In fact, phonological awareness is now acknowledged as “an important variable in reading and spelling acquisition” (Moriarty and Gillon 2006). Children who “approach literacy acquisition with poor phonological awareness are likely to struggle in early word recognition and decoding tasks” (Moriarty and Gillon 2006). Furthermore, children who begin literacy learning without being able to use phonological information for decoding, are likely to have persistent, long term reading difficulties.
Indeed, in 2007, the Department for Education and skills launched “Letters and sounds” which forms part of the new Primary Strategy. Here the development of phonic skills is placed centrally in the Simple model of reading. However in order to develop “principled” (Edwards and Mercer 1998) phonic knowledge, children must have a strong understanding of phonological awareness. SALLEY ensures that most children have this before they begin a phonics programme in their reception year.
Within the Early Years Foundation Stage, children have to be able to discriminate sounds, develop their auditory memory and sequencing skills and be able to talk about sounds. Salley develops these skills, and more, through its systematic, highly structured and multi-sensory learning programme. It ensures that all the key areas of knowledge, understanding and skills are covered and frequently revisited to enable practitioners to be confident that children have the skills they need to move forward.
SALLEY also covers, in depth, the primary sounds needed to decode CV, CVC, VC, CCVC and CVCC words – whether real or nonsense - ensuring that children have a strong focus on the structure of words and that they can decode speedily.
Within “Letters and sounds” this is typically introduced during the reception year. However our research has shown that children are more than ready to learn these skills during their time in nursery, as part of the 100 day SALLEY programme. This then means that when they go on to Primary school they have all the skills and much more, which will ensure that learning is successful. We have found this to be particularly critical for the child who needs more repetition and for whom, devoting only six weeks to developing these core skills is not enough.
Children who have experienced SALLEY can already achieve most of the outcomes for phase two. Therefore, time can be used more effectively by the practitioner, in differentiating learning. Differentiation is a central to SALLEY and this begins right at the beginning of the programme. Thus children can progress at their own pace within a group teaching situation because of this unique approach.
Ballem and Plunkett (2005) found that children as young as 14 months could engage in some phonological awareness tasks. SALLEY is finely graded to follow the normal developmental sequence, thereby allowing children of three to be more than ready to benefit from the programme and, in fact, we have had some staggering success with children 2;6 – 3;0, which is discussed further n the handbook.
SALLEY ensures that children have achieved all the “core learning” (Primary Framework 2007) skills for the development of phonics by the end of the programme. This allows the teacher to focus on revision and consolidation of these areas and enables the focus to be placed more on comprehension. Thus reading outcomes have the potential to be significantly greater for SALLEY children by the end of the Early Years Foundation stage( 2007). SALLEY enables the teacher to focus more on writing the sounds and learning the high frequency words.