ACQ Vol 11 no 2 2009

35 / 68

Literacy
ACQ Volume 11, Number 2 2009 97
Ed Gillian
(top) and Sue
Williamson
This project was motivated by the desire to improve
the literacy and numeracy standards of all preparatory
students attending a government primary school
in Victoria. This motivation arose from the school’s poor
performance in these areas in the years 1999 to 2004. The
annual school report (a report produced yearly detailing
the literacy and numeracy results for each school) for 2004
noted that the school was performing below “like schools”
and below the state benchmark in literacy and numeracy
data (the targets for reading and mathematics that each
school must achieve for each year level) for the preparatory
year. In the previous four years, the school had failed to
meet the benchmark for the state or “like schools”. It is
mandated by the Victorian Department of Education and
Early Childhood Development (DEECD) that for literacy
benchmarking, preparatory students attempt to read a Level
5 text to a teacher by November of the academic year. A
Level 5 text is an unfamiliar text for the student which has
one to two sentences per page with picture cues. The text
has high frequency words in simple sentences, dialogue
with quotation marks and questions. For the numeracy
benchmarking, DEECD mandates that preparatory and
grade 1 students complete a numeracy interview (a criterion
referenced tool for screening numeracy) with a teacher to
achieve key growth points, or targets, for the numeracy
curriculum areas of number, space and measurement.
Oral Language Basic Concepts
Program
School characteristics
The enrolment at this school was 862 at the August census
of 2006. The students came from a variety of language
backgrounds. A majority (74.1%) of students were from
language backgrounds other than English (LBOTE) and in
this cohort, 84.4% of the children did not have English
spoken in the home. Many students come from a low
socioeconomic background. The school was in the “like
school” group nine, which is categorised by medium to high
LBOTE and medium to high socioeconomic risk factors.
“Like school” groupings refer to the Victorian Department of
Education and Early Childhood Development’s matching of
schools according to factors concerning students’
background to more effectively compare schools’
performance in literacy and numeracy testing.
With the poor performance of the school in literacy and
numeracy results, the Early Years Literacy (first 3 years of
schooling) and Numeracy Coordinators and the school-
At the start of 2005, a program to connect oral
language to literacy and numeracy was
implemented for preparatory students at a
primary school in Victoria. This paper starts
with an overview of the rationale for this
project, followed by a description of the
program and a summary of the
implementation of this program. Although
research into the effectiveness of such a
program is urgently needed, the benefits of
collaboration between teachers and speech
pathologists were evident.
Clinical insights
Oral Language Basic Concepts Program:
An example of collaborative service provision in Victoria
Ed Gillian and Sue Williamson