ACQ Vol 11 no 2 2009

Literacy

Clinical insights Oral Language Basic Concepts Program: An example of collaborative service provision in Victoria Ed Gillian and Sue Williamson

T his 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.

Ed Gillian (top) and Sue Williamson

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ACQ Volume 11, Number 2 2009

www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au