Teacher guide Meeting Initial Needs In Literacy

TLF ID S7094

This teacher resource is about the Meeting Initial Needs In Literacy (MiniLit) program and its trial with 22 Foundation and year 2 students in a NSW regional public school. MiniLit is an intervention program providing instruction to small groups of young children struggling with reading. The resource describes how MiniLit instructors are trained and were monitored during the trial and how the program is presented in 80 one-hour lessons, delivered four days a week over three school terms. It discusses the outcomes achieved in the trial in four areas - phonological recoding, reading single words, spelling, and oral reading fluency - and provides references and links to relevant readings.





Educational details

Educational value
  • This resource is useful in supporting the reading component of the English curriculum, particularly in year 1 but also to some extent in Foundation and year 2. The MiniLit intervention program helps teachers and students with those content descriptions that emphasise using comprehension strategies to build literal and inferred meaning; reading texts using phonic knowledge; manipulating sounds in spoken words; and recognising sound-letter matches including common vowel and consonant digraphs and consonant blends.
  • The resource is also of value for its focus on the research base of reading intervention programs. It identifies the five ''big ideas'' of reading - phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension - and differentiates between Tier-2 and Tier-3 interventions within the Response to Intervention (RtI) model's framework, explaining that Tier-2 interventions typically provide intervention in small groups. The successful outcomes achieved in the NSW trial are attributed to the efficacy of the program itself. The resource describes the MiniLit program in some detail, discusses the lessons learnt in the trial and considers the next steps for the program.
Year level

F; 1; 2

Learning area
  • English

Other details

Contributors
  • Contributor
  • Name: Education Services Australia
  • Organization: Education Services Australia
  • Description: Data manager
  • Copyright Holder
  • Name: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Organization: Commonwealth of Australia
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.australia.gov.au
  • Publisher
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organization: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Description: Publisher
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: http://www.esa.edu.au
  • Resource metadata contributed by
  • Name: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Organisation: Education Services Australia Ltd
  • Address: AUSTRALIA
  • URL: www.esa.edu.au
Access profile
  • Generic
Learning Resource Type
  • Online
  • Text
Rights
  • © 2014 Commonwealth of Australia, unless otherwise indicated. This material is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence (CC BY-SA 3.0 AU) unless otherwise indicated. You may distribute, remix and build upon this material, provided that you include the acknowledgement '© Commonwealth of Australia 2014' and license under the same terms any new creations you have based on the material.