Workshop approach

Overview

The workshop approach (see among others, Hill & Crevola, 1999) is a literacy teaching structure that involves: 

Examples of the structure

Example A

Traditionally, the time allocation for teaching literacy using the workshop approach is 120 minutes per school day, which is demonstrated with Example A of the workshop model. 

Example B

However, given the importance of establishing early literacy knowledge and skills, components within, this approach can be expanded to go beyond the daily 120 minutes through the purposeful links to literacy across the curriculum such as an inquiry unit. Workshop model Example B expands the workshop model to 150 minutes. 

Context

The workshop approach can be used by Foundation to Year Two teachers to explicitly teach a new literacy concept or skill.  Typically, the teacher introduces a new concept or skill to a whole cohort by teaching up to the level of the most able learners in the classroom (Tomlinson,  2009).  Differentiated teaching then follows where the teacher would work with smaller groups or individual students to support their understanding and facilitate success with the new learning. For short periods of time, as teachers are working with small groups or individual students, the majority of the cohort are undertaking authentic and purposeful reading, writing and speaking and listening practices linked to the whole class focus or individual needs. Through multiple exposures to the introduced skill or concept, students become confident with its use and embed it in their own repertoire of literacy practices.

Although this advice is specifically designed for Foundation to Year Two students, the workshop approach can be adapted to suit the needs of students across Years Three to Six.

This advice recognises the foundational importance of phonological awareness and phonics, with attention to morphology for reading and early writing (Adoniou, 2014; Goswami, 2014; Moats, 2005). As a result, a specific component on decoding and encoding has been designed as a new feature of the contemporary workshop. This concurrent teaching of phonological awareness and phonics for reading and spelling is not isolated and discrete. Rather, strong links are extended across the workshop components to demonstrate how the decoding and encoding process complements and operates across the modes with a range of text types.

The workshop approach can be used to teach literacy skills, concepts and conventions such as:

  • oracy skills including the: physical, linguistic, cognitive and the social and emotional (Mercer, 2018).
  • the six essential elements of reading:  oral language and early experience with print, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension (Konza, 2016; NICHD, 2000).
  • the clear relationship between early writing and drawing (Mackenzie, 2016).
  • a range of text types for a range of purposes (Derewianka & Jones, 2016) and the inclusion of spelling knowledge: phonological, orthographic, morphological and etymological (Adoniou, 2014).
  • handwriting.
  • grammar in context (Christie, 2005). 

Purpose

The workshop approach for teaching literacy draws on the following supportive elements to underpin its design:

  1. The high impact teaching strategies (HITS) which "reliably increase student learning wherever they are applied" (p. 5).
  2. The gradual release of responsibility practices including the explicit description, modelled, shared, guided and independent practice of a literacy concept or skill (Duke, Pearson, Strachan & Billman, 2011). Through the use of these practices, differentiation can be effectively built into every literacy lesson to promote student engagement with their literacy learning.
  3. The importance of reciprocity when teaching early literacy (Clay, 1991). Clear and explicit links between the English modes can support early literacy learners to build their oral language through listening and reading which can then be applied to speaking about ideas and writing them down (VCAA, 2017).
  4. The capacity to link literacy content with literacy across the curriculum through an inquiry unit of work (Christie & Derewianka, 2008). The literacy skills and concepts embedded in an inquiry unit can be purposely planned for and taught through a workshop approach. This purposeful planning can see the integration of content-specific vocabulary and knowledge and the reading/viewing of texts which support the writing of a range of text types. Moreover, through the participation of experiences in an inquiry unit, (e.g. excursions, presentations and/or school-based experiences), opportunities for building oral language and concept-based vocabulary can be targeted, rehearsed and reused during the workshop approach and across the school day (Beck & McKeown, 2007).

Some F-2 examples of units of work which demonstrate how literacy (including an EAL focus) and a Science or Geography/History discipline can be integrated are found at these links:

Recommendations

When using the workshop approach, it is recommended that teachers:

  • ensure students read, write and undertake purposeful speaking and listening practices in every literacy lesson (Derewianka & Jones, 2016; Freebody & Luke, 1990; Mercer, 2018).
  • draw on a plurilingual approach towards teaching EAL students (Choi & Ollerhead, 2018).
  • provide opportunities for learning English grammatical patterns (Gibbons, 2015).
  • encourage talk for learning within a dialogic classroom (Mercer, 2018).
  • facilitate talk as a rehearsal for writing (Myhill, Jones & Wilson, 2016).
  • model and teach relevant metalanguage (Christie, 2005; Myhill, Jones & Wilson, 2016).
  • incorporate a concurrent focus on phonological awareness and phonics with attention to morphology for reading and early writing (Adoniou, 2014; Goswami, 2014; Moats, 2005), (for example, Konza (2014) argues for 20 minutes of differentiated, explicit teaching, four times a week).
  • embed handwriting into the phonic lesson drawing on the kinesthetic movement of writing letters including letter formation to promote memory retention of phonemes and matching graphemes (Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou & Velay, 2005; Mackenzie & Spokes, 2018).
  • provide instruction and time for students to learn irregular spelled words (sight words) to automaticity (Ehri, 1991; Konza, 2014).
  • plan and teach the rich instruction of vocabulary in context (for example, Beck & McKeown (2007) recommend 400 words per year -Tier 1 and 2 words for F-2).
  • develop student vocabulary, fluency, grammar, comprehension and models for writing across text types using fiction and non-fiction texts (Pressley & Allington, 2015; Wing Jan & Taylor, 2020).
  • support the composition of texts for different purposes across a range of text types (Derewianka & Jones, 2016; Mackenzie, 2016).
  • use texts in context to support language use across the modes (Derewianka & Jones, 2016).
  • link the daily literacy workshop with literacy across the curriculum (Christie & Derewianka, 2008).
  • use student feedback to redirect their teaching and/or refocus students on the learning goal (HITS).

References

Adoniou, M. (2014). What should teachers know about spelling? Literacy, 48(3), 144-154.   

Beck, I., & McKeown, M. (2007). Increasing Young Low-Income Children's Oral Vocabulary Repertoires through Rich and Focused Instruction. The Elementary School Journal, 107(3), 251-271.   

Choi, J. & Ollerhead, S. (Eds.). (2018). Plurilingualism in Teaching and Learning: Complexities Across Contexts. New York: Routledge.    

Christie, F. (2005). Language education in the primary years. Sydney, Australia: UNSW Press.    

Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. (2008). School discourse: Learning to write across the years of schooling. London: Continuum.   

Clay, M. (1991). Becoming Literate: The construction of inner control. Auckland, New Zealand: Heinemann Education   

Duke, N.K., Pearson, P.D., Strachan, S.L. & Billman, A.K. (2011). Essential Elements of Fostering and Teaching Reading Comprehension. In S. Samuels & A.E. Farstrup (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction, (4th ed.), (pp. 51-93). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.   

Derewianka, B. & Jones, P. (2016). Teaching Language In Context (2nd ed.). South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press.   

Ehri, L.C (1991). Development of the Ability to Read Words. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal and P.D. Pearson, Handbook of Reading Research: Vol 2. (pp. 383-417). White Plains, NY: Longman Publishing Group.   

Freebody, P., & Luke, A. (1990). Literacies programs: Debates and demands in cultural context. Prospect: An Australian Journal of TESOL, 5(3), 7-16.   

Gibbons, P. (2015). Scaffolding language, scaffolding learning: Teaching second language learners in the mainstream classroom (2nd ed.). Portsmouth NH: Heinemann.   

    

Goswami, U. (2014). Child psychology: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   

Hill, P.W. & Crevola, C.A. (1999). Key features of a whole-school, design approach to literacy teaching in schools. ACER Research Conference October 1999: Improving Literacy Learning. Retrieved from http://cunningham.acer.edu.au/inted/onlinedocs/1999acerconf/crevola_paper.pdf   

Konza, D. (2014). Teaching Reading: Why the "Fab-Five" should be the "Big Six". Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(12), 153-169.   

Konza, D. (2016). Understanding the process of reading: The big six. In J. Scull & B. Raban (Eds.), Growing up literate: Australian literacy research for practice (pp. 149-175). South Yarra, Vic. : Eleanor Curtain Publishing.   

Longcamp, M., Zerbato-Poudou, M.T. & Velay, J.L. (2005). The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children: A comparison between handwriting and typing. Acta Psychologica, 119(1), May 2005, 67-79.   

Mackenzie, N.M. (2016). Becoming a Writer. In J. Scull & B. Raban (Eds.), Growing up literate: Australian literacy research for practice (pp. 177- 194). South Yarra, Vic. : Eleanor Curtain Publishing.   

Mackenzie, N.M. & Spokes, R. (2018). Handwriting, keyboarding or both? In N.M. Mackenzie and J. Scull (Eds.), Understanding and Supporting Young Writers from Birth to 8. (pp. 137-164). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.   

Mercer, N. (2018) The development of Oracy skills in school-aged learners. Part of the Cambridge Papers in ELT series. [pdf] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://languageresearch.cambridge.org/images/CambridgePapersInELT_Oracy_2018_ONLINE.pdf    

Moats, L.C. (2005). How Spelling Supports Reading And Why It Is More Regular and Predictable Than You May Think. American Educator, Winter 2005/06, 12-43.   

Moss, B. (2005). Making a case and a place for effective content area literacy instruction in the elementary grades. The Reading Teacher, 59(1), 46-55.   

Myhill, D., Jones, S. and Wilson, A. (2016). Writing conversations: fostering metalinguistic discussion about writing. Research Papers in Education, 31(1), 23-44.   

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), (2000). National Reading Panel:Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Retrieved from  www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/pages/smallbook.aspx   

Pressley, M. & Allington, R.L. (2015). Reading Instruction That Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching. (4th ed.). New York: The Guilford Press.   

Tomlinson, C. (2009). Intersections between differentiation and literacy instruction: Shared principles worth sharing. New England Reading Association Journal, 45(1), 28-33.   

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) (2017). Victorian Curriculum Foundation-10: English. Retrieved from https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/english/english/curriculum/f-10   

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) (2020). Victorian Curriculum Foundation-10: English as an Additional Language [EAL] https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/english/english-as-an-additional-language-eal/introduction/rationale-and-aims     

Wing Jan, L. & Taylor, S. (2020).  Write Ways (5th ed.).  Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University 

Press.