T.Ching and Learning Blog : June 2026

What underpins the Structured Literacy Teaching Approaches?

Once you've completed this module, you'll be able to:

Understand key theoretical frameworks behind structured literacy teaching approaches.
Understand the background and research evidence underpinning the Better Start Literacy Approach as one example of a structured literacy teaching approach.
Consider the cognitive, ecological, and psychological influences on children’s literacy development as a wider context for structured literacy teaching.
Gain knowledge and confidence in understanding the linguistic elements of structured literacy assessment and teaching.

Quality education for all students

This course is set within the global context of our United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This is "a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity" and comprises 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 4 focuses specially on quality education. UNESCO describes this goal as a commitment to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all". This goal is a pivotal driver for positive change, emphasising the transformative power of education in fostering a sustainable and equitable world.

We need to ensure our teaching practices are accelerating learning for those with greater learning needs.

The term “structured literacy” was first used by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) in 2015 to describe evidence-based approaches that are effective for children with dyslexia.

The teaching focus includes:

Explicit and systematic instruction in phonics.
Phoneme, morphological and syntactic awareness.
Knowledge of orthographic patterns.
Understanding syllable structure.
Vocabulary learning.
Knowledge of sentence, paragraph structure and text structure.

"Explicit instruction is a teacher-directed pedagogy that includes modelling, guided practice, and independent application with immediate corrective feedback". Buckingham, 2020.

There is strong research evidence supporting the effectiveness of structured and explicit teaching strategies to accelerate children’s oral language, reading, writing and maths skills. Professor Gillon and colleagues wrote a detailed report for the Ministry of Education (Gillon et al, 2024) summarising this research evidence.

- If this is the case, what about other learning areas? Would this be the case for all learning areas then?

Professor Gail Gillon and Professor Brigid McNeill led the development of this approach through a series of controlled research trials. This development was supported by a team of researchers and practitioners across the disciplines of education, psychology and speech-language therapy. Leaders in Māori and Pacific education as well as community indigenous (Māori) leaders, influenced its development to ensure culturally responsive teaching practices are embedded within the approach.

As a comprehensive structured literacy approach, it includes:

Innovative online assessments to monitor children's progress and response to teaching.
Lesson plans and resources for Tier 1 (universal/whole class).
Lesson plans and resources for Tier 2 (targeted/small group) teaching.

Simple view of Reading Comprehension

Cognition Process

This theory is now widely contested.

Students who become self-teaching, using orthology, and using the idea of breaking up words into decodable patterns, can work out a wide range of vocabulary, using these patterns.

Strengths-Based Principles

This focuses on what children can do, so they facilitate what they can do

Thinking Proactively - ensure learning is supported for the beginning, starting with school entry assessment and then (10 weeks later)
Positive Learning Experiences - for all, self-teaching hypothesis, needs to be scaffolded and given feedback, with a focus on what they can do.
Constructive Reporting - how we share data with parents and learning support people. What they can do rather than what isn't achieving, then focus on the next steps for learning.
Positive Collaborations - Where everyone feels valued to support children, engaging with other agencies and colleagues, and planning for tier 2 learning
Whānau Engagement - this is critical and gives context for parents, power sharing and allows them to know what students are doing.
Maximising Protective Factors - Literacy specialist, health professionals, ECE, library and sleeping well all help with success. This includes checking hearing, vision, and dental health.
Cultural Responsiveness - competence with reaching out to whanau, using a strength-based approach. The importance of engaging children’s whānau (family) in their children’s learning and respecting, valuing and acknowledging children’s cultural identity and home language are all highlighted in the research literature.

Culturally Responsive

Cognitive Lead

How much thinking do you have to focus on the learning?

Intrinsic Load - This is the focus on the important part, the same structure of the lesson each day, ensuring the student knows what will be next in the lesson.

Extraneous Load - The teacher telling for some, this prevents misconceptions, and smaller tasks.

Germane Load - Learning aspect - minimise other loads

Applying cognitive load theory to teaching and learning to read:

Cognitive load theory has been applied to many different aspects of learning, both incidental and academic learning. The reading for this section, by Sweller et al. (2019), describes the theory in terms of many of these areas.

Cognitive load theory conceptualises learning as being limited to how much the brain can process at any one time. It breaks this process of learning down into the types of load, or work, that the brain takes on at any one time. Germane load is the learning we want to take place, so we want to maximise this learning.

Unfortunately, what we consider to be the incidentals of teaching – the materials, the approach to the lesson, what we select as the learning intention – gets in the way of learning by taking up some of the cognitive effort required for learning.

Extraneous cognitive load is based on the amount of learning we want students to do at any one time. If we have very broad learning intentions, or no learning intentions, or don’t explicitly tell children what they are learning, they are expending precious cognitive effort on trying to understand what they are supposed to learn.

To reduce this load we provide explicit instruction by telling children what they are learning and how to apply it, for example, “this is the sound of P - /p/" or "this is the suffix -ist and this suffix creates nouns which are usually people's jobs."
We also reduce this load by teaching only a small number of phoneme-grapheme relationships, high-frequency words or morphemes at a time. The scope and sequence provides the guidance and order to support the identification of what that small number of patterns will be at any one time.

Intrinsic load is the impact of the learning activity. Providing a structure to each lesson for the teaching of letter-sounds in small-group reading, or vocabulary instruction in the large group setting means that children know what to expect in each lesson. They can focus their cognitive effort on learning what is being taught rather than wondering what will happen next in the lesson.

Considering cognitive load in the teaching and learning sequence means that we are able to meet the needs of students when learning the critical early literacy skills needed as the foundation for the rest of their education.