On porcupines and predictable text: What are predictable texts and why are they a problem? - Five from Five

The problem with predictable text: How many beginning readers can read these words without the aid of repetition and picture clues? The draft revision of the Australian Curriculum was released for consultation in April and two aspects of the English: F-6 curriculum have attracted particularly strong criticism. One is the inclusion of a variation of the three cueing strategy for reading. There are multiple references in the draft curriculum to students using ‘contextual, semantic, grammatical, and phonic knowledge’ (or some variation of this) to read words, and to ‘text processing strategies’, which is another term for the same idea. As explained here, three-cueing with phonics as the strategy of last resort is not an effective, evidence-based reading strategy. It instills the habits of weak readers and therefore should not be enshrined in the Australian Curriculum.