Early Literacy Skills: A Guide to the Big Six

1. Oral Language and Early Literacy Skills

Oral language is not simply vocabulary—it is a multilayered system encompassing phonology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, morphology, and discourse skills.

Why oral language is foundational

Reading comprehension requires the same processes used in listening comprehension. As texts become more complex, children rely increasingly on:

• Semantic knowledge (word meanings and relationships)
• Morphosyntactic skills (understanding sentence structure and meaning)
• Discourse-level abilities (narratives, expository structures, cohesion)
• Inferencing (filling gaps the text does not explicitly state)

These areas directly influence the ability to make meaning from texts, especially from Year 3 onwards.

Professional red flags

A child may have underlying oral language weaknesses if they:

• decode well but cannot summarise or retell
• struggle with multi-step instructions
• use vague language or limited vocabulary
• misinterpret figurative language, idioms, or implicit meanings

These difficulties often masquerade as “reading comprehension problems” rather than core language challenges.

Assessment considerations

Professionals should evaluate:

• narrative cohesion and story grammar
• vocabulary breadth (number of words) and depth (quality of knowledge)
• morphological awareness (e.g., prefixes, suffixes, root words)
• syntactic comprehension (complex sentence types)
• listening comprehension vs reading comprehension discrepancies

Ways to support oral language at home:

• Read together daily
• Encourage conversations about experiences
• Introduce new words in meaningful contexts
• Model expressive and descriptive language

2. Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness includes sensitivity to words → syllables → onset-rime → phonemes.
Of these, phonemic awareness (identifying and manipulating individual phonemes) is the strongest predictor of early reading success.

Why phonological awareness matters

English is an alphabetic language: letters represent sounds. Successful readers must break spoken words into units that map onto print.

Phonological awareness supports:

• accurate decoding
• phonics learning
• spelling development
• mental orthographic mapping (the process required for automatic word recognition)

Typical developmental sequence

1. Rhyming and alliteration
2. Syllable segmentation and blending
3. Onset-rime manipulation
4. Phoneme identification
5. Phoneme blending
6. Phoneme segmenting
7. Phoneme deletion, substitution, manipulation

Difficulties at the phoneme level are highly indicative of dyslexia.

Assessment considerations

Professionals should measure:

• phoneme segmentation and blending
• phoneme deletion/substitution
• rapid automatized naming (RAN) for differential diagnosis
• phonological memory

RAN is not a phonological skill but relates to processing speed, and differences are important for differentiating between dyslexia subtypes.

3. Phonics and Early Literacy Skills

Phonics is the explicit teaching of sound-letter correspondences, blending, segmenting, and pattern generalisation.

Why phonics is essential

Children must develop:

• alphabetic knowledge (letters represent sounds)
• grapheme-phoneme correspondences
• blending and segmenting skills
• generalisation across patterns (e.g., the many spellings of /ae/)
• orthographic mapping (storing words in long-term memory)

Systematic synthetic phonics has the strongest evidence base for supporting decoding.

Clinical/red flag presentation

Children with phonics difficulties may:

• guess based on pictures or first letters
• struggle to decode unfamiliar words
• learn new patterns slowly
• read different words as the same word (high error variability)
• rely on whole-word memorisation

Assessment considerations

Professionals should examine:

• decoding accuracy (real and nonwords)
• grapheme-phoneme knowledge
• ability to apply patterns to new words
• spelling (encoding) errors for error-pattern analysis

4. Vocabulary Development

Vocabulary knowledge is strongly related to reading comprehension and academic achievement. As texts increase in complexity, vocabulary becomes a major determinant of access to content.

Components of vocabulary

• Breadth: number of known words
• Depth: understanding of nuance, morphology, semantic networks
• Automaticity: ease of retrieval
• Flexibility: understanding multiple-meaning words, figurative language

Why vocabulary matters

Comprehension relies on:

• understanding individual words
• integrating conceptual knowledge
• interpreting subtle or discipline-specific meanings
• making connections to background knowledge

Assessment considerations

A comprehensive evaluation should look at:

• core vocabulary measures
• definitional knowledge
• semantic associations
• morphological reasoning
• contextual use of vocabulary

Weak vocabulary requires intervention across both oral and written contexts—not isolated word lists.

How to strengthen vocabulary:

• Read a mix of fiction and factual books
• Explore new topics together
• Use varied and rich language
• Encourage curiosity and inquiry

5. Reading Fluency

Fluency represents the efficiency of the reading system. It comprises:

• Accuracy (correct decoding)
• Rate (automaticity)
• Prosody (expression and phrasing that reflects meaning)

Why fluency is critical

Fluency frees cognitive resources for comprehension. When decoding is effortful, working memory becomes overloaded, limiting comprehension even when language skills are adequate.

Underlying mechanisms

Fluency is influenced by:

• phonics mastery
• orthographic mapping
• processing speed
• RAN
• working memory

Assessment considerations

Professionals should assess:

• words correct per minute (WCPM)
• error types and error patterns
• phrase boundaries and expression
• reading stamina
• cognitive fatigue

Fluency difficulties may be particularly prominent in ADHD, dyslexia, and processing speed weaknesses.

6. Reading Comprehension

Comprehension is not a single skill but a complex integration of:

• language knowledge
• decoding automaticity
• vocabulary
• working memory
• inferencing
• background knowledge
• monitoring and metacognition

The Simple View of Reading summarises this relationship:
Reading Comprehension = Decoding × Language Comprehension

If either component is weak, comprehension suffers.

Assessment considerations

A high-quality evaluation includes:

• literal, inferential, and evaluative questions
• cloze tasks
• summarisation
• error analysis (e.g., memory vs vocabulary vs inference issues)
• differentiation between decoding-based and language-based comprehension problems

Comprehension develops through:

• Strong language skills
• Background knowledge
• Inferential thinking
• Discussing stories and ideas

How the Big Six Support Early Literacy Skills

Each component of the Big Six works together to build early literacy skills. A difficulty in one area can affect progress in others. For example, limited phonological awareness affects phonics, and limited vocabulary affects comprehension.

Understanding a child’s unique literacy profile helps parents, educators, and allied health professionals plan targeted support.

Integrating the Big Six: A Professional Framework

Professionals should conceptualise literacy difficulties through an interactional model:

• Weak phonological awareness → poor phonics → low fluency → reduced comprehension
• Weak oral language → comprehension difficulties despite adequate decoding
• Weak vocabulary → limited comprehension and limited capacity to learn content
• Weak working memory → difficulty managing long sentences and complex texts

A robust assessment requires triangulating:

• standardised academic assessment
• nonword decoding
• phonological and language measures
• cognitive assessment (as appropriate)
• classroom samples
• teacher and parent input

When to Seek Support

A literacy or psychoeducational assessment may be helpful if a child:
• Avoids reading or becomes easily frustrated
• Struggles to sound out words
• Reads slowly or without expression
• Has difficulty understanding what they read
• Shows inconsistent academic progress
• Is bright but not achieving as expected

Early support can improve confidence, engagement, and long-term outcomes.

Conclusion

A deep understanding of the Big Six of Literacy allows educators, psychologists, SLPs, and allied health practitioners to conduct more accurate assessments, design targeted intervention plans, and support students who show early literacy difficulties. When professionals use a structured framework informed by reading science, outcomes improve—not only in reading accuracy and fluency, but in confidence, academic engagement, and wellbeing.

For more information on evidence-based reading instruction, visit the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).