Victoria’s new Phonics Plus lesson plans are being rolled out to support early literacy instruction. But do they actually enhance early reading instruction? As a lecturer dedicated to preparing future teachers, I have serious concerns about the quality of instruction they promote.
I emphasise the importance of research-based practice—my students create literacy lesson plans and justify their instructional choices with evidence. But where is the research backing these lesson plans?
The Victorian government promotes Phonics Plus as a way to enhance early reading instruction, focusing on phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, handwriting, and morphology. To support its implementation, the government has provided lesson plans for teachers. Although not mandatory, these plans set the standard for classroom instruction and warrant closer scrutiny.
Are These Lessons Too Long and Too Rushed?
How long might you expect young children to sit and engage as a whole group? Lesson length and sequencing are important considerations. Each lesson requires Foundation students to sit through a 25-minute Phonics and Word Knowledge session—a demanding duration for young learners, especially when tasks require sustained attention and cognitive effort.
A closer look at the sequencing raises more concerns. For example, in Phonics Plus Set 3: Lesson 9, activities jump from syllables to phonemes. Clapping syllables is a whole-word awareness task, immediately followed by phoneme-level analysis requiring segmentation into individual sounds. This shift from recognising larger spoken chunks to identifying separate sounds demands a significant cognitive leap that would even confuse adults.
The Phonics Plus lesson demonstration video on the ARC website reinforces these concerns. The scripted, rapid-fire teaching style, delivered from the front of the room, shows little to no scaffolding for students navigating these concepts.
Cognitive Load Theory emphasises the need for clear, step-by-step scaffolding over rapid shifts. Additionally, the National Reading Panel found that phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when focused and not overloaded with multiple overlapping tasks.
Where’s the Differentiation?
These lessons follow a ‘spray and pray’ approach, treating all students the same regardless of ability. For example, the high-frequency word ‘at’ appears in Lesson 1 as new content for all students. What happens if some children can already recognise and read this word?
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development highlights the importance of tailoring instruction to students’ current abilities—too easy, and they become bored; too hard, and they become frustrated. Bruner also emphasised scaffolding as essential for ensuring students build on existing knowledge rather than receiving one-size-fits-all instruction. Snow, Griffin and Burns stress the need for differentiated literacy instruction, particularly in early years classrooms. The evidence is clear: without differentiation, capable students risk disengagement, while struggling students are left behind.
Fluency Without Meaning?
Another area of concern is the use of texts to build ‘fluency.’ In Phonics Plus Set 1, Lesson 3, the Fluency Text is simply a grid of single letters: A, T, and S. The lesson plan directs teachers to use choral reading and partner reading of this text for 15 minutes.
In Lesson 9, students engage in choral reading using:
Tom can tag Sam and Pat.
Tom can tag Sam at the dam.
The cod is in the dam.
These texts align with phonics instruction but lack narrative value. How can students meaningfully engage with them?
Fluency is not just speed and accuracy but also expression, pacing, and comprehension. The lack of meaningful context in these choral reading tasks suggests students are practising letter and word recognition in isolation rather than developing expressive, purposeful reading.
Choral reading might seem effective, but research suggests otherwise. Shanahan (2024) argues that choral reading does not inherently improve fluency because it focuses on group reading without individualised pacing or comprehension engagement. Kuhn & Stahl (2003) found that fluency is best developed through repeated reading with feedback and discussion about meaning, rather than rote repetition of sentences.
Have you ever sung along to a song only to later realise what the lyrics actually mean? Just as choral singing doesn’t guarantee comprehension, choral reading doesn’t ensure students make meaning from text.
What About Meaning-Making?
Perhaps the most pressing issue in Phonics Plus is the lack of emphasis on meaning-making. Young readers thrive on content-rich texts that foster discussion and comprehension. While decodable texts reinforce phonics, they must be complemented by experiences that promote storytelling, prediction, and interpretation.
Duke and Pearson found that effective reading instruction integrates both code-based and meaning-based approaches. Castles, Rastle & Nation (2018) also advocate for balanced reading instruction embedding phonics within engaging and meaningful reading experiences. The Simple View of Reading reinforces that reading involves both decoding and comprehension—without explicit attention to meaning-making, fluency practice lacks purpose.
Prioritising rapid decoding over comprehension mirrors the shallow processing seen in digital reading, undermining critical literacy. Is this the outcome we want for our students?
Concerning gaps
While Phonics Plus aims to support early literacy, its lesson plans reveal concerning gaps in differentiation and comprehension development. Victoria’s reading reforms must balance phonics with meaningful reading experiences to develop engaged, proficient readers. Unless these gaps are addressed, the lesson plans risk doing more harm than good.
Naomi Nelson is a lecturer and literacy coordinator at Federation University Australia’s Mount Helen Campus. She educates pre-service teachers and works with colleagues to deliver contemporary and engaging literacy courses. Naomi’s PhD research investigates reading comprehension, the impact of reading mode (paper vs. screen), and the strategies students use to understand text.
The header image is a still taken from Phonics Plus In the Classroom, a video from the Department of Education, Victoria
Thank you for your insightful analysis of the new Victorian approach to reading instruction in your article “Phonics Plus: Does the new Victorian approach to reading miss differentiation and meaning-making?”
As an academic involved in preparing pre-service teachers, I found your examination of the lesson plans and overall approach particularly valuable. Your critique resonates strongly with my concerns about implementing these lessons. As you rightly note, these lessons are not mandated, but the daily 25 minutes of phonics is, and many teachers will use these lessons as part of this mandate.
Your point about some decodable texts lacking narrative value is important. As you rightly note, such texts fail to engage children in meaningful reading experiences and do not contribute to their understanding of how language works in context.
Furthermore, your observation about the lack of differentiation in these lesson plans is crucial. As educators, we understand the diverse needs and abilities present in any classroom. The absence of strategies to accommodate this diversity is indeed worrying and could potentially leave many students behind or insufficiently challenged.
Your emphasis on the importance of meaning-making in the reading process is well-placed. Any focus on decoding at the expense of comprehension and engagement with text meaning is a significant concern that deserves careful consideration.
Thank you, Naomi, for bringing these critical issues to light. Your analysis provides a valuable perspective for both current and future educators as we navigate this new approach to literacy instruction.
It is wonderful to have a Victorian academic state what many of us are thinking.
Thank you, Martina, for your generous and considered response. I really appreciate your reflections.
Like you, I have found it difficult to accept these lesson plans as a model of high-quality literacy instruction. To be frank, if one of these Phonics Plus lessons were submitted to me by a pre-service teacher as part of an assignment, it would not pass. The absence of differentiation, the questionable sequencing of content, the limited opportunities for student interaction, and the lack of meaningful engagement with quality text are all significant concerns. These are precisely the issues I teach my students to avoid when designing effective literacy instruction.
Thank you again for your collegial response. It is reassuring to know others share these concerns and are committed to ensuring early literacy instruction remains grounded in research and is responsive to children.
“Thank you, Naomi, for keepng the discussion going. You mention Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, emphasizing tailored instruction to students’ abilities. The assumption of those still using early 20th century thinking is that the role of the society is to “Instruct”, as if everyone’s job is to lecture those they construct as ‘less experienced.’ It also implies there’s one ‘right’ way to see things—making outliers like Newton or Einstein mere deviants.
You also so, “the most pressing issue in Phonics Plus is the lack of emphasis on meaning-making.” – It is difficult to write meaningful drills for 10 million kids. Judging by your concern, the pressing issue in Phonics Plus is not the absence of meaning, but the absence of the student/child.
Question I’d ask is: “Where is the child on Vygotsky’s ladder?” In the “expert’s” head, is the right answer. So, whatever the expert decrees, goes. We could be busying ourselves for 50 years looking for the right sequence only to find out that we had no real hypothesis to defend.
Ania Lian
CDU
Thank you, Ania, for your thoughtful and provocative response. I really appreciate your engagement with these ideas.
You raise such an important point – that at the heart of effective literacy instruction is not simply content or sequence, but the child themselves. I absolutely agree that when instructional design becomes overly focused on delivery from the ‘expert’ to the ‘novice,’ without space for student agency, interaction, or responsiveness, we risk losing sight of the learner altogether.
Phonics Plus positions the lesson, not the learner, at the centre of instruction. The emphasis is on fidelity to a script rather than flexibility in response to students’ needs, questions, or understandings.
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development reminds us that learning is relational and occurs in the dynamic space between what a child can do independently and what they can do with support. That space looks very different for different children. Effective teaching, then, requires noticing, listening, and adjusting – qualities that rigid, decontextualised drills cannot accommodate.
Thank you again for your thoughtful contribution. I think this is exactly the kind of dialogue we need to have as we navigate what it means to teach reading well.
Best regards,
Naomi
Thank you Naomi. I am going to be able to use the expression “Spray and pray” more often than I would like!
Thank you! I’m glad “spray and pray” resonated (even if for all the wrong reasons!). Let’s hope that it stays firmly in the category of ‘what not to do’ when planning for diverse learners!
I have been in education for over 50 years, long enough to remember creating my own “phonics” worksheets differentiated for different levels of skill and understanding. I recall keeping them thinking that I could use them again in following years. Wrong!! The students were different, they developed skills at different paces, they had different interests- the practice sheets could not be simply reused. We have forgotten the needs of the students in this latest fad that fails to differentiate teaching and learning.
Our ability to access meaning from written text depends on many factors – the one that delivers the least information about meaning is decoding. Where is the understanding that we create meaning from fiction but extract it from non fiction?
Even when I attended school in the early 1950s our phonics based readers encouraged us to create meaning. It wasn’t meaningless decoding of decidable words pretending to be sentences!
Barbara, what a powerful reflection.
I really appreciate your deep experience and the reminder that even the best-designed resources can never be a substitute for knowing your learners. The idea that a worksheet or a lesson plan could be fit for all misses the heart of teaching: every group of students is different, and good teaching responds to this child, in this moment, with this need.
Your reflections also speak so clearly to one of the great frustrations of education – the constant pendulum swing between approaches. And all too often, that swing isn’t driven by what research or experience tells us works best for students – it’s driven by politics, by standardised testing pressures, and, frankly, by money: the commercial interests of those who stand to profit from selling the next big solution.
These lesson plans narrow the focus of literacy to what can be easily measured – decoding in isolation – at the expense of the rich, complex, messy, meaning-making processes that real reading requires.
And yes, those early phonics readers you describe are something we risk forgetting: reading isn’t just barking at words.
Thank you again for sharing your wisdom, Barbara. It’s such an important reminder that while programs, tests, and political agendas might come and go, the heart of teaching remains relational, responsive, and focused on meaning – not just blindly following a sequence.
Naomi I’d love you to come and visit some schools where we are implementing explicit phonics instruction with significant positive impacts on student reading outcomes. We do differentiate lessons, and phonics plus will provide schools with a solid Tier 1 program. Schools, principals and teachers are overwhelmingly in support of our department providing quality lesson plans. Teachers are and will continue to provide additional support and extend those able students who come to school with strong literacy skills. That won’t change. But teachers are crying out for lesson plans so we can put our time into differentiation, student support, data analysis and student wellbeing.. I’m not sure how much you have to do with schools – I’ve been a Prin in Ballarat for 8 years and our paths have never crossed. I’d invite you to provide your feedback directly to the phonics plus team, and also come and see how we are currently teaching reading and what skills and knowledge we need our graduates to have. It would be incredibly useful for uni’s and schools to work more closely together, and to make sure all our practices are aligned and evidence-informed. You can find me via Read Ballarat – we’ve got 3000 members and we are all about reading, literacy and learning. We also have a Sharing Best Practice conference in Ballarat in November this year where local educators and schools present. They would be great avenues to connect our uni staff with schools and teachers. Your concerns about things like F students sitting for 25 minutes are unfounded – of course we build up to that. And decodables are to practice sounds and blending – that are not supposed to be rich literature. Come and see how we develop both sides of the reading rope – word recognition and language comprehension, and how engaging phonics lessons are for our students. And speak to teachers about how they feel about teaching reading with and without SSP. Teachers can see it works.
Thank you for raising important questions about the direction of reading instruction in Victoria. However, I think this piece may be missing some key context.
The Phonics Plus resources are not designed to address the entire reading process, but rather to support the word recognition component of the Simple View of Reading. These lessons are foundational, but are not intended to cover the entirety of a literacy block. They build the decoding skills students need to access meaning-rich texts later on. To critique them for not foregrounding comprehension is to misunderstand their intended purpose.
There also seems to be a misconception about explicit instruction. High-quality explicit teaching is not passive or rigid. When done well, it’s responsive, interactive, and highly supportive of differentiation. Teachers use it to ensure clarity, check for understanding, and scaffold success. A resource such as Phonics Plus allows teachers to adapt it for their students, rather than re-inventing the wheel. I am concerned that you would suggest teachers would mindlessly ‘spray and pray’.
Finally, many teachers have been calling out for this kind of support. These resources are answering a genuine need: for clarity, structure, and alignment with evidence-based practice. They are not the whole solution, but they are a step in the right direction.
Let’s keep having these conversations, but let’s also be precise about what we’re critiquing and why. Teaching phonics in a structured way does not preclude meaning-making. Rather, it opens the door for our students to be able to comprehend text. Our students deserve this. And so do teachers.