The Big Six - a guide for families - Parenting reading success tips

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by lilac

The Big Six: a guide for families explains six key components that support children’s early reading success: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. The guide describes how each component strengthens reading foundations and offers practical at-home activities for parents, including responsive conversation, daily read-alouds, word-focused discussion, word detective games, listening and clapping syllables, and practicing rhymes and phonological sound awareness.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

AccessFree to download

Oral language

How oral language contributes to reading success

What parents can do at home

Vocabulary

How vocabulary contributes to reading success

What parents can do at home to assist with vocabulary learning

Phonological awareness

How phonological awareness contributes to reading success

What parents can do at home to encourage phonological awareness

Phonics

How phonics contributes to reading success

The Big Six: a guide for families Research has shown that there are six key components that contribute to successful beginning reading. Because of the importance of these components, they have become known as‘The Big Six’: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. In the early years of schooling, literacy lessons will incorporate The Big Six. Oral language How does oral language contribute to reading success? Oral language is the foundation of all literacy skills. If children experience rich oral language when young by talking with and listening to adults and other children, they will have a large‘bank’ of spoken vocabulary, words they understand when used in spoken communication (see Vocabulary below) . Children will have heard and joined in word play and rhyming and be aware of the sounds of English (see Phonological awareness below) . They will be familiar with lots of different sentence types and understand how language can change in different situations (see Fluency below) . They understand that words have meanings and that we use language to communicate information, ideas, feelings and thoughts (see Comprehension below) . What can parents can do at home to encourage oral language? Parents can support children in their oral language development by providing a variety of opportunities for children to listen and talk for different purposes. Here are some of the best ways parents can encourage oral language: • Talk to your child and listen responsively. Ask and answer questions. • Read aloud to your child at least once a day. Good books expose children to vocabulary and sentence structures that they won’t hear in everyday situations. Research has shown that reading aloud to children is a major factor in their success in learning to read at school. • Talk about the books you read aloud with your child. Ask your child about the characters , plot or setting; the themes and ideas raised by the book; topics they’d like to read or learn more about as a result of reading aloud. You’ll find more suggestions for things parents can do to support oral language development in the For families section on the Literacy Hub. © 2021 Commonwealth of Australia, unless otherwise indicated. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, unless otherwise indicated. 1 Vocabulary How does vocabulary contribute to reading success? When children have a large‘spoken’ vocabulary, meaning they use and understand lots of different words, they are well placed to recognise and understand those words when they see them when reading. Words can be broken up into three groups, sometimes called‘Tiers’. Tier 1 vocabulary is the words most frequently used when speaking and writing; words like the, and, was, some and‘everyday’ words like dog, happy, play, go. These words are also called‘high frequency’ or ‘sight words’ because readers will see them in lots of different texts and need to be able to recognise them automatically, by sight. Many Tier 1 words can’t be‘sounded out’, their spelling doesn’t directly correspond to the way we say them; for example, was is pronounced /woz/, this is another reason they need to be learnt ‘by sight’. Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary contains more sophisticated and subject-specific words. Children who hear a wide range of words used in talk and through books read aloud will be better able to understand those words when they begin to read them in books. What can parents can do at home to assist with vocabulary learning? As with oral language, parents can best support their children in learning vocabulary by encouraging them to talk and listen for a range of different purposes and reading aloud to them often. Children learn new words by hearing them used meaningfully many times and by being encouraged to use new words in their own talk. Other ways to support vocabulary learning include the following: • Become‘word aware’ as you read aloud. One of the best

FAQs

What are “The Big Six” components for beginning reading?

They are oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

How does oral language support reading success?

It provides the foundation for literacy skills, building a bank of spoken vocabulary and understanding how language changes in different situations.

What at-home activities help children develop vocabulary?

Parents can read aloud often, talk about books, encourage children to use new words meaningfully, and become “word aware” and “word detectives” when out and about.

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by lilac