Dear parents
I am reaching out about a
subject that I know will be extremely important to you – the question of whether or not your
child learns to read in the early years of school. Some of you might be alarmed
at the thought that this would even be open to question. I can hear you now: “Surely,
if my child is attending a local school, irrespective of education sector, they
are going to learn to read?! Why would I even need to worry about
this?” I know that many of you are concerned about this, though, because I regularly hear from parents via email. So I thought I would compile some information here about common concerns and frequently asked questions.
Unfortunately, all is not
as it should be when it comes to how we teach our children to read, and parents
need to be well-informed about this. Part of the problem in this space lies in
how our universities prepare undergraduate teachers to teach reading. A recently
released report shows enormous gaps with respect to how Australian universities
go about preparing student teachers for the vital task of teaching reading, and
there is no reason to believe that other first-world, English-speaking nations
are doing any better.
We’ve known for a long
time that teachers
lack the critical knowledge of language and literacy that is needed to take
a novice 5-year old on the amazing and life-changing journey towards becoming a
reader. This is not the fault of teachers. Responsibility for this lies
with their university lecturers, who, for decades, have ignored or shunned
robust cognitive psychology research about what the reading process is and how
best to approach reading instruction to ensure success for all. Government and
other education jurisdictions have been complicit in this rejection of scientific
knowledge, preferring in the main, to try to appease all sides by saying, in
effect: “Schools can choose from a range of methods; we don’t mind how they go
about this, as long as they can say they are addressing the curriculum”.
Imagine how you would feel
if student doctors were not taught up-to-date science about human physiology, disease
processes, and appropriate treatments. Imagine if state health departments said
to hospitals “You do your own thing with infection control. We’re sure you’re
on top of this”.
Let’s unpack some
important issues that parents need to understand about reading and how it is
(or isn’t) taught, and then have a look at a few parental FAQs.
Reading is not a
biologically natural thing to do
This might sound like a
strange statement, but let me explain. In the first five years, children’s
lives have a big focus on learning to talk. Talking and understanding are what
we humans have evolved to do as a matter of course. Consequently, this period
sees the largest language explosion of your child’s entire life. By school
entry, children know (i.e., use and understand) around
10,000 words and their vocabulary will continue to grow steadily through
the school years – both through conversations with adults and peers, and importantly,
through their own reading.
Spoken language is
critical in its own right, because it is the way we humans connect with each
other and so it gives us tools to form and maintain relationships. In turn,
these are critical for our mental health and well-being.
Oral language skills are
also the foundation that children build on when they start school in order to
learn how to read. Printed text was invented only about 6,000 years ago to represent
speech. It’s a social and cultural contrivance and it’s a code, and as such, it
needs to be learnt over time by children. Some children acquire the code
relatively seamlessly, but the vast majority require support in the form of explicit
teaching in order to do so. Unfortunately, though, explicit teaching of the
code has been unfashionable in education circles in recent decades, and some educators have been less than upfront about their views on this. Read on.
There are historically-rooted
tensions about how reading should be taught
There’s two broad schools
of thought about how children are “best” taught how to read. Whole Language,
and its descendant Balanced Literacy sit on one side of the debate, and
proponents argue that reading is a meaning-based activity that is best acquired
through immersion, and teaching approaches that incidental. Phonics proponents, on the other hand, argue that the
code-based nature of reading needs to be explicitly unpacked for the reading
novice, so that we are not leaving reading to chance.
Importantly, however, no
phonics advocates argue that phonics alone is enough, and nor do they overlook
the importance of all of the Big Five elements identified by the US National Reading Panel back in 2005: phonemic awareness,
phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Some, such as Australian education
academic, Dr
Deslea Konza, have argued for a focus on the Big Six, with oral language
receiving equal focus. Some argue too that writing, spelling, and morphology are equally important, and I agree.
“Balanced Literacy” sounds reassuring to
teachers and to parents because it suggests the right mix of teaching ingredients
are in play, in the right order. Unfortunately Balanced Literacy is a buffed-up version of Whole Language,
designed to appear like a teaching approach that ticks all the boxes, while
keeping students and teachers back in a 1970s time-warp. You can read more about this history here. The reading science has moved on since the 1970s and universities and classrooms need to catch up.
As parents, you buy a
lottery ticket when your child starts school.
Schools get to choose
their own adventure with respect to how they teach reading. Some will align
strongly with the scientific evidence indicating that all children need to
learn to decode, and the most efficient instructional approaches to ensure success
in the early years. Lucky you, if that’s the kind of school your child is
attending. Others, however, use a mixed-bag of approaches, most commonly referred to as Balanced Literacy, as noted above.
*****
Let me now address some questions
that are frequently asked by parents:
Don’t some children learn
to read without explicit phonics instruction?
Yes, they do. The problem
is, there is no way for a teacher of five-year olds to know at the start of
their first year of school, who’s who in terms of the level of ease with which
children will learn to read. For this reason, effective explicit phonics
instruction is like fluoride in the teaching water; it protects every child
against the decay of low reading achievement. It won’t prevent every academic
difficulty that children might encounter in the future, but it will ensure that
at a population level, every child is better off. Professor Catherine Snow (no
relation) of Harvard University and her colleague Professor Connie Juel of Stanford
University observed in
2005 that
Explicit
teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful
for none, and crucial for some
Can’t struggling readers
just catch up later on?
Not easily, no. The best
time for struggling readers to catch up is in the first year of school. After
that, it’s a law of diminishing returns and it takes more and more resources to
try to bring these children up to speed. All the while, of course, they are
missing out on academic content, and often developing mental health problems
such as anxiety as a result of their reading problems and the embarrassment attached to these. Effective early intervention is like building
better fences at the top of the cliff, rather than parking ambulances at the
bottom. The best early intervention is effective instruction.
Isn’t English too
irregular for phonics instruction to be the focus of early years instruction?
English certainly has its quirks
and idiosyncrasies, but overall this is a furphy. English is a rule-governed
language, but there just happen to be rather a lot of rules. As with teaching
your child anything complex (getting dressed, tying their shoe-laces, riding a bike, playing
the piano), the logical learning principle is to start simple, practise and consolidate,
and build up to more complexity.
Children don’t begin their
piano playing by banging out a Beethoven sonata. We all accept the importance
of starting with very simple pieces, such as Baa Baa Black Sheep, and
explicitly teaching the connections between musical notation and the keys on
the piano. Later on, they will learn about complexities such as sharps and
flats, different keys and time signatures, and notes of different beat lengths. In the same way, in early reading
instruction, it makes sense to start with some clear 1:1 correspondences
between sounds (phonemes) and letters/letter combinations (graphemes), and
build up from there.
Does it matter what kind
of phonics instruction children receive?
Yes, it does. This is a
game of playing the odds, and for my money, the odds favour approaches that are
systematic, rather than incidental, and have a focus on synthesising (blending
and segmenting sounds), rather than just focusing on initial letters or sounds in words.
Initial letters can be tricky
for novice readers, because English requires us to produce and represent 44
speech sounds, but we only have 26 letters to do so. So if the child is trying
to read the word “shoe”, asking her to focus on the initial letter will not be
helpful. She needs to develop an understanding that the letter combination s +
h is a grapheme that represents the phoneme /ʃ/ (“sh”).
If you would like to learn
more about different approaches to phonics instruction, there’s a brief explainer here.
Are predictable readers a
good idea in the early years?
Many schools have invested
thousands of dollars in sets of levelled, predictable readers. A predictable
reader is one in which there is an easily identifiable pattern in the content
and structure of the text, to promote (apparent) early success through
recitation rather than actual reading. If a child knows that only one word
changes on each page, and that word corresponds to the different picture on the
page, it’s not hard to see what habit is going to be established in the novice
reader’s mind – one of guessing from pictures and predictability.
Unfortunately, this
approach produces what is sometimes referred to as the year four slump – what
seems like a sudden drop in a child’s performance in the middle primary years,
when the scaffold of predictability is removed and they have to use their own
decoding skills to lift new words off the page. If children have not been
taught the skill of decoding, they have nowhere to go, except to become
instructional casualties who now appear to have a “reading disorder”.
The alternative to predictable
texts for beginning readers is decodable texts. These are books whose
simple narratives are made up mainly of words that contain phoneme-grapheme (letter-sound)
combinations that children have already been taught, so that they experience
the meaning-making associated with decoding text. These books are instructional
scaffolds for use in the early stages of reading. In the beginning stages of reading instruction, adults should not confuse
books that children read, with books that are read by others to children. The
latter should contain words and sentences of all kinds of richness and complexity,
so that oral language skills are being promoted at every turn.
You can learn more about
the rationale behind using decodable texts here.
Unfortunately, some
schools see the wisdom of teaching decoding skills systematically, but are
loath to let go of the apparent security of predictable, levelled readers. This can be
confusing for children, as it gives them a mixed message about what the
reading process is all about. On the one hand, it’s about decoding through the
word, and on the other, it’s about guessing and using picture cues; however, the latter approaches divert the child’s attention away from the text on the page - which contains all of the information they need in order to read.
Remember: written text was
devised as a code for spoken language, so in order to derive meaning from it,
children need to be able to decipher the code.
If parents read to them in
the pre-school years, won’t children automatically become good readers?
Reading to children in the
pre-school years (and well beyond) is important for a number of reasons. It
exposes children to rich, complex vocabulary and sentence structure, and
assists with their understanding of the structure of narrative - a text genre they
will learn more about at school. Time spent by parents and children reading
together is usually enjoyable too for the physical proximity and cuddles, and
can be a soothing, down-regulating activity at the end of the day, ahead of sleep-time.
All of these are important
reasons to maximise parent-child reading time, but don’t be fooled. In and of itself,
reading to your child will not guarantee that he will be come a reader. Reading
needs to be taught by classroom teachers on school entry. The corollary of this
is that if your child has difficulties with reading at school, it cannot be
attributed to a lack of home reading time in the pre-school years. This is
called parent-blame and is not OK.
Is it OK to check children’s
phonic decoding skills in the early years?
It is not only OK, it is
essential, in the same way that we check children’s hearing and vision in the
early years of life. In fact, population screening begins at the moment of
birth, when your baby has a heel-prick
test (you were probably barely aware of this at the time, amidst the myriad
of emotions and distractions present in the birth suite).
There has been a lot of
noisy debate in recent times about whether Australia should introduce a Year 1
Phonics Screening Check, along the lines of what has been used in England
since 2012. Sadly, much of the opposition to this in Australia comes from
teacher unions – bodies whose remit is industrial conditions, not the
science of instruction. Teacher unions need to stay in their lane on this one.
Otherwise, it will be clear to others that they are more concerned with misguided attempts to protect the reputation
of teaching as a profession than they are with the welfare of students. If they are genuinely interested in teacher well-being, however, they will lobby universities for better pre-service education about the teaching of reading, and education sectors for clearer policy positions on this.
Many in education claim
that “we already check decoding skills” and no doubt some, possibly many, do.
The problem is that this is not done in a consistent manner. Some schools use
high-quality screening tools to monitor children’s progress, while others use a
bit of this and a bit of that, including some tools that are less well-suited
to screening than others. This means risking inaccurate assessment along the
way.
You might be interested to
know that the South
Australian Department for Education ran a trial of the Phonics Screening Check
in 2018, and they were quite open about sharing their dismay and
disappointment about how few children were able to demonstrate the necessary
skills it measures.
If you start reading about
the Phonics Screening Check, you’ll almost certainly come across tensions about
its inclusion of so-called pseudo-words (also called nonsense words and
non-words). These are simply there to assess whether your child has the
essential code-breaking skills needed to map the relationships between sounds
and letters. Nonsense words are not the enemy of meaning-making in reading.
Think about how many wonderful and delightful children’s books contain them –
e.g. books by Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss, JK Rowling, and Roald Dahl, to name a
few.
Why is all of this important?
It is important for the simple reason that either every child matters, or no child matters.
No child should be deprived of the life-changing opportunity to learn to read. We know too much to be able to make excuses for failures to translate knowledge into action in universities and schools. Parents may be the most powerful voice of all in effecting change on this.
Where can you go for
reliable information about reading and reading instruction?
There’s list of what I
consider to be trustworthy
resources at this link.
I
hope this information has been of some value to you in your journey to
understanding what is an unnecessarily complex and contested space
for parents and teachers alike.
Do please feel free to make comments and share your experiences. (C) Pamela Snow (2019)
