When Loretta met Misty: my response to a recent Talking out of School podcast episode

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Thanks to a share by my colleague Dr Nathaniel Swain, I recently listened to this episode of the Talking out of School podcast, in which Dr Loretta Piazza interviews A/Prof Misty Adoniou. I was frustrated and disappointed about the number of misconceptions and misrepresentations contained in the interview, and will address what I see as the key problems here:

A/Prof Adoniou recalls her own experience of phonics instruction several decades ago and places great store in the fact that she found it boring and wondered as a child why she was not learning letters in the context of words.

There’s a few problems here:

- Anecdotal accounts of our own experiences of learning to read are just that. They’re a bit like noses. We’ve all got one, but we can’t extrapolate too much from their size or shape about noses at a population level.

- A/Prof Adoniou apparently misses the irony of the fact that her early reading instruction was successful. She’s now a PhD-qualified academic, and that would probably not have happened without early reading success and the academic achievement it affords.

- Children are not usually the best judge of what they "need" at a given point in time. That's why they're not in charge of bedtime, the supermarket shopping, or curriculum design and delivery. 

When asked by Dr Piazza why “speech therapists” (sic) work in literacy, A/Prof Adoniou attempts to explain the scope of speech pathology (SLP) practice (to her credit, she uses the correct term) but incorrectly positions this work in schools as “medicalising” literacy.

This is a mischievous distortion. Some SLPs do work in medical contexts, such as hospitals, but those who are in schools obviously do not. The fact that SLPs have knowledge about a range of neurobiological disorders does not make their work in schools “medical” any more than it has this effect on the work of teachers in special education contexts. Worryingly, in a 2021 study of ours at La Trobe University, we found that practitioners who are dual-qualified as teachers and SLPs reported that the substance of what they know about reading came from their SLP degree, not from their teaching degree.

For anyone who is interested, there’s a detailed explanation of why SLPs work in the literacy space in this 2019 blog post of mine. It is not “over-reach” and the professional body, Speech Pathology Australia, provides detailed guidelines for practice in this and a range of other domains. If people genuinely want to know why SLPs work in the literacy space, perhaps it would be wise to pose that question to an SLP, or to the professional body.

While critiquing the term “science of reading (SoR)”, A/Prof Adoniou walks right into the straw man trap of suggesting that some (happily she does not say "all") SoR advocates talk very narrowly about phonics and specifically, systematic synthetic phonics (SSP).

I defy A/Prof Adoniou (or anyone else for that matter) to provide evidence of such narrow advocacy, at the expense of vocabulary, fluency, comprehension etc. To set the record straight, how phonics is taught is a fundamental point of disagreement in reading debates, so it is understandable that this is where much of the nitty-gritty discussion occurs. My position is that children need to have efficient tools for sub-lexical analysis of novel words of increasing length and complexity. Teaching decoding explicitly equips children with a transferable skill-set that in turn promotes automaticity and fluency. These are key ingredients for reading comprehension. I hope this explanation also addresses Dr Piazza’s later question “What’s wrong with predictable texts and getting children to look at pictures?” Predictable texts and reliance on picture cues of course promote an illusion of early fluency and proficiency that for a significant proportion of children results in the pernicious Year 4 slump (which in practice probably becomes evident in Year 3). 

A/Prof Adoniou describes reading as a “social” activity that should not be “medicalised” by health professionals like SLPs.

Reading is not a social activity. Reading relies heavily on individual linguistic and cognitive sub-skills such as knowledge of the alphabetic principle, understanding how phonemes and graphemes map to each other, phonemic awareness, working memory, attentional control, and self-monitoring (among many others). Being read to, and later on, reading to others are activities that have a social element but once again, reading is not fundamentally a social activity. Social activities involve interaction, for example conversation and games that entail sharing and turn-taking. When proficient readers join a book club, that is a social activity, but reading per se is not. Struggling readers do not benefit from "social" interventions. They benefit from support targeting specific sub-skills. Teachers and children alike have been done a great disservice by the positioning of reading as a social activity. This is worthy of delegation to the neuro-myth hall of fame (or perhaps shame).

In the context of discussing the range of abilities that can be expected in a classroom, Dr Piazza provides a fundamentally flawed description of what she calls a “normal distribution curve”.

Rather than re-hashing this here, let me summarise briefly what it does mean to say a distribution of scores fall under a normal (bell-shaped) curve. A normal curve means 50% of scores fall above the central point (where measures of central tendency, the mean, median and mode are all of equal value), and 50% below. Approximately 68% of scores fall immediately either side of this mean (i.e., within 1 standard deviation, which is a measure of distance from the mean). A further 28% fall plus or minus 2 standard deviations from the mean and in total, over 99% fall within 3 standard deviations (either above above or below) the mean. It does not mean (as stated) that “50% of children are in the average range”.

I would also question Dr Piazza's apparent acceptance of the fact that 25% of children in a class will struggle with reading. While there will always be a lower band, that group does not necessarily need to be cast into the wilderness of perpetual struggle. We should be actively working against a normal distribution for reading skill and seek instead to shift the tail of the (peaked) curve to the right. SoR advocates argue that we should be achieving reading proficiency for 95%-plus of students. That seems far more child-friendly than accepting a 25% failure rate.

A/Prof Adoniou argues that teachers operate like “scientists” in the classroom because they are constantly observing their students and making instructional adjustments.

I’m really not sure that this warrants the use of the term “scientist” but if that is the position that A/Prof Adoniou is adopting then we need to talk about the background knowledge that those scientists bring to their work. There is an abundance of published evidence indicating that teachers lack critical linguistics knowledge that supports optimal reading instruction (see reference list on this page). In fact, A/Prof Adoniou has written about low teacher knowledge herself, observing (p.104) that “Numerous accounts of beginning teachers note a lack of content knowledge about how the language works – most particularly, the basic constructs of the English language”. Pleasingly, this is a key focus of the recommendations of the recent (2023) Teacher Education Expert Panel Report.

Dr Piazza expresses exasperation about the decision in Victoria to adopt a phonics screening check (PSC) - or what I would refer to more correctly as a Clayton’s PSC.

There is reference to this as a perplexing decision by a high-performing state to base its practice on a change adopted by a more poorly performing state (South Australia), without acknowledgement of the fact that SA’s NAPLAN data has shown improvement since the PSC and associated pedagogical changes were implemented. Let's not forget too, that following the 2016 trial of the PSC in SA, it was reported that "For many teachers and leaders, the PSC was an eye-opener with some expressing surprise and disappointment about the results - particularly for students they identified as strong readers" (p.18).

Victoria may be the strongest performer at a macro level but that does not mean that there are not children being left behind in the early years as a consequence of not being efficiently and effectively taught how to decode. The widening achievement gap in Victoria was also not mentioned. Further, there’s a growing (but unknown) number of schools in Victoria shifting from balanced literacy to instruction that aligns with the SoR, so those schools will be helping to boost Victorian NAPLAN data as well.

In the context of discussing the PSC, the hoary pseudo words chestnut makes an appearance.

There’s some predictable and unfortunately disingenuous angst about testing 6-year olds on these apparent abominations, with no pause for thought about the extent to which nonsense words turn up in high quality children’s literature (Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, JK Rowling, Julia Donaldson, Dr Seuss, and so on). I suspect A/Prof Adoniou does actually understand why they are used in the PSC, as she references their use in laboratory research. It’s disappointing that she did not use this opportunity to do some much-needed myth-busting about their importance as part of brief a progress monitoring screening tool. Similarly, no SoR advocates (to the best of my knowledge – always happy to be corrected) suggest that teachers “teach non-words” to the children in their class, as implied by A/Prof Adoniou in this podcast. It’s possible some teachers give children non-words for decoding practice and for having fun with sounds, but that’s not the same as “teaching non-words”. Let’s remember too, that all words were once “non-words” so this is not a robust, binary distinction, as the ever-evolving nature of English reminds us.

Another important point that is conveniently not raised in the context of discussion about the PSC is the fact that England’s performance on the international PIRLS test is improving while Australia’s falls significantly below that of comparable OECD nations and is not trending upwards.

It is not possible of course to attribute England's PIRLS data solely to the introduction of the PSC in 2012, but as a policy and practice centre-piece, it has clearly been pivotal in driving changed practice at instruction and progress monitoring levels in that nation. With 20% of Year 4 students in Australia failing to achieve proficiency by international PIRLS standards, we have, as Jordana Hunter and Anika Stobart observed in May this year, "some work to do". We know that schools in disadvantaged areas can change their student achievement and well-being by changing their instructional practices, so let's not even think about blaming disadvantage for this (though the phenomenon is sadly over-represented in disadvantaged post-codes). It's teachers, not post-codes that produce children's reading achievement and we should be celebrating and learning from the successes in schools such as Churchill Primary in Victoria.

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I am a big fan of listening to podcasts to broaden my knowledge and perspectives on all things language and literacy, and education more generally. It’s rare, however, to experience so many jarring moments in which misinformation is presented and stated as fact. I would be very happy to receive an invitation to be interviewed by Dr Piazza on this podcast, as a way of setting the record straight on some matters and presenting alternative views on others.

Talking out of school should not mean being careless with accuracy and completeness in the messages conveyed to teachers.

 

(C) Pamela Snow (2023)