Image source: MS PPT
Recently, I attended two Sydney events that have given me
pause for (further) thought on the mixed state of play in Australian education.
These were the Australian
School Improvement Summit on Wednesday October 29, and the researchED
Conference at St Catherine’s School on Saturday November 1. For those of
you unfamiliar with researchED,
it is a platform that hosts low-budget events, always on Saturdays, so teachers
and researchers can come together, share ideas and discuss existing and
evolving evidence concerning education across year levels and sectors.
At both of these events, there was discussion about the
importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum, for all students, but most
particularly those whose backgrounds create a lack of financial,
social, and human capital that can only be offset by strong educational
experiences curated by classroom teachers.
Natalie
Wexler is a US education writer and commentator, author of two highly
regarded texts, The
Knowledge Gap and Beyond
the Science of Reading, and co-author, with Dr Judith Hochman, of The Writing
Revolution. Wexler was a keynote speaker at both of the above events, acknowledging first that the focus on explicit and
systematic phonics instruction in recent years has been entirely appropriate,
because of the serious and harmful policy and practice deficiencies highlighted
in Emily Hanford’s American Public Media Sold a Story podcast.
Wexler’s central thesis (like many before her) is that
effective decoding skills are the necessary but not sufficient toolkit for students’ reading success. She highlights the complex factors that can stand in
the way of children’s comprehension of text. These include knowledge of
increasingly complex vocabulary, mastery of more elaborate sentence
structure, inferencing ability, and the application of prior (background)
knowledge when reading. Of course, different factors may be more or less in
play to create difficulties for different children reading the same text.
Children who cannot efficiently and effortlessly lift
unfamiliar text off the page, also cannot efficiently and effortlessly understand
said text, particularly as its complexity rapidly increases after the first
three years of school. The distinction between the constrained
skill of decoding and the unconstrained skill of comprehending text should
never have been a matter of debate, but some education academics continue to
contest the importance of early explicit decoding instruction and oppose moves
at policy level for this to be mandated, e.g., see here.
Such commentators are silent on the fact that a growing number of schools,
after adopting explicit teaching approaches, see a significant uplift in
reading success in their students, often in spite of socioeconomic factors that
make such success even more challenging, e.g., at Churchill
Primary School in rural Victoria, Marsden
Road Primary School in western Sydney, and Blue
Haven Primary School on the NSW central-coast – to name a few.
Wexler makes a compelling and evidence-based case for
classroom practice to continue to be purposeful and explicit beyond the
early mastery of decoding, so that children’s comprehension of texts (and
by extension, their enjoyment and learning) continues to grow and meet the
unconstrained challenges that can stand in the way of academic success. This is
illustrated in the image below, which I compiled to reflect Nancy Lewis
Hennessey’s analogy in her 2021 Reading
Comprehension Blueprint text that reading comprehension is akin to a
factory assembly line, so is dependent on all processes and components being
fully engaged via classroom teaching:
Image source: P.Snow
And just to be clear, neither Hennessey nor I are saying schools should be like factories. This is an analogy for how reading comprehension occurs.
If you thought the reading wars were only about decoding,
there are concerning indications that this is not the case, with many education
academics internationally, opposing the explicit teaching of background
knowledge and some even opposing the explicit teaching of higher-order
vocabulary to children identified as coming from linguistically diverse
backgrounds.
Let’s look at these separately.
Opposition to the teaching of
knowledge
It would probably surprise (and dismay) most parents and
other tax-payers to know that there are education academics around the world
who get up in the morning to rail against the teaching of knowledge to children
at school. Some refer to the privileging
of knowledge-teaching as the “learnification”
of schools. I am not making this up.
The general argument goes something like this (my
high-level synthesis):
Knowledge-rich curricula are overly prescriptive,
culturally narrow, and politically conservative, meaning that certain
“knowledges” and learners are privileged/prioritised while others are
neglected. It is not possible to agree on what knowledge should be included and
what should be excluded, so curricula should be inclusive, dialogic, and
socially transformative, where “knowledge” is not simply delivered but
contested, contextualised, and co-created. There is a premium placed on
so-called “21st century skills” such as communication,
collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity and these are priorities for
classroom time, via activities that favour “engagement” over evidence of actual
learning. We can’t agree on what knowledge to privilege so we should by-pass it
altogether.
Some academics are actually sounding an alarm about the
“intrusion” of terms like “evidence-based” and “knowledge-rich” into education
debates and policies, e.g., see here
and here
. Others argue for a greater emphasis on play (see here) and on
building relationships and wellbeing at school, e.g., see here.
Professor
Pasi Sahlberg of the University of Melbourne has even coined the acronym “GERM”
(Global Education Reform Movement) to deride the efforts of policy-makers,
school leaders and individual teachers who work hard to leverage the social
justice potential of education through evidence-based instruction and school accountability.
Background knowledge might be handy here, as some
germs are actually essential for good health. If there’s somewhere I can sign
to be a card-carrying GERM ambassador, I’m in.
Accountability is disparaged by some as a “neoliberal”
artefact. Funnily enough, I see no objections by these same commentators to
accountability in health, engineering, and aviation - where they may personally experience the consequences of "choose your own adventure" practices. I’m musing over an opposite term to neoliberal – paleoprogressive
perhaps?
For some education academics, the crisis is not that 30%
of children are not proficient readers, or that the burden of this disparity is
disproportionately borne by students in equity and diversity groups. No. The
crisis is that governments and education sectors are visibly galvanised in
increasingly coordinated efforts to do something about this – by putting
in place the kinds of policies and practices likely to lead to
intergenerational change.
Much of the opposition to explicit teaching of knowledge
comes from education academics (rather than teachers themselves) and is veiled in the language of academic
freedom, teacher autonomy and a vague need to “re-imagine” schools and
schooling. Unfortunately, this is often a fig-leaf for “we don’t like
the evidence on the impact of explicit teaching on student academic and wellbeing
outcomes”. In the quest for improved educational outcomes for all students,
academic freedom has a mere cameo role at the margins, and must yield to
evidence, in the way this is managed in respected disciplines such as medicine,
psychology, engineering, nursing, and aviation. These are all professions that have accountability contracts with the communities they serve, and practitioners
are required to answer (often quite publicly) for poor decisions and adverse
outcomes.
As I
have noted previously, much of the early heavy lifting in the so-called GERM
has come from classroom teachers. Policy makers in Australia (and elsewhere)
are increasingly on the bus but many education academics are yet to even acknowledge
there’s a journey to undertake that they need to be part of. Until things
change upstream in the halls of academia, there will be enormous practice bottlenecks
and inefficiencies (and thus continued student inequities) downstream.
Opposition to the teaching of Tier 2
vocabulary to children from minority groups
In this
2024 paper, British educational linguist Dr Ian Cushing takes
aim at the consideration of vocabulary in terms of “tiers”, as described by Isabel Beck and her
colleagues in the US (e.g., in the well-regarded and widely-used text Bringing
Words to Life). Cushing applies a postmodernist critical lens to argue against
the teaching of higher-order (Tier 2) vocabulary to children from Black
minority backgrounds, on the basis that to do so is to impose “colonial
histories of raciolinguistic ideologies” (p. 972) and class-based power
dynamics on the language of such children. He claims (p. 976) that:
It is a very specific type of child that Beck and her
colleagues have in mind when arguing for the targeted instruction of tier two
vocabulary: Black children from low-income communities. Reproducing the same
raciolinguistic ideologies as articulated in the writings of white European
colonisers and anti-Black deficit thinkers as I described above, Beck et al
claim that such children are unlikely to experience ‘language rich’ environments
at home or with peers, unlikely to use language in ‘reflective, playful, or
novel ways’, and unlikely to encounter ‘extensive and sophisticated vocabulary’
(Beck et al. 1987, 156).
There’s a major problem with this claim, however. It
is not an accurate reflection of the Beck et al. source from which
Cushing is quoting. I have read the chapter in question, and they make no
reference to race, Black or otherwise, anywhere. It is unfortunate that
this point escaped the Language
and Education reviewers, who appear to have accepted on face value, the
proposition that such an overtly racist position would be adopted by respected
reading scientists.
It is notable too that Cushing seems happy to overlook
the educational needs of minority children and the possibility that to
succeed in an English-speaking education system, mastery of Tier 2 vocabulary
might be as useful to them as it would be to other children (right across the
socio-economic spectrum), whose comprehension of increasingly complex texts
will be compromised without receptive and expressive vocabularies that go
beyond everyday Tier 1 common words learned in the context of home and
community interactions, regardless of text exposure. Vocabulary contributes
to mental models of knowledge held in longterm memory. As Kintsch
observed in 1998 (p. 127) “Comprehension begins with the identification of
individual words and their meanings; without this, no higher-level integration
is possible.” Kintsch was in no way suggesting that reading comprehension ends
with word knowledge, a point taken up by E.D. Hirsch, in 2005, in his paper
with a built-in self-explanatory title: Reading
comprehension requires knowledge of words and the world.
Cushing offers no suggestions as to robust, culturally
responsive, dare I say it, evidence-based instructional support for the
children he is seeking to “protect” from being explicitly taught Tier 2
vocabulary. Presumably they should simply not be allowed to read texts that
contain these words? Someone should alert the librarians in UK
schools so this can be policed. Contrast this with the late Dr
David Corson’s observation that “A diverse and rich vocabulary is a
better tool for dealing with a complex universe” (1995, p. 2).
Interestingly, Cushing pays little attention to Tier 3 words
(typically described as lower-frequency and more subject-specific than Tier 2
words) and in fact claims with respect to the work of Beck and
colleagues that these are “….generally dismissed as not important for teaching”
(p. 979). What Beck et al. actually wrote is that “…Tier Three consists
of words that tend to be limited to specific domains (e.g., enzyme) or so rare
that an avid reader would likely not encounter them in a lifetime (e.g., abecedarian)”
(p. 20). If we “protect” students from the deficit-based thinking of Tier 2
vocabulary teaching, how, I wonder, should they leap-frog from Tier 1 to Tier 3
words, so they can engage with specific curriculum areas? Or should students from
equity and diversity groups be spared exposure to vocabulary-dense subjects
such as biology, geography and mathematics, on the basis that they contain “big
words” that they would not use in their home contexts?
I wonder whether Dr Cushing asks his own students from
minority backgrounds (who have presumably acquired sufficient Tier 2 vocabulary
to succeed at school given they have made it to university) to engage with a
different academic reading while those of white Anglo ethnicities read this
paper?
Although I could have easily predicted the answer, I
asked ChatGPT to analyse a 1000-word sample of Dr Cushing’s paper, to
determine the proportion of content words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) that
are Tier 2 or Tier 3. The result? Forty-five percent were Tier 2 and 35% were
Tier 3. So, 80% higher-order vocabulary all-up, in a breathtaking example
of pedagogy for the privileged.
In Tier 1 parlance, we might call this know-how for the
in-crowd.
*********
So, if we’re not careful, the next reading war is not going
to be about how we teach decoding (the jury has returned a verdict on that
one), but rather whether we teach complex vocabulary and background
knowledge to all students, so all students can engage deeply, and
dare I say it, critically, with increasingly complex texts.
The Society for the Prevention of Children’s Knowledge
is open for business.
Don’t trip over your privilege on the way in.
FURTHER READING ON THE VOCABULARY DEBATE
If you’re interested in this debate, do read US reading practitioner
Harriett Janetos’ Substack article and make sure you work through the comments
that follow:
Is
Teaching Academic Vocabulary Racist?
Readers are also referred to this response to Cushing’s
paper, by Dr
Kathleen Brown of the University of Utah Reading Clinic:
Letter
to editors: commentary on tiered vocabulary and raciolinguistic discourses of
deficit: from academic scholarship to education policy.
Cushing’s response to Brown is published here:
A
response to Brown.
References
Beck I, McKeown
M, Omanson R. 1987. The effects and uses of diverse vocabulary instructional
techniques. In: McKeown, M & Curtis, M (eds). The nature of vocabulary
acquisition. Erlbaum, pp. 147–163. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-97117-009
Corson, D.
(1995). Using English words. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hirsch, E.D., Jr.,
(2003). Reading comprehension requires knowledge of words and the world. American
Educator, 27(1), 10-13.
Kintsch, W.
(1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge University
Press.
© Pamela Snow
(2025)
