Reading is a verb. Literacy is not.

Talking about reading has become a bit passé and unfashionable in education circles, but reading is high-stakes for the young people who are the focus of my research – those who have exited education early and empty-handed when it comes to reading skills.  No form of literacy, whether traditional or postmodern is possible unless children achieve the ability to read. Children do not sit down and literate a book, a newspaper article, an online blog, or the instructions for a new game. They read them. If they are lucky, that is.

Recently, Robyn Ewing, Professor of Teacher Education and the Arts at the University of Sydney, wrote a blogpost critical of the Centre for Independent Studies’ Five from Five Initiative  I wish to respond to some of Professor Ewing assertions.

The fact that the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) has a particular definition of literacy is all well and good, but that does not necessarily translate into useful classroom practices that in turn translate into useful skills for children. The catch-cry “it’s already in the curriculum” is a hollow defence against the evidence that indicates that too many Australian children exit primary school with under-done reading (and writing) skills. There, I used that word again. Reading.

Where is the evidence that Five from Five is touted as “all-encompassing”? It is ironic (and logically inconsistent) that Professor Ewing describes this approach as “simplistic” when there is abundant evidence to indicate that primary teachers in Australia and overseas lack basic explicit knowledge of the complexity of how language works in order to teach reading*. Dr Louisa Moats has stated through the title of one of her publications, that “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science”. However, too few teachers exit their pre-service education equipped with explicit language knowledge and an understanding of the science of reading instruction. Instead, they are fed a steady diet of Whole-Language based approaches such as the Three Cuing system referred to in Prof. Ewing’s blogpost. This approach is used widely throughout Australian schools, yet was not featured in any of the 20 recommendations of the 2005 National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy.

Teacher knowledge is the elephant in the room that has to be admitted. Taboos do not make useful contributions to solving complex problems. There is a sad irony in the fact that much of the literature on teacher knowledge is situated in journals that concern learning difficulties in children.

Similarly, it is not enough that literacy educators “don’t deny the importance of phonics and phonemic awareness”. Literacy educators need more than a lack of denial in order for their students to succeed. They need knowledge and skills that give them access to decades of cognitive science research on how reading is acquired. How on earth can teachers be expected to enhance phonemic awareness skills when they don’t reliably know what a phoneme is, or how to count them in simple words?

Education is remarkable in two respects: for its capacity to turn its back on evidence in favour of ideology, and for its wasteful approach to the evidence already sitting at its feet and being ignored. Both of these ingrained and indoctrinated responses occur at the expense of the educational livelihoods of children – most notably those who are starting from behind. When education academics get on an aeroplane, do they expect the pilot to say 

“Good afternoon ladies and gentleman; there’s probably a particular way that I’m meant to get this Airbus A380 off the ground, but I’d like to try out a few ideas of my own on you today. After all, I’m the pilot, and you’re my passengers”.  

 Similarly, when education academics go to hospital with a suspected heart attack, do they expect that an evidence-based protocol will be followed, or that the doctors in the emergency department are free to interpret the evidence as they wish? In these examples, of course, there is a clear link between practitioner actions and outcomes, but when teachers fail to apply evidence in early years classrooms (because they were not equipped with it in the first place), there is a creeping, insidious poisoning of a child’s potential, that decades later is either explained away as a function of the child’s background, or of the child being “unteachable” for some intrinsic reason.  

Unlike pilots and doctors, teachers do not receive confronting and immediate feedback about erroneous practices. This seems to perpetuate a flat-earth belief-system that is impenetrable by those on the outside begging to be heard.  

I am part of an Australian Research Council Linkage Project research team which reported last year, consistent with a number of earlier Australian and international studies, that primary teachers' explicit and implicit knowledge of basic linguistic constructs was limited and highly variable (see Stark, Snow, Eadie &Goldfeld, 2015).

The 78 teachers who participated had a wide range of experience, and were most likely to rate their ability to teach skills including spelling, phonics, comprehension and vocabulary as either “moderate” or “very good”. However most of them demonstrated limited knowledge and stated that they did not feel confident answering questions about their knowledge in these areas.

Bear in mind that these teachers worked in disadvantaged schools where staff were sufficiently interested and motivated to respond to a call for Expressions of Interest to take part in a research study on literacy teaching. A random sample may have produced even more concerning results. It must be stressed, however, that these findings should not invite criticism of teachers themselves. They are doing the best they can with their available knowledge and skill toolkits. We can only imagine the greater reach of their efforts, however, if they were properly equipped with systematic skills regarding the phonics and phonemic awareness aspects of the “Big Five”.

How can a child who receives solid, teacher-guided instruction ranging across phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency be “short-changed”? Seriously?!  Many children can but dream of having these basics in place in their classroom. Having them in evidence is one thing. Having them based on robust evidence, is another thing altogether. And where is the evidence that children exposed to phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency “disengage from the learning process”? What about the possibility that systematic attention to these features might have the very opposite effect for many at-risk learners? 

One of the tired and hoary old chestnuts that is regularly trotted out against those who argue for better and more systematic phonics instruction is that there's more to reading than simply decoding text. That’s a bit like saying that there’s more to making a cup of tea than boiling the kettle. Advocates for evidence-based phonics instruction have always seen learning to decode as a necessary but not sufficient part of literacy learning. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) asserts the importance of both decoding and comprehension. So if you can't get words on and off the page, what hope do you have of participating in digital, critical, multi or any other sort of literacy? 

Some children have more limited “past experiences and knowledge of language” to bring to the task of reading than others. Who, pray tell, is suggesting an “over-emphasis” on letter-sound relationships? What would an “over-emphasis” actually look like? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that for many teacher educators, phonics is anything other than incidental, third out of three, last resort assistance, as per the sacred Three Cuing doctrine.

The young people in my research, those in the tail of the education curve, can “interact” all they like with a range of literacy materials. If they cannot read, however, such interaction counts for nought in the real world, in which they will be permanently socially and economically marginalised.

I do agree with Prof. Ewing that “ongoing teacher professional learning” is needed in this space, because there is an enormous short-fall to be made up. 

Instead of parking ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, however, let’s start building fences at the top, in the form of more rigourous teacher pre-service education. One day, a university somewhere will break ranks with the zeitgeist and the wheels of change will start to turn.

Just imagine. 

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*See for example:

Binks-Cantrell, E., Washburn, E. K., Joshi, R. M., & Hougen, M. (2012). Peter Effect in the preparation of reading teachers. Scientific Studies of Reading, 16(6), 526-536.

Cunningham, A. E., Perry, K. E., Stanovich, K. E., & Stanovich, P. J. (2004). Disciplinary knowledge of K-3 teachers and their knowledge calibration in the domain of early literacy. Annals of Dyslexia, 54(1), 139-167.

Fielding-Barnsley, R. (2010). Australian pre-service teachers' knowledge of phonemic awareness and phonics in the process of learning to read. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 15(1), 99-110.

Fielding-Barnsley, R., & Purdie, N. (2005). Teachers' attitude to and knowledge of metalinguistics in the process of learning to read. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 33(1), 65-76.

Joshi, R. M., Binks, E., Hougen, M., Dahlgren, M. E., Ocker-Dean, E., & Smith, D. L. (2009). Why elementary teachers might be inadequately prepared to teach reading. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 392-402.

Louden, W., & Rohl, M. (2006). “Too many theories and not enough instruction”: Perceptions of preservice teacher preparation for literacy teaching in Australian schools. Literacy, 40(2), 66-78.

Mahar, N. E., & Richdale, A. L. (2008). Primary teachers' linguistic knowledge and perceptions of early literacy instruction. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 13(1), 17-37.

Moats, L. (2009). Still wanted: Teachers with knowledge of language. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 387 - 391 .

Moats, L., & Foorman, B. R. (2003). Measuring teachers’ content knowledge of language and reading. Annals of Dyslexia, 53(1), 23-45.

Moats, L., & Lyon, G. R. (1996). Wanted: Teachers with knowledge of language. Topics in Language Disorders, 16(2), 73-86.

Piasta, S. B., Connor, C. M., Fishman, B. J., & Morrison, F. J. (2009). Teachers' knowledge of literacy concepts, classroom practices, and student reading growth. Scientific Studies of Reading, 13(3), 224-248.

Podhajski, B., Mather, N., Nathan, J., & Sammons, J. (2009). Professional development in scientifically based reading instruction teacher knowledge and reading outcomes. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 403-417.

Reid Lyon, G., & Weiser, B. (2009). Teacher knowledge, instructional expertise, and the development of reading proficiency. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 475-480.

Spear-Swerling, L., & Brucker, P. O. (2003). Teachers’ acquisition of knowledge about English word structure. Annals of Dyslexia, 53(1), 72-103.

Spear-Swerling, L., & Brucker, P. O. (2004). Preparing novice teachers to develop basic reading and spelling skills in children. Annals of Dyslexia, 54(2), 332-364.

Stark, H. L., Snow, P. C., Eadie, P. A., & Goldfeld, S. R. (2015). Language and reading instruction in early years’ classrooms: The knowledge and self-rated ability of Australian teachers. Annals of Dyslexia, 1-27.

Tetley, D., & Jones, C. (2014). Pre-service teachers’ knowledge of language concepts: Relationships to field experiences. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 19(1), 17-32.

Washburn, E. K., Joshi, R. M., & Cantrell, E. B. (2011). Are preservice teachers prepared to teach struggling readers? Annals of Dyslexia, 61(1), 21-43.

Washburn, E. K., & Mulcahy, C. A. (2014). Expanding preservice teachers' knowledge of the English language: Recommendations for teacher educators. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 30(4), 328-347. 

(C) Pamela Snow 2016 

My grateful thanks to Alison Clarke for comments on an earlier draft of this post.

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Explaining or justifying literacy instruction?

In their piece on The Conversation this morning, Queensland education academics Drs Stewart Riddle and Eileen Honan referenced a previous article of mine on The Conversation* (co-authored with Alison Clarke) as a source of “misinformation” about how the teaching of literacy is approached in Australian schools.
 
I was mildly bemused to see that today’s piece opens with an effort to persuade the reader that there’s nothing controversial about early reading instruction. Ironically, this position is refuted in the NSW Department of Education document to which they link:

For decades now, phonics has been the subject of great public debate. It seems everyone has an opinion on it, so much so that a host of myths and half truths have arisen.

While experts argue about how much emphasis should be placed on phonics instruction in classrooms, just about all agree the teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness is critical to children learning to read.

Anyway, we’ll put that inconsistency aside.
 
Stewart Riddle and I have had a number of collegial on and off-line interactions about reading instruction and teacher education and I think it’s fair to say we’ve both gained from these discussions. I find it hard to disagree with some of what he and Dr Honan say in today’s piece. In particular, they emphasise the importance of fostering early oral language skills as a means of supporting children’s transition to literacy in the early years. The two randomised controlled trials in disadvantaged schools in Victoria in which I have been an investigator (one ongoing) have as a central platform teacher knowledge and practice concerning children’s oral language skills, in particular phonemic awareness, narrative skills, vocabulary, and comprehension (see this link to the completed OLSEL study). So there’s much common ground here. 

Where things become problematic, however, is when we interrogate the evidence pertaining to teachers’ language knowledge concerning the teaching of literacy. Unfortunately there is a growing body of Australian and international research that points to unacceptably low levels of explicit linguistic knowledge on the part of practising teachers. In a study published by my group last year  we found that not only was knowledge poor, but teacher self-rated confidence regarding their knowledge was disproportionately high; this means that teachers are not good at “knowing what they don’t know” with respect to their knowledge base. It is important to note that these difficulties did not only apply to knowledge pertaining to decoding skills (e.g. the ability to define key concepts such as phoneme and morpheme, and the ability to accurately count phonemes in words), but also existed in domains pertaining to semantics and grammar. 

I have no doubt that organisations like the Australian Literacy Educators' Association  have a genuine commitment to fostering early literacy skills in Australian classrooms, but to be seen as a credible force, they need to move beyond defending current classroom practices to interrogating the evidence concerning uneven performance in our schools. This unevenness cannot be conveniently and simply explained away on the basis of funding arguments, as some schools punch well above their weight when it comes to reading performance in spite of socio-economic disadvantage.

I have blogged on this topic before, in a piece entitled Taboo topics: Reading instruction and teacher education. Talking about teacher knowledge cannot be a taboo topic, any more than the community would condone us not talking about gaps in health professionals’ knowledge and skills.
 
Australia’s poor performance on reading being re-packaged as “moral panic” for readers of one particular newspaper is disappointingly trite and simplistic. The youth offenders and children in state care who have been the focus of my research for the last 15+ years deserve better than that from education academics. Sadly, their language and literacy skills are so poor, they cannot take part in the debate. They become part of the silent throng of adults who are illiterate and are excluded from the economic mainstream, as featured on this morning’s episode of Radio National’s Life Matters


So Drs Riddle and Honan may be explaining more than they think when they describe how literacy is taught in Australian schools.


*Note - this link was subsequently amended in the Riddle and Honan piece and replaced with this link, which is a discussion around the views Alison Clarke and I expressed in our February 2015 piece on The Conversation



(c) Pamela Snow (2016)

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Snake Oil Toil

Things have been rather quiet over at the Snow Report of late. As you might imagine, the reasons for that are many and varied, but chief among them is the fact that I have been ridiculously busy with writing projects. Associate Professor Philip Mendes (Monash University) and I are in the final throes of editing an international text on leaving state care (to be published by Palgrave in late 2016/early 2017), I've just finished a book chapter with Professor Jacinta Douglas (La Trobe University) on psychosocial aspects of pragmatic language impairments across the lifespan (for a forthcoming text being edited by Professor Louise Cummings, to be published by Springer in early 2017; and just to ensure that my fingers don't stray too far from the keyboard, Dr Caroline Bowen and I are well into the process of writing our book Making Sense of Interventions for Children's Developmental Difficulties to be published by J&R Press in (hopefully) early 2017.

So on most days, I look a bit like this (just with a slightly more crazed look in the eyes):

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While the book with Philip and the chapter with Jacinta have had an exclusive focus on solid academic, peer-reviewed literature, our task of writing Making Sense is altogether different and has taken us down some bewildering tracks, where the light is poor, the language is highly impressionistic and brazen claims are a dime a dozen. We've both felt on a couple of occasions that we'd have to hand back our PhDs if our academic colleagues saw the kinds of websites we've been frequenting of late. Every so often we both need to push away from the desk and breathe deeply. There is soooooo much neuroflapdoodle out there!! We've been reminded too of the torture of the ancient figure Sisyphus whose labourious toil could never be completed, and some days we've had a pretty good idea of how he might have felt.

We've been reading both promotional websites as well as scouring the academic literature for evidence of evidence. The latter is a sometimes interesting exercise. The task of distilling information for the parents in particular (but also teachers and clinicians) whom we hope will be the book's readership is immense, and at times seems like it will have no end. We are endeavouring to cover as many of the well-known scoundrels as we can, as well as featuring some up-and-coming snake-oil merchants of lesser-known fame. Some approaches of course, make a modicum of theoretical sense, and look like they perhaps should work, though the evidence does not support this optimism. Others make good theoretical sense, but lack an adequate research base on which to make a sensible judgement at this point in time. And still others are just plain nonsense and would be laughable were it not for the parents whose hopes signal the next sale in the interventions bazaar (or should that be bizarre?).

I was reminded of the enormity of our task today, when a clinician emailed me about yet another technique that looks like it is deserving of a mention in Making Sense: Neuro-Fit Systems.

The Neuro-Fit website starts with the usual, generally OK-sounding, and difficult-to-refute nod to mainstream neuroscience

"The brain and body work together through the central nervous system comprised of neurons and neuropathways. This entire system relies on our senses to gather information from the world around us and transmit it to the brain through these pathways. Immature neural development, chronic stress, and traumatic events can produce inefficiencies in neuropathway communication."

 However there are soon typical red-flags that should arouse concern on the part of parents, clinicians and teachers: its reference to a neurobiological approach (whatever that is), the fact that it is somehow a good fit for a myriad of disorders, and that like many snake-oil approaches that have gone before it (older readers of this blog will remember the Doman Delacato Technique), it is based on a neuro-sequential (patterning) approach. I'm not sure whether to be relieved or alarmed that Neuro-Fit staff are required to be first-aid qualified and to have "competitive athletics experience", but I can tell you that all of these factors and its reliance on testimonials rather than anything even resembling research mean that it is almost certainly an approach that clinicians, teachers, and parents should steer well clear of; regardless of what the good folk at Channel 7 have to say.

Caroline and I are facing a law of diminishing returns when it comes to the number of snake-oil approaches out there and the time (and words) available to us in Making Sense.

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Oh, and yes, we are making space for those approaches for which evidence is at least promising. It's not all bad news.

(C) Pamela Snow 2016

 

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