Setting fire to the ultimate straw man : Phonics only!

There seems to be this gigantic straw man in the phonics debate that those that advocate systematic phonics want there to be only phonics taught. When pushed there doesn’t seem to be one valid example of anyone who advocates a phonics only approach. If you can find one let me know. This blog is about setting fire to the phonics only straw man and outlining evidenced based literacy instruction.

So what are the phonics zealots advocating for?

Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) is often mentioned in the phonics debate but I prefer to use the terminology systematic explicit phonics instruction as this not only distinguishes itself from phonics in context, embedded phonics and analytic phonics but includes SSP and linguistic phonics. Evidenced based literacy instruction includes systematic explicit phonics early as a foundational concept otherwise many children will fail to comprehend text once reading becomes more difficult. I like Louisa Moats labelling “scientific based reading research (SBRR).

Why the focus on phonics in the debate?

Decades of research shows the importance of explicit phonics instruction as a foundational reading skill. Phonics in context is not enough and phonics instruction is often embedded in a balanced literacy program where students are expected to learn to read by some level of magic osmosis. This approach works for some children but leaves a significant number of children at risk of reading failure.

Phonics is an essential foundational skill that for many years has either not been taught at all (whole language) or been sprinkled onto a whole language approach in “balanced literacy”. Such phonics in context teaching has an ideological strangle hold in teacher training as it represents the romantic view of reading instruction. The evidence shows that such an approach will leave many children behind. Phonics needs to be explicitly taught by the teacher in a systematic fashion.

“… studies of reading development, studies of specific instructional practices, studies of teachers and schools found to be effective – converge on the conclusion that attention to small units in early reading instruction is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some” (Snow & Juel, 2005, pp. 501–520).

Evidenced based literacy instruction

Evidenced based literacy instruction includes 5 key elements that must be taught explicitly and systematically. Phonological awareness, Phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension are all essential components of evidenced based literacy instruction. Without a solid foundation of essential reading skills comprehension will be impacted.

Oral language at the core

Oral language is a skill that should be achieved naturally before school and is also an essential foundation to achieve literacy. Oral language should be achieved through everyday interactions with adults. However some children may have language delays and should be referred for specialist intervention. Children with Dyslexia can often initially present with speech language delays due to an underlying phonological deficit.

Unlike the acquisition or oral language, literacy is a skill that needs explicit instruction. Only a small handful of children will achieve the skill of reading seemingly effortlessly and with little instruction through exposure to books. Explicit and systematic teaching in the 5 elements of literacy instruction are beneficial for all children and absolutely essential for a significant percentage of children.

Whilst exposure to a rich language environmental is essential to literacy acquisition it is certainly not enough to enable the great majority of children to become capable readers.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness

Phonological awareness (PA) is the ability to perceive and manipulate the sound and language components of words onset, rimes, phonemes and syllables. Many children develop the basic skills of phonological awareness through songs, rhymes and listening to children’s books. Poor phonological awareness is a very good predictor of reading failure.

“Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school” (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995). http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/

Phonemic awareness is a sub skill of phonological awareness which where children identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in a word. It includes the ability to separate a word into the sounds that make it up and to blend single sounds into words. It is like phonics without the actual association with letters. It is the top tier of phonological awareness. The development of phonemic awareness, being a higher order phonological awareness skill, can be difficult for most children and very difficult for some children. It is often an area of difficulty for children with Dyslexia and for children who have not been exposed to a rich oral language environment. For those children at risk of reading failure phonemic awareness needs to be explicitly taught.

http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/

“PA instruction helped all types of children improve their reading, including normally developing readers, children at risk for future reading problems, disabled readers, preschoolers, kindergartners, 1st graders, children in 2nd through 6th grades (most of whom were disabled readers), children across various SES levels, and children learning to read in English as well as in other languages.” National Reading Panel Report: An evidenced based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction.” https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf

Phonics

“That direct instruction in alphabetic coding facilitates reading acquisition, is one of the most well established conclusions in behavioural science” Stanovich, progress in understanding reading

Phonics is the alphabetic code of the English language. It is the relationship between speech sounds and how we represent them in writing using letters of the alphabet. Phonics utilises the ability to break down the code of a word into individual phonemes and attach them to graphemes. This is particularly important for children with Dyslexia who will often need a much more intensive approach to the teaching of phonics. All students benefit from an explicit and systematic approach to teaching phonics.

“Current research tells us unequivocally that struggling learners benefit: When the structure of spoken and written language, beginning with phonemes, is represented for them explicitly, sequentially, directly and systematically in the context of a comprehensive reading program” Birsh and Ghassemi 2010

“The evidence is clear that the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics is the most effective way of teaching young children to read, particularly those at risk of having problems with reading.” Rose review, England (2006)

Fluency

Fluency is achieved when children have gained enough mastery and automaticity of phonics and high frequency words that their reading seems effortless. Children who are fluent read out loud with expression. Children who have achieved fluency at an appropriate level for the text do not guess but read with accuracy and sound out unknown words. Often children with Dyslexia don’t have the automaticity of the alphabetic code to achieve accurate reading at a flowing speed and their reading is laboured and choppy as a result. Lack of fluency will require a much greater load on working memory and processing speed and thus hinders comprehension of text.

Fluency can be assisted by the use of decodable readers in the early stages of reading. Decodable readers enable faster recognition of words, which in turn reduces the amount of mental energy required to decode the text. This facilitates the building of automaticity, fluency and confidence.

Students should be given ample opportunities to read out loud. Guessing and the use of multi cueing strategies should be discouraged in early reading acquisition. Children should be encouraged to decode unfamiliar words..”

Vocabulary

Knowing the meaning of words is essential for comprehension. The ability to read a word is essentially meaningless without understanding the word. Early exposure to conversations and being read to is of paramount importance to developing a rich bank of spoken vocabulary.

Achieving early reading fluency is essential to prevent the Mathew effect which will have a significant impact on a students acquisition of reading vocabulary. The Mathew effect is where poor readers are limited to restricted vocabulary in their reading and leads to a widening gap between readers as those who are successful early in reading are able to build a huge store of vocabulary through reading more complex texts.

Audio books and adults reading text can assist children to build vocabulary who are struggling to read at grade level.

It is also important to explicitly teach children vocabulary.

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/teaching-vocabulary

Comprehension

Comprehension is the extraction of meaning from text and is the end point for reading. It requires a set of complex foundational skills as discussed. Any deficit in any of these skills will hinder comprehension. A child who cannot read at a word or sentence level or a child will poor vocabulary will have impaired comprehension. A child without adequate fluency, poor working memory or attentional issues may lose the meaning of the text.

“Teaching reading [comprehension] strategies is worthwhile, but we should bear in mind that knowledge of strategies is only a small part of what makes an effective reader. A good reader also decodes fluently, has a broad vocabulary, and has wide-ranging background knowledge.” Willingham (2006)

Fewer than 1% of children who a good decoders with adequate vocabulary will have comprehension difficulties. (Lyn Stone, Reading for Life, 2019)

The simple view of reading

The ‘Simple View of Reading’, (Gough & Tumner, 1986) describes that reading comprehension is achieved when decoding and linguistic comprehension is achieved. Deficiency in either area will lead to poor comprehension. My daughter is an excellent example of the importance of each aspect. Assessed at age 8 ½ she had a reading comprehension age 1 ½ years below her peers. But testing also revealed a superior level of oral comprehension. My daughter was exposed early to a rich language environment. She enjoyed having complex text read to her much earlier than my other child. In preschool the teachers noted her huge vocabulary. Yet she struggled to learn to read because for children with dyslexia explicit systematic phonics is absolutely essential.

Strands of early literacy development. Reprinted from Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice, by H. S. Scarborough, in S. B. Newman & D. K. Dickinson (Eds.), 2002, Handbook of early literacy research, p. 98,

Classroom instruction best practice

The 5 keys to evidenced based literacy instruction must be taught explicitly, systematically, early and well.

The National Inquiry into Teaching of Literacy in Australia (2005) states; “in sum, the incontrovertible finding from the extensive body of local and international evidence-based literacy research is that for children in the early years of schooling (and subsequently if needed), to be able to link their knowledge of spoken language to their knowledge of written language, they must first master the alphabetic code – the system of grapheme-phoneme correspondences that link written words to their pronunciations. Because these are both foundational and essential skills for the development of competence in reading, writing and spelling, they must be taught explicitly, systematically, early and well.”

Explicitly: “Explicit teaching is where teaching follows a very important direct principal of instruction when helping students to acquire essential skills.” Julie Mavlian 2018

 Systematically: Students are introduced to one concept or skill at a time before moving onto more complex areas. “Explicit instruction is also systematic: there is a carefully planned sequence for instruction, not simply a spur of the moment approach. The plan is constructed in a logical sequence that proceeds in a hierarchy from simple to complex objectives.”Hempenstall (2016) Read About It: Scientific Evidence for Teaching of Reading (p31)

Early: Before school students need to be exposed to a rich language environment in order to develop foundational vocabulary and phonological awareness. When children start school they should be explicitly taught phonological awareness and phonics due to the fact that they form an essential foundation to reading.

Well: Skills should be assessed and monitored and mastery of each skill should be achieved before progression to higher order skills.

We are leaving too many children behind. Illiteracy has devastating consequences. One child struggling to learn to read, who could have been taught, is one child too many. I know because that one child was my child. With the assistance of a tutor I was able to teach her to read. But the emotional scars remain years later. What I would like to see in this debate is less ideology, rhetoric and straw men and more facts and evidence!

Resources and further reading

Examples of High Quality, Evidence-Based Phonics Programs DSF https://www.education.sa.gov.au/sites/g/files/net691/f/examples_of_high_quality_evidence-based_phonics_programs.pdf

Reading for life Lyn Stone

https://www.bookdepository.com/Reading-for-Life-Lyn-Stone/9781138590922

Understood

https://www.understood.org/en/learning-attention-issues/child-learning-disabilities/reading-issues/phonological-awareness-what-it-is-and-how-it-works

Mind the Gap

Politics, literacy and the Socio Economic Gap

Let’s shine a bit of light on the constant attack of phonics being right wing. The chatter on twitter attacking phonics on the basis of it being a “right wing idea” is quite constant and downright ridiculous at times. The teacher unions and teachers in general are certainly left wing. I used to be one of those left wing teachers.

“Either a secretive, corporate-backed “free market” thinktank that advocates privatising/charterising public schools, cutting education funding, and increasing class sizes really really wants kids to read good… Or there’s another agenda here. 🤔 #phonicscheck “

“All of the “research” in education carried out by the conservative think tank Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) is right wing rubbish.”

“It IS odd isn’t it. I have wondered about that too. Not about the veracity of phonics research but the right wing obsession.”

“WHAT is the *phonics* obsession with right-wing people in the teaching of literacy? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”

“Teachers in Australia are so fed up with being harangued by right-wing think tanks (and some politicians) about phonics.”

“I teach reading. Some years back reading became “phonics”. Pushed by linked right-wing “think tanks” and vested interests selling phonics programmes.”

“About to start teaching 27 (!) middle primary kids, who’ve come through whole language classrooms. According to #1in5 maniacs, this means that 5 or 6 won’t be able to read. Or could that just be another dogshit talking point from synthetic #phonics spivs?

Closing socio economic gap”

The “phonics is right wing myth” makes me quite angry for a number of reasons and not because it is just plain wrong.

Let’s get my political leanings out of the way first. This week saw the anniversary of my father’s death. On his coffin we placed a book on the The Australian Labor Party (ALP) to represent his undying love for politics, the ALP and his working class roots. Dad taught me about politics and to have my own strong opinion on matters. He taught us as children that we could express any point of view providing we based it on facts. He valued education and his generation was the first in the family to attend University. My grandfather made boots in a factory. As a big leftie he taught me to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves thus leading me into a path of volunteer advocacy. I joined the board of SPELD NSW in the wake of his death last year determined that I would continue his legacy.

I met my husband at a BBQ after we had been handing out How to vote leaflets for the ALP. My father in law died hammering in a ALP voting sign as an ALP elected member of the local council. He stood for federal parliament at one point as the ALP candidate. Many high up representatives of the ALP attended his funeral.

So call me right wing at your peril.

The accusation that the right wing must be interested in phonics due to financial interests needs to be examined for validity. This argument is absolutely ridiculous when you think about the enormous sums of money that are already being spent on PM readers, Reading Recovery, L3 and other commercial whole language and “balanced literacy’ programs and resources. It is also well established that excellent literacy instruction early reduces the the need for intervention and the amount of intervention thus saving money in the long term. Companies like Fountas and Pinnell have a lot to lose if schools move towards the use of phonics resources.

There are certainly many excellent commercial phonics programs available for teachers to use. But the reality is that any program is only as good as the expertise of the teacher implementing the program. I would like to see more teacher training in systematic, explicit systematic phonics so programs become less needed. Personally everything I do in the area of phonics is by a volunteer basis. I have no commercial interests in anything!

Personally I don’t care if The Five from Five project gets their funding from a right wing think tank. My father always respected anyone’s views and actions from any side of politics if it was the right thing to do. He taught me never to blindly follow anything or anyone unless the research and facts led me there independently. It’s a little offensive and certainly defamatory to accuse Jennifer Buckingham of twisting facts due to “financial interests”.

The current politics in Australia is beginning to take a bipartisan approach to phonics to some extent. The Liberal government has pushed for a phonics check nationally. This started somewhat with Christopher Pyne who at the time of being education minister listened intently to Dyslexia groups in Australia due to a family history of Dyslexia including his twin children. Implementation of the Phonics Check in South Australia was a commitment of the Liberal State government but it has bipartisan support with the Labor party having also being committed to introducing the check if they were elected. Most political parties are starting to listen to expert advice and the advocacy of Dyslexia groups.

I find it extremely odd that phonics and explicit teaching is seen as a right wing ideology as the evidence shows that excellent literacy instruction in early years goes a long way to closing the socio economic gap.

“Findings from the best-evidence synthesis of strategies for struggling readers living in poverty – What works for struggling readers? – identify that:

 Structured phonics-based approaches, in general, work better than non- phonics approaches.

 One-to-one tutoring by qualified teachers is very effective for improving literacy outcomes, but this is an expensive strategy. Tutoring by teaching assistants and volunteers can produce positive outcomes if they are well trained and use structured phonics materials.

 Intervening immediately is most effective for primary reading, where preventative whole-class strategies are adopted first, followed by tutoring for the small number of pupils who still need it.

https://www.york.ac.uk/media/iee/documents/Closing%20the%20Gap.pdf

So where does Australia stand in terms of literacy if the status quo continues? “In the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) Australia performed 12th in reading (down from 10th). There is a steady decline in the results since 2000, both in terms of overly simple international comparisons and absolute mean scores.” “the narrative of steady decline on PISA and TIMSS results continues, while educational inequality is on the rise.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-07/pisa-australia-ranks-poorly-but-what-can-we-learn/8097546

Current Australian reading policy has seen an improvement in average reading scores in the PIRLS but at the expense of the very long tail. “Australia still has the second-largest proportion of children below the international intermediate benchmark for reading among English-speaking countries.” http://theconversation.com/international-study-shows-many-australian-children-are-still-struggling-with-reading-88646 For a full analysis of the PIRLS results see the article.

The UK has one of the highest Socio Economic Gaps of any OECD country and has a policy of synthetic phonics introduced by a right wing government. In contrast with Australia, England has closed the literacy gap achieving the best PIRLS results in a generation. This was the first PIRLS cohort to go through the Phonics check where the mandated synthetic phonics policy was more strongly implemented. England managed to drag up its long tail in literacy. “The socio-economic gap is relatively high in England, but many students also overcome disadvantage.” The average reading score of students in England was significantly higher than in PIRLS 2006 and 2011, and higher than the 2011 majority of other countries. The improvements were mainly among boys and lower-performing students.” https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/2530/ilsa02.pdf

“PIRLS 2016 marks the first cycle where it is possible to evaluate how pupils’ performance in the Year 1 phonics check, introduced in 2012, is associated with performance in PIRLS. The correlation between performance on the two tests is 0.52, indicating a moderate, statistically significant relationship; the group of pupils achieving full-marks in the Year 1 phonics check also have the highest average score in PIRLS 2016.

In PIRLS 2016, the gap between high and low-performers is still larger than in many other countries, but has been substantially reduced from previous PIRLS cycles. This has mainly been driven by large improvements in the performance of lower-performing pupils, as the 10th percentile score has increased by 15-points from 2011, whereas the 90th percentile score has only improved by 3-points from 2011.” https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/664562/PIRLS_2016_National_Report_for_England-_BRANDED.pdf

By spreading the myth that literacy is all about the influences of home environment we are undervaluing the ability of teachers to close the gap that children often bring with them to school. Teachers should set the highest standards and expectations of their pupils. Yes it is well established that some children are behind the day they walk into a classroom but that just means good evidenced based instruction is even more important.

“Research shows that pupils from low socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to attend pre-school or to have a home environment incorporating literacy and language activities than their less disadvantaged peers. As a result, children from low socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to enter school with the social and academic skills needed to set them up for success.” “The authors found that between one- and two-thirds of the variance between schools in terms of disadvantaged pupils’ achievement can be explained by school-level characteristics, suggesting that intake and circumstance are influential but do not totally determine outcomes.” http://www.beib.org.uk/category/achievement-gap/page/2/

The problems of low socio-economic gap is certainly multifaceted and has no easy solution. My friend used to teach at a school where there were so many issues it broke her heart. It was a school that used to make it onto the news on occasion for all the wrong reasons. In her classes the majority of kids had never seen a book before. She had refugees who had lost their parents in the Christmas Island boat tragedy. She had parents who were in jail, drug addicts and completely dysfunctional. Kids threw chairs across the room and beat each other with cricket bats.

She ensured those kids had the best possible education that they could receive with often little home support. She cared for them, nurtured them and read them lots of books. She also always had the highest expectations of them in terms of behaviour and achievement. She also taught them systematically and explicitly phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocabulary and fluency. She gave them a chance. I taught in a disadvantaged high school. Already life was mapped out for them. Stints in jail already, illiteracy and a continuing cycle of poverty.

Ensuring best practice in the classroom is just one aspect of many to ensure all children are given the best start in education. We need to leave ideology and political leanings at the door and examine the evidence. The science of reading is well established. Children of low socio economic status need good literacy because it may very well be the only chance they have of escaping the cycle of poverty.

Time to fly

The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you have come!

This blog is a bit of reflection on how far my daughter has come. I used to be afraid of the future. She struggled so much I couldn’t look forward to where she would be in the years ahead. But now I see how far she has travelled and how far she can go. I can see her strengths fighting to be seen and I can see her coming out of her cocoon and spreading her wings. My daughter still has so many challenges in front of her and there are still many hurdles to her success but I have hope. I can see the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Just a glimmer of it.

My daughter has working memory and processing speed issues, severe social and general anxiety, Moderate Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and Dyscalculia. At the beginning of year 3 when she was assessed she was already years behind and had spent 6 months at a psychologist for her anxiety. By then school was such a dark place for her she would vomit, scream and cry before and after school. She had significant self esteem issues and was a good example of learned helplessness. She had given up. She couldn’t spell anything and reading was something she hated and feared. She would barely speak to teachers or strangers.

She has now just finished a year of high school. It has been a challenge but she has surpassed my expectations in every aspect. My goal was just to manage to hand things in, cope with the organisational aspects, make a few friends and control her anxiety. She had an extra challenge of the death of her grandfather early in Term 1 when she was still finding her feet.

She has impressed teachers with her creative thinking, her hard work ethic, her speeches and her writing. She has achieved grades higher than we could have imagined often getting A’s and B’s for assessments. Even in examinations she has often gone well despite all her difficulties. I’m not afraid of this years school report. I know it will be positive. The high school teachers almost universally (there are always a few) can see how much she tries and appreciate her strengths. Her half yearly report was a positive experience for her. I’ve already had a phone call from the year coordinator congratulating her on a wonderful year. She has exceeded everyone’s expectations. The learning support teacher mentioned how pleased he has been to see her personality come out and how confident she has become.

She has the most wonderful friends who appreciate her quirks, her strengths and support her when she is struggling. They have given her the confidence to be her unique self. They have helped turn on the light inside of her. They have turned up to see her drama performances, hugged her when her grandfather died and laughed with her when she has made mistakes. For the first time she feels like she belongs. For a teen belonging is what it is all about.

My daughter now reads for pleasure and keeps on her bookshelf every book she has read like a trophy. She spends her afternoons locked in her room writing stories. All those stories locked in her head are now finding their voice on a page. On the weekend she enthusiastically completed her English homework. A narrative with symbolism written with creativity and passion. Her creative writing is better than anything I could ever do and always amazes me. She wrote a poem for her grandfather’s funeral that made everyone cry.

On Saturday my daughter stood a metre from a group of strangers and her best friend and recited a Shakespeare sonnet without seeing it. She was nervous and had to wait through a dozen other kids for her turn. My husband lent over and said “How is she going to do it?”. All the other kids were nervous too. She is the youngest in her High School NIDA class. But she stood up and read it. Any mistakes she covered and to me it sounded perfect. She also performed in a pair a long scene from Shakespeare. This is a child who in year 3 could not read or talk in front of anyone.

A Dyslexic kid with social anxiety reading Shakespeare in front of an audience is an amazing achievement. It is a testament to what can be achieved with the right intervention and support. It has certainly not been easy and I’m exhausted and emotional writing this. But I’m so proud of how hard she has worked to get to this point. There have been many setbacks. Her anxiety and learned helplessness hold her back more than her learning difficulties do at times. This year there have been many achievements. There have been far more tears of joy than sadness. There have been so many moments of wow this year that I can now see the path ahead filled with hope.

It is so important to have the highest expectations of our kids. They will do amazing things. They will find their strengths. My daughter has found her feet and now she will fly!

Recovering from Reading Recovery

I read about the new Reading Recovery research with great skepticism. I have learnt a great deal in the last 5 years since my daughter struggled to learn to read. I have read literacy research until I wore my eyes out and gone to numerous professional developments. Most of all I have learnt from my daughter’s amazing specialist literacy tutor. I have’t been to one professional development where the strategies being taught were ones already being used by our tutor. She was our saviour when Reading Recovery failed spectacularly.

Being our first child and an ex high school teacher I trusted the professional advice of the primary teachers even though alarm bells rang early and things didn’t really make sense. The signs were all there. She struggled to learn the 200 sight words she was suppose to memorise. She flung the PM readers across the room. In my mind I questioned instinctively the value of learning sight words when she didn’t even know how to sound out base sounds. I questioned the value of repetitive and boring PM readers.

I was relieved a little when she was placed in a special reading group. The Reading Recovery teacher was lovely and encouraged her a gave her lots of attention. In first class her reading seemed to make some progress. So I set aside the parental worry at the back of my mind. I regret to this day I did not act sooner.

She started Year 2 fresh from a year of Reading Recovery on a respectful level 20 of PM readers. But unfortunately running records are not the best indicator of an early readers ability to read. A smart child like my daughter had an awesome ability to guess. Reading recovery had taught her this was acceptable. A few mistakes were even let through…”Close enough is good enough!” At home my daughter could finish a sentence without even turning a page and often be correct. This is most certainly NOT a good strategy. This is not reading. It took us years to undo guessing.

We started year 2 with an air of positivity. The year 2 teacher promised me that her reading wasn’t that bad. My daughter, having greater insight than the rest of us, was already displaying some level of school anxiety and avoidance. She knew she couldn’t read. She was a master of camouflage. Mid way through year 2 concerns escalated and anxiety soared. Reading became more difficult. Reliance on multi-cueing strategies taught in reading recovery quickly showed their deficiencies. Her reading totally stalled. Teachers told me “we don’t understand she seems really bright.”

In Year 2 under new NSW government funding we had the arrival of another of my daughter’s saviours. A new learning support teacher who had training in explicit and systematic phonics instruction. She tested her phonics. She could not even sound out the entire alphabet let alone decode words. The school counsellor undertook psychometric tests which showed she was above average in verbal comprehension but had difficulties in processing speed and working memory.

I started googling what it all meant and this lead me down a path to recovery for my daughter. Her anxiety had escalated so much that I delayed assessment or tutoring because it would have failed. She spent 6 months seeing a psychologist. She was so afraid of school and reading by then that we had vomiting, sickness and frequent tears. I would sit down every afternoon and have a cup of tea and calm myself as I never knew what she would be like when I picked her up from school. I became afraid of the school bell too!

I started as best I could to explicitly and systematically teach her phonics after school. She was so broken and so anxious that often even with me she would break down and cry. The Nessy learning program gave her back some of her confidence but my skills at that time teaching phonics were inadequate. Teaching reading requires a skilled teacher. She ended the school year on PM level 22. A year of virtually no progress in reading.

At the beginning of year 3 she started with her specialist literacy tutor the day before she undertook an assessment for Dyslexia. Her assessment showed at age 8 ½ she had a reading age of 7 and a spelling age of less than 5. I reinforced skills at home daily guided by the tutor which meant progress in reading was fairly rapid considering we pretty much started from zero. We reinforced phonics learnt using decodable readers which she enjoyed immensely. Suddenly she was actually reading and could decipher the squiggles on a page. The learned helplessness and fear of books took far longer to overcome.

On a positive note my daughter’s school now teaches synthetic phonics from day 1 of kindergarten. The Learning Support teacher introduced Multilit as an intervention which is evidenced based and follows the scientific criteria of a reading intervention program.

Science has repeatedly shown what is needed in early reading instruction. We also have a great understanding of what characteristics a good reading intervention should include. Reading Recovery does not meet the criteria of a good intervention program.

Phonemic awareness is the ability identify the sounds in spoken words. It is like phonics with a blindfold on. Good remediation for reading difficulties will include an assessment of phonemic awareness and appropriate intervention. “Phoneme awareness instruction, when linked to systematic decoding and spelling instruction, is a key to preventing reading failure in children who come to school without these prerequisite skills.” Moats (2010)

Phonics is the alphabetic code of the English language. It is the relationship between speech sounds and how we represent them in writing using letters of the alphabet. Phonics should be taught systematically and explicitly to automaticity and mastery. This is particularly important for children with Dyslexia who will often need a much more intensive approach to the teaching of phonics. “Current research tells us unequivocally that struggling learners benefit: When the structure of spoken and written language, beginning with phonemes, is represented for them explicitly, sequentially, directly and systematically in the context of a comprehensive reading program” Birsh and Ghassemi 2010

Fluency is achieved when children have gained enough mastery and automaticity of phonics and high frequency words that their reading seems effortless. When children have fluency issues they may fail to comprehend the text and not enjoy reading. Decodable readers, are matched to the phonemes they have been taught, enabling faster recognition of words, which in turn reduces the amount of mental energy required to decode the text. This facilitates the building of automaticity and fluency. struggling readers.”

Reading vocabulary is children’s bank of known words that they can use in writing or reading. Knowing the meaning of words is essential for comprehension. The ability to read a word is essentially meaningless without understanding the word. Early exposure to conversations with adults and being read to is of paramount importance to developing a rich bank of spoken vocabulary.

Comprehension is the extraction of meaning from text and is the end point for reading. It requires a set of complex foundational skills as discussed. Any deficit in any of these skills will hinder comprehension. A child who cannot read at a word or sentence level or a child will poor vocabulary will have impaired comprehension. A child without adequate fluency, poor working memory or attentional issues may lose the meaning of the text.

Reading recovery is based on the principles of “Balanced Literacy” and sprinkles in phonics in context. It is not an explicit or systematic approach to the teaching of phonological awareness. Science has shown repeatedly that a deficit in phonics and/or phonemic awareness (which make up phonological awareness) are the biggest predictor of reading failure.

Research on Reading Recovery has certainly been mixed and there has been much criticism of the research undertaken by Reading Recovery. This is what the experts have to say; “In this open letter, more than 30 international reading researchers expressed concerns about the continued use of Reading Recovery. These experts urged policy makers, educational leaders, researchers, and federal research organizations to acknowledge the weaknesses of Reading Recovery. They concluded, “Reading Recovery leaves too many students behind.”

“While research distributed by the developers of Reading Recovery indicates a positive effect of the program, analyses by independent researchers have found serious problems with these conclusions. Studies conducted by researchers associated with Reading Recovery typically exclude 25-40% of the poorest performing students from the data analysis.”

“The lack of efficacy of Reading Recovery with the poorest readers is not surprising given the research base that highlights the importance of explicit teaching of phonics for this group. Reading Recovery teaches phonics, but the instruction is not sufficiently explicit. A common finding in research on Reading Recovery is that those students who do not respond are weak in phonological awareness (Snow et al., 1998; Tunmer & Chapman, in press b).”

“Reading Recovery has not met the needs of these lowest performing students. Most significantly, its excessive costs can make it more difficult for a school to provide help for all students in need, especially those who are behind in the upper grades.”

https://www.wrightslaw.com/info/read.rr.ltr.experts.htm

In 2016 NSW education dumped Reading Recovery’s $55 million a year specific funding after they commissioned a 2015 research review which found it had limited efficacy, especially considering its huge cost. The report concluded “While the current findings reveal short-term positive effects of RR on reading outcomes for the lowest performing students, they do not support the effectiveness of the intervention on other aspects of literacy achievement or the longer-term sustainability through the early years of school. One possible explanation that is asserted strongly by RR critics is that RR does not provide sufficient tuition in phonics and phonemic awareness to effectively remediate literacy performance among struggling readers (Center et al. 1995; Chapman & Tunmer 2011; Greaney 2011; Moats 2007; Reynolds & Wheldall 2007; Tunmer & Chapman 2003; Tunmer et al. 2013). Center et al. (1995) argue that “while Reading Recovery stresses the importance of using all sources of information available to access meaningful text, it may not provide enough systematic instruction in the metalinguistic skills of phonemic awareness, phonological recoding, and syntactic awareness for students to acquire these processes” (p. 244). The lengthy examination of the research is certainly worth a read here. https://www.cese.nsw.gov.au/images/stories/PDF/Reading_recovery_evaluation_FA_AA.pdf

I think the biggest indicator of the true nature of Reading Recovery is to look at the spectacular failure of New Zealand literacy in recent years, the home of reading Recovery, where the principles on which it is founded dominate the teaching of reading. New Zealand literacy and Reading Recovery are based on a constructivist approach to literacy teaching encouraging a multi-cues approach to the teaching of reading. Phonics takes a backseat and is taught (if at all) in context and not explicitly or systematically. A detailed analysis of the failure of Reading Recovery and the teaching of reading in New Zealand is given in this 2013 article in the Learning Difficulties Australia Bulletin. https://www.ldaustralia.org/BULLETIN_NOV13-RR.pdf.

Since this article was written in 2013 New Zealand has continued to be a poor performer in reading despite millions being poured into improving literacy. New Zealand according to the latest PIRLS result in 2016 is now ranked 33, making it the poorest performing country in the English-language world. In 1970 they were ranked first. Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery and the constructivist approach to literacy has been the dominant ideology in New Zealand for decades seeing a steady decline in literacy.

This article by literacy and teaching training experts at Massey University, New Zealand examines the failure of New Zealand literacy. Massey University has also undertaken research into Reading Recovery. “The problem with literacy outcomes doesn’t lie with teachers, but with teaching. As a country, we continue to rely on an approach to literacy instruction that was discredited by scientific research over 30 years ago. Our teachers have been trained and provided with teaching resources that are out of step with contemporary research, and with literacy teaching practices in other countries. Britain, for example, has made significant improvements in literacy learning outcomes since the introduction of systematic phonics instruction towards the first decade of this century.“

“Reading Recovery was introduced in the 1980s to lower the number of children experiencing literacy learning difficulties. This programme has not achieved this major goal. The Reading Recovery website claims that the programme acts as an insurance against reading failure. This is not true, as successive PIRLS results have shown since 2001.” http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/about-massey/news/article.cfm?mnarticle_uuid=FFBE6235-9CB5-4742-97C0-E1AA4ED407B5

Certainly Reading Recovery does give a boost to those children whose failure is due to lack of exposure to a rich language environment. Hattie has shown any intervention or teaching strategy is certainly going to have an affect more than no intervention. This is particularly true for children who may have come from a neglected environment. A true examination of Reading Recovery would be to compare it to an explicit and systematic phonics intervention program.

“Thanks to new scientific research—plus a long- awaited scientific and political consensus around this research—the knowledge exists to teach all but a handful of severely disabled children to read well” Louisa Moats https://www.ldaustralia.org/client/documents/Teaching%20Reading%20is%20Rocket%20Science%20-%20Moats.pdf

Reading Recovery fails too many children. As admin of Dyslexia Support Australia we get many parent members who join our group bemused at the failure of their children fresh out of Reading Recovery. Reading Recovery is an expensive program that has not adapted to research in the last 30 years that shows what struggling learners need for reading success. Reading Recovery wastes valuable intervention dollars and time.We know how important early and appropriate intensive intervention is for struggling readers. We can do much, much better than Reading Recovery.

Reading to children is not enough!

“If every parent, or carer …read aloud a minimum of three stories a day to children in their care, we could eliminate illiteracy within one generation.”

This is one of Mem Fox’s favourite bylines. Every time she is interviewed she likes to declare how she is going to solve illiteracy. Unfortunately she is wrong!

The first time I saw this quote was on a poster in our school library. My daughter had just been diagnosed with Dyslexia. I was already filled with enough parental guilt for not intervening in her schooling earlier. I really didn’t at that point to need any more guilt. It made me so sad and so angry. For a few years I had been asking teachers questions. They would answer …”she seems so bright!” “We don’t know why!” “Don’t worry she will get it.” “Do you read to her?”

Now I know better. I know I did do all the right things to give my daughter the best chance to read. But my daughter has Dyslexia and she did not receive the instruction she needed in school to teach her to read. I know that reading to your child is foundational to learning to read. But I also know that for most children it is not enough and they need to be taught explicitly how to read.

Yes I did read to my daughter more than any parent I know. She was my first child. I left my job as a teacher and spent all my energy playing with my child, talking to my child, singing to my child and reading to her.

From the moment she was born we read to her. We knew her favourite books off by heart. I remember her screaming in the car once so from the front I recited the entire “Each Peach Pear Plum” which was a definite favourite. Books were always how we settled her before every sleep, calmed her when upset and comforted when she was ill.

I remember being part of a government survey when she was a toddler and one question asked whether I read to my daughter 10 minutes a day. I laughed. The lady must have thought I was crazy as I was thinking it was more like hours. It was the thing she wanted to do most. Even before she could walk she would crawl over and grab books out of her book box for us to read. She never seemed to have enough.

I thought that once she learnt to walk she would not want to be read to so much. Instead she would toddle behind me demanding to be read to! One of her first sentences etched in my mind was “Read dis book yep!” All her grandparents, Aunties and Uncles read to her enthusiastically too. They include doctors, teachers a lawyer and even an author.

We owned about 6 or more Mem Fox books. I could recite to you “Time for bed” even now a decade after I read it to my child over and over every night before bed. My husband’s favourite was “Where is the green sheep?” He used to make up silly names for all the characters and would ask my daughter to point out the “Carmen Miranda sheep” and the “Ned Kelly sheep”.

Before school she spent 2 1/2 years at the local preschool. The year before school she had the most amazing preschool teacher 3 days a week who used to teach kindergarten. She read books to the children, did amazing activities, sang songs, played with rhymes.

So my daughter went to school primed to learn to read. She couldn’t have had a better foundation of oral language. In fact her preschool teachers commented about how good her vocabulary was. In her assessments later, when we were looking for answers, she was shown to have verbal comprehension and vocabulary well above average. She loved a complex story early.

In kindergarten we started reading her Harry Potter. Sometimes she’d be wriggling and I would accuse her of not listening. She would then recite to me the last line or tell me what the story line was for the last 10 minutes. At the same age her sister was still enjoying picture books being read to her.

So when she didn’t learn to read we were shocked. She so looked forward to learning to read books because she had always loved books so much. She struggled, she cried and threw predictive readers across the room. She began to hate and fear school. Eventually in year 3 we found out she had Dyslexia and at the age 8 1/2 she had a spelling age of less than 5 and a reading age of 7. After we employed a structured literacy tutor and she spent many hours with me at home reinforcing explicit phonics lessons she learnt to read. But that’s another story.

I know Mem Fox is a passionate advocate of whole language. A methodology of teaching that has been proven time and time again to be not an effective strategy to teach children to read. Her views are from a position of power but are based on significant ignorance. With power and influence comes a great responsibility because the myths you are spreading are doing damage. Kids are being left behind and families are being blamed for their children’s failure.

My understanding is not only supported by research evidence but by the thousands of parent stories I have heard in Dyslexia Support Australia. Parents over and over again tell how they were blamed for their child struggling to learn to read. They discuss in great detail how they always read to their child from day one, yet they did not learn to read. We have teachers in our support group who join when their own child struggles to learn to read. We have parents with multiple children but only one struggled.

I’m not discounting the importance of reading to children in the early development of oral language. It is an essential foundation for later reading acquisition. But well trained teachers can bridge the gap that some children bring to school with them. My child had no oral language gap. My child had no disadvantage other than a disability that could have been overcome without the heartbreak through early evidenced based intervention. Reading 3 books a day to children will not eradicate illiteracy. Training our teachers in systematic and explicit phonics instruction, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension will.

The cutie in the photos is my daughter being read to!