Reading Wars
Greater use of structured literacy in primary schools is aimed at improving worsening reading statistics, but critics fear what could be lost in a straitjacketed lurch back to basics.
By Sally Blundell
It was the “s” that did it. Should it face right? Or left? And then that pesky “k”, sounded out in some words, then inexplicably silent in others. Eastern Hutt School provided the cues, through published readers, read-aloud stories, and single words given to us to take home in a round Mackintosh’s toffee tin, but that damn “s” was always looking backwards over its shoulder.
Learning to read is complex, full of tripwires, archaic rules, silent letters and exceptions. Today, some 50,000 five-year-olds around the country are figuring out the direction of an “s”, the “c” sound in “cat”, the mysteries of capital letters, the difference between “rag” and “rang”.
Now, overshadowing these faltering attempts even further, is a loudly publicised and very politicised warning about the so-called “reading wars”.
On the one side, the “whole language” camp, based on the theory that, immersed in text- and image-rich pages of “real” books, most children will come to recognise words, often using a “three cueing” approach that draws on context, sentence structure and letters to identify words.
On the other side, the “Structured Literacy” camp (the capitalised term has been trademarked by the International Dyslexia Association), advocating a strictly controlled focus on phonics to help young readers master phonemes, the smallest units of sound in the English language, and letters through a designated programme of required knowledge (known as scope) and order (sequence), all laid out in sequential phonics-based “decodable books”.
In a nutshell, with whole language, you begin with language to get to letters; in a structured-literacy approach, you begin with letters, or even sounds, to get to language.
With a few bumps and swerves on the way, New Zealand has taken a largely “balanced literacy” approach, focusing on comprehending meaning of a whole text and understanding the alphabetic code. “You read whole stories, you do your letter work,” explains Rebecca Jesson, an associate professor working in literacy education at the University of Auckland. “The big-issue focus has always been on higher-order thinking, reading comprehension, writing and critical thinking you will need in high school.”
Lurching from one extreme to another, she says, “is disruptive for schools. It’s focusing on political gain and point scoring and that is not fair on children”.
We are in mid-lurch. Beginning from Term 1 next year, all primary school teachers will be expected to implement a structured-literacy programme. This will be backed by $67 million to cover the cost of resources, professional development, phonic checks and “additional support for children who need it” (funding for Reading Recovery, a short term intervention programme for six-year-olds long associated with the whole-language approach, will be axed).
The language- and image-rich texts of the Ministry of Education’s Ready to Read series will be kept, alongside its Phonic Plus series used to support structured literacy, but these will be complemented by a range of commercially available decodable texts and a curriculum “refresh”.