| Phonics is back. The year-long
inquiry into the teaching of reading by Parliamentīs science and education
committee has recomended better phonics instruction in primary schools. This
is great news for parents of the one in three New Zealand children who are
struggling readers. It is also good news for everyone else because research
shows that even good readers can read and spell better with phonics under
their belts.
Phonics is not a teaching method. It is a skill - the
skill of matching letters to voice sounds and vice versa. It is an extremely
important skill because 85 - 90 per cent of English words are spelt as they
sound. But it is a skill that has not been taught systematically in our
schools for at least three decades.
The fashion since then has been the so-called whole
language or balanced literacy approach, in which children are expected to
learn naturally being taught the alphabet and smothered in bright colourful
story books. Some letter sounds are taught in an ad hoc, peacemeal way, but
it is a far cry from the systematic phonics instruction called for by the
committee.
Fact : the last New
Zealand children to top an international literacy survey were those who
learned to read in the early 1960`s.
Fact : adults who learned
to read after 1970 did less well in the 1997 Adult Literacy Survey than
those who learned to read in the preceding two decades.
Fact : since 1970, the gap
between good and bad readers in New Zealand has widened.
Poor literacy is usually attributed to cultural and
language barriers, poor parenting, too much television, lack of computers
etc. Of course, these factors do play a role - but only where the
teaching is not good enough to outweigh their effects. Hundreds of millions
of dollars have been poured futiley, year after year, into Reading Recovery,
computers - in - schools, parents as first teachers, and so on. Everything
has been tried except the bleeding obvious; improving the teaching.
Now the select committee has finally bitten the bullet and
said what we all needed to hear - our teachers simply donīt know how to
effectively teach the most fundamental literacy skill, phonics.
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It is a very bitter pill. Not so
long ago New Zealand educators were being lauded as visionaries as they
hawked their whole language snake oil - and Reading Recovery clean-up pack -
around the world. It took about a decade for the customers to wise up - as
their test scores plummeted. In the mid- 1990`s. England and a host of
American States, most notably California and Texas, dropped whole language
and embraced systematic phonics. Theit literacy levels have been rising ever
since.
But here in New Zealand, the whole language industry steam
- rolled on under a different name - balanced literacy - protected by a
conspiracy of silence that spiralled right to the top. With one voice, the
ministry, the Education Review Office, the Literacy Task Force, and the
Colleges of Education simply pooh - poohed the evidence that kids need
phonics first and foremost. Without the enbarrassment of yearly national
testing to debunk them, they airily dismissed the concerns of parents,
dissenting teachers, and researchers.
Only a few hardy souls stood up to the juggernaut :
teachers like Doris Ferry, Janet Bradford and Mary Ashby-Green, whose pupils
bloomed under systematic phonics; and researchers like Tom Nicholson, Bill
Tumner, and James Chapman, who kept plugging away at the research evidence.
Now, the select committee has vindicated their persistence.
But hold the champagne. Phonics wil only rescue New
Zealandīs readers and spellers if it is taught systematically to everyone -
and there is the rub. Many teachers, even those who think they already teach
phonics, have no idea what a systematic phonics programme entails. It
actually means teaching the 42 phonemes (speach sounds) of the English
language, and the 100 or so main ways of spelling them. Most teachers
havenīt a clue what those sounds and spelling patterns are, or how to teach
them.
But that is not all. There are several ways to teach
phonics. Some excellent and some abysmal. Most fall into one of two
categories - systematic or analytic phonics. In systematic phonics, the
children are taught the individual sounds, how to spell them, and how to
combine them to form words. Research has found this word-building approach
to be the most effective way to teach phonics. Teachers who use the Jolly
Phonics programme find the same thing.
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In contrast, the analytic
approach preferred by most whole language teachers introduces children to
whole words first (either in stories or rhyming word families) and then
tries to get them to learn the sound-letter combinations within the words.
Research has found that analytic phonics is less sy<stematic, more
confusing, and less effective for beginner readers.
So choosing the right sort of phonics programme is vital.
Our schools donīt just need phonics - they need systematic sythetic phonics.
The committee has recommended this for low decile schools but has been less
prescriptive fpr other schools. There is also an impression that only the
poor readers really need phonics. Therein lies the danger.
Most school principals are still struggling to overcome
long years of anti-phonics brainwashing. Many think that the smattering of
letter sounds they already teach is sufficient. Most have no idea of the
options available, the reasearch findings, and the improvements taht their
students could make if everyone were taught phonics systematically.
Many principals, like Belfastīs (Rep. Ireland) Peter
Simpson, quoted in The Press, think standard programmes do not work and
pursue the impossible dream of individually tailored instruction. College of
Education lectureres like Faye Parkhill, say phonics is not the panacea and
warn against putting all children through some systematic of learning. Such
comments are precisely opposite to what the research shows. Phonics is most
successful when taught systematically to small classes or groups.
The Ministry of Educationīs first task now should be to
draw up some guidelines and training programmes. But there lies another
problem - the scorched earth policies of past decades have left so few good
phonics advisers to turn to.
Rowan Taylor is a founder of the
recently established Phonics First Charitable Trust and is working on a
parentsīguide teaching phonics.
Junior English 2002 |
