More to reading

AFTER becoming an embarrassment in the 1960s and ’70s, the term dyslexia fell from favour as the cause of the epidemic of reading failure that began in those years. The experts who had taken over infant education trotted out different terms — socio-economic status, learning difficulties and so on. But recently, TV has carried a message for us “to recognise the one in 10 who suffer the frustration of (wait for it) dyslexia”. We have a new set of experts promoting the need for a phonic base for teaching reading. They have reintroduced dyslexia. I have no doubt a new set of primers and workbooks is being written as we speak. There’s an old saying, “Experto credite”, which translates to “trust the ones who have done it”.

I’m afraid after 60 years of falling standards, there are few of us left who were taught properly and went on to teach large classes successfully without enlisting parental help. I know I taught from the best set of primers because they were written by teachers with years of successful experience. Those teachers passed on to my generation the tricks of the trade as it were. But, of course, today’s experts have coined the term “synthetic phonics” to promote their advice.

How did I succeed without knowing the jargon? The process of transferring spoken words to paper then getting them back off the page hasn’t changed. With proper help, every average child should succeed. “The more things change, the more things stay the same” is true of learning to read. For 60 years we have listened to the wrong people. There’s more to teaching reading than simply using phonic knowledge to decode words. J.A.M. (just ask me). — Elizabeth Clarke, Taroona