Read all about it: literacy is vital
Literacy has to be a community-wide investment in social, cultural health
New academic research from the University of Alberta and McGill University has found — wait for it — that if you actually take the time to teach children to learn to read, they learn to read. Shocking, isn’t it?
I’m sorry. That sounds a bit snarky.
And I’m not making fun of the researchers. Their findings are critically important. I’m just frustrated that we’re still having to “prove” and explain this pretty basic fact in late 2017.
This new research project, as detailed by my colleague Janet French in Monday’s edition of the Edmonton Journal, wasn’t radical. The University of Alberta’s part of the study followed 290 first-grade students from 11 different Edmonton public schools. All 290 of the kids were having trouble learning to read. As part of the study, the struggling readers met three times a week in small group sessions with reading specialists, who helped them with strategies to solve their specific, individual literacy challenges.
At the end of two years, 283 of the 290 students had caught up with their classmates, and were not considered to be “at risk” anymore.
Principals were so enthusiastic about the program that 15 Edmonton schools have now adopted the techniques.
This, I suppose, is the part where I should be cheering.
But honestly, as I read French’s story, I wanted to punch my fist through my computer screen.
There is, she noted, no requirement at the U of A faculty of education for future teachers to study problem-specific literacy techniques. Nor does Edmonton Public Schools require specific literacy screening of all students.
Yet, every few years, we seem to reinvent this wheel. We come up with educational buzz terms like “balanced literacy” and “reading recovery” and “success by six.” We vow that, this time, we’ll really, really teach young students to read. And still, children and their teachers are struggling without the support and resources to get this vital job done.
Study after study demonstrates that if children get one-on-one coaching from people who really know how to teach reading, they learn to read. The fundamental ability to decode letters and words is the foundation of every academic step forward, and of every future economic and cultural opportunity.
In a surprising way, technology has made our culture more textdriven than ever. Once, pundits worried telephones and television might make the written word obsolete. Instead, millennials and teens are the most text dependent, text-savvy generation, relying on the written word as the basis of their social interaction and their online entertainment. As for the jobs of the future? In a digital economy, fluent literacy will be the basic threshold for entry.
But it’s not enough to say universities should do more to teach teachers to teach readers. It’s not enough to say our schools should devote more time to literacy.
HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
By the time little ones show up to kindergarten, they’re already divided into literacy haves and have-nots. Some have come from households where they’ve been read to since infancy, where stories and books have been part of their lives for years. Others arrive having never owned or even held a book. And some, of course, arrive knowing little or no English.
I didn’t understand how absolute the gulf was until, one day, years ago, when I visited a high-needs school in northeast Edmonton to read to a Grade 2 class. I happened to run across a box of surplus promotional children’s books in a Journal storeroom. So I liberated a few and brought enough to give each student a little paperback.
A week later, the teacher called me, in tears.
Every student, exactly a week after my visit, had brought the books back to school. The kids had just assumed that they had to return them, as they did to the library. The teacher told me not one of those students had ever owned a book before.
Full-day kindergarten can help children catch up. But we need more programs, too, such as those offered by the Edmonton Public Library, Alberta Health Services and the Centre for Family Literacy that connect children with books and with words, right from the cradle. That means helping those parents who may struggle to read themselves, to learn along with their children.
Literacy isn’t something that we can just leave to schools to teach and universities to study. It has to be a community-wide investment in our social, cultural and economic health.
It’s as basic as A, B, C. And that’s precisely where we have to start.