Sounding out issues with youth literacy rates
CIVIS is alarmed by the fall in New Zealand’s reading standards. International testing results have shown a slide to mediocracy and below. Once we were number one.
It is little wonder the advance of structured reading is welcome. In a case of back to the future, more and more schools have been swapping ‘‘balanced literacy’’ for ‘‘structured literacy’’.
Civis knows of a large primary school that flipped its programmes three years ago and its teachers are enthusiastic about the outcome. Children are learning to read earlier and with more pleasure. They enjoy the process of decoding the sounds and getting them right rather than primarily using context and pictures to help them with unfamiliar words. Older children are catching up, and there are reports of dodgy spellers leaping ahead.
Sometimes pupils like more exactitude, even if the ambiguities, inconsistencies and intricacies of the English language make it complicated. They appreciate a clear and direct approach.
It’s a bit like the oldfashioned times tables. Questions have straightforward right answers — a dose of certainty in an uncertain world.
Balanced literacy was progress on the previous ‘‘whole language’’ — a theory that sort of made sense. Children could learn to read in the same way they learned to speak. They would intuitively pick up patterns through repetition and practice. They would learn through context. The ‘‘painful’’ process of matching all the different sounds and phonics to all the different letters and letter combinations would be largely eliminated.
Although it might have worked for many ‘‘learners’’, it failed many others. ‘‘Balanced literacy’’ was seen as rectifying the worst excesses, but it did not go far enough because decoding was often attempted only after considering the context and looking at the pictures. Phonics was used but not systematically.
The government now insists schools switch to ‘‘structured literacy’’. The Budget this month will include
$67 million supporting teachers, schools and pupils and providing resources.
This is another example of the inconsistency in politics. National and Act New Zealand are supposedly for more choice and more local decisionmaking. Not in this instance.
Civis acknowledges the teachers’ union point about politicians and the details of education pedagogy. Politicians wouldn’t tell doctors how to treat their patients so how can they tell teachers how they should teach? Structured literacy was winning the ‘‘reading wars’’ against balanced literacy anyway. The Education Ministry says 85% of schools have at least begun to move in that direction. Nevertheless, the compulsion will push structured literacy along. No doubt, smart schools and teachers will also retain some flexibility — whatever the rules — because pupils learn in different ways.
Education Minister Erica Stanford says kura kaupapa (Maori ¯ immersion schools) have successfully used structured literacy for years. Structured literacy is also critical to give children from poor language backgrounds or with reading disabilities more of a chance.
It is appalling that about half of New Zealand’s children are below their expected reading level when they leave primary school and about one in five 15yearolds don’t have basic reading proficiency.
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As a followup, Civis should include another language gripe this week.
Did you notice the word ‘‘progress’’ several paragraphs back? Civis feels like a grumpy pedant on the progressive mispronunciation of the word. Never mind.
We’ll stick to the word as a noun; it gets too complicated to include progress as a verb. The traditional syllable division, as in pro (gress) the opposite of con, seems to be replaced steadily by prog (ress) as in a frog with the p instead of the f.
Perhaps this is another case of United States language creep. Maybe, it’s not entirely so because the Americans often speak of something more like pragress.
Let’s not get on to the pronunciation of pronunciation — although we could ask the next generation to sound it out for us.