I have no particular axe to grind in the war between advocates of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching reading. In the spirit of wishy-washy compromise, I suspect that both have their place.
But it strikes me as a rather odd feature of the debate that advocates of phonics should also be the ones most concerned about spelling. The vast majority of spelling errors arise from the use of the obvious phonetic spelling rather than the “correct” spelling that is part of the whole language. So one of the costs of the phonic approach is the need to learn, by rote, the vast number of exceptions and special cases that make spelling English such a miserable experience for the uninitiated.
Phonics phans never seem to recognise this.
Here, for example, is Kevin Donnelly in today’s SMH
Advocates of whole language argue the critics are wrong and that the overwhelming majority of students are successful readers. Often cited are the results of the PISA literacy test in 2000, which covered 32 countries, in which Australian 15-year-olds came out at the top of the table.
But students were not corrected for faulty grammar, punctuation and spelling. One Australian researcher involved with the study stated: “It was the exception rather than the rule in Australia to find a student response that was written in well-constructed sentences, with no spelling or grammatical error.”
Whole language advocates also point to the apparent improvement in the numbers of students reaching the reading benchmarks as evidence that all is well. In 1996, the first year of the national benchmarks introduced by the Howard Government, 73 per cent of year 3 students reached the set standard; by 2000 it was 92.5 per cent.
However, such standards represent minimum acceptable standards, and raising the success rate from 73 per cent to 92.5 per cent in just under four years is somewhat suspicious. There is some evidence to suggest that the education bureaucrats have simply lowered the bar by redefining what constitutes an acceptable standard.
This piece is riddled with logical errors, and unsupported factual claims. What relationship is there between the way a student was taught to recognise words and their capacity to construct a grammatical sentence? Following Donnelly’s approach, it seems reasonable to blame his incapacity to construct a logical argument on the way he way was taught to read. I’m guessing he was taught phonics.
John Quiggin 
James, we must stop meeting like this, but I am astonished by the SMH survey you speak of. I have never met a teacher or trainee, even in Queensland, who didn’t know what a syllable was. Then again, it’s probably not something you’d ask someone unless you’re on intimate terms.
Also, in defence of Queensland, I should point out that Year One there is the first year of primary school after preschool. When sitting the Year Three National Benchmark test, the children have only had three years of schooling compared with four in the other states. They have begun to trial a Prep year (or Kindrgarten as you call it in NSW) as I speak, with plans to introduce it in 2007 (I think).
I don’t believe reading methods are conceived in ideology in the sense of conspiracy theory, but there’s no doubt that when school systems so persistently fail to turn around social disadvantage, when the ways to enhance literacy has been so obvious for so long, a move to shake things up might be welcomed. The trouble is, the bureaucraccies with the power to get things moving are full of administrators, and you can bet their solutions will be, you’ve guessed it, structural change. That’s, maybe, why the Teachers’ Unions won’t have a bar of Nelson’s bulldozing.
And by the way Brian, Hi to you too!
Hi Margaret. The change to Prep in Qld is 2006, I think. Part of the reason, I understand, is to bring Qld up to speed in the Year Three National Benchmark Test. This shoud be achieved by virtue of effectively starting compulsory schooling 6 months earlier.
Prep replaces Preschool, which is voluntary (although about 90% of kids do it) and half-time. Prep is supposed to be play-based, but will have more formal skills content. Play will be contstrained by having less aide time (15 hours per week), and new facilities won’t, I understand, have an enclosed outdoor area or a sandpit.
It’s a way of getting a 13th year of formal schooling on the cheap and will be hailed as a success through better National Benchmark scores. This is almost inevitable because the kids will be a little older.
Radio National had two excellent segments on reading this morning. First the Health Report wherein “Dr Reid Lyon, Director of Child Development and Behavior at the U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Development, talks about the latest evidence on teaching literacy and the enormous gap that still exists between what teachers are trained to do and what they need to do in the classroom. He also heavily criticises a popular program in Australia (Reading Recovery) which costs tens of millions of dollars per annum. According to Dr Lyon this money could be far better spent.”
Then Life Matters did a piece on Qld Literacy Program with Carol Christensen, Senior lecturer in educational psychology at the University of QLD and Meredith Wenter Deputy Principal, and literacy program manager, at Kirwan High School in Townsville.
Both these segments were excellent. Unfortunately no transripts as far as I can see, but worth listening to if you can or buying the tapes if you’re seriously interested.
It sounds as though the Americans have systematised the science and are now at the stage where they will only give taxpayer support to programs based on the science.
If some-one could summarise these two segments it would be terrific. I’d try but I’m a bit pushed at present.
Congratulations on a very informative and rich discussion of the topic. Glad the SMH article sparked so much interest and love the comment comparing me to Andrew Bolt!
Any thoughts about the dangers of fuzzy maths?
If you are still around, Margaret, you were right and I was wrong. My apologies. Prep is to be introduced in Qld system-wide in 2007.
Brian I thought the topic was closed, so hadn’t opened the file for a while. Thanks for the update. When I retired in June, serious discussions about Prep were just beginning at my school. Not everyone was rapt, particularly the pre-school teachers. But maybe it will help some. Fancy the dept doing anything on the cheap!
I absolutely concur about Reading Recovery, although occasionally a RR teacher with a phonics-based value system would turn up, and they could make good use of the luxury one-on-one teaching conditions.
I knew Carol Christensen at UofQ. Her work was excellent, but she probably thought I was a whole language buff because I was researching it. In fact she probably never noticd me.
Kevin Donnelly, glad to see you here. I liked your contibution in the Australian. However it was a long leap from Freire to throwing out phonics. Graves and Britton also had perfectly legitimate arguments which wouldn’t have necessarily led there. It took Frank Smith and Kenneth and Yetta Goodman and quite a lot of misinformation and misinterpretation at various universities and teachers’ colleges (both here and in the US) to come up with the final bag of ideas practised here as WL.
Margaret, John doesn’t normally close a topic. It’s just that all the kiddies run off to play somewhere else after a while.
On Prep, my wife is a preschool teacher. One of her best friends will be teaching Prep next year. They were told in training that Prep was based on the philosophy and practice of preschool if only the preschoolers had really understood what preschool was about and had made the necessary paradigm shift in their thinking. This is pretty much a direct insult to many preschool teachers who understand the preschool philosophy well enough.
Many principals are looking to primary teachers to teach prep and are talking about transferring the preschool teachers to Year 7. These principals see what preschoolers do as mucking around and would prefer that kids started on formal learning without all the unnecessary preliminaries. The introduction of Prep provides them with perfect opportunity to take control of the situation.
On reading, the Health Report item I mentioned above has a full transcript up now. If you’ve got time I’d really like to know what you think about it.
Brian, thanks for the access to Health Report. I’ve read it at last. Reid-Lyon has wrapped it all up nicely, in spite of lots of unhelpful interruptions from Norm. He also puts genuine Learning Disabilities at about 4% which I would agree with. However in my last few years as a Learning Support teacher, the number of children we were helping was more like 20% – 30%. I’m not sure about the direct link he makes between reading problems and poverty but early learning is certainly important. Having spent a lot of time reading literature from U.S.Teacher Ed. institutions I’d have to agree that many hadn’t got the message. And many here haven’t either.
I hope this project goes better for Bush than Iraq. I’m not sure I like his solutions.
Brian I have tried twice to post a comment to the Health Report. Thanks for the invitation. Here goes for a third and last time.
Reid Lyon obviously knows what he’s talking about and I agree with his discription of the problem almost entirely. His connection between poverty and difficulty is a bit simplistic, but I guess that was because he was trying to say a lot in a short time.
He puts genuine learning disabilities at about 4% and I would agree. But in my experience of the last fiveyears, Learning Support staff were often helping between 20% and 30% of the school population. This, in my opinion, could be put down to uninformed teaching priorities of many kinds, and not necessarily on the part of the teachers. Apart from beliefs about literacy, the pressure to keep adding more to the curriculum has drastically reduced the time for systematic teaching of literacy, although many teachers do try to teach it throughout the curriculum where possible. As Lyon says, it has to be taught right through to Tertiary, and then, I’m sure you’ll agree, more some.
As for Nelson’s National Enquiry, it may highlight the problem. But Lyon hinted at the difficulties of legislating teacher change. Better to spend money winning hearts and minds. I wonder if the national education departments remember how to conduct a decent inservice course. I haven’t seen one for a long time.
Margaret, thanks for that. I sit here in sadness pondering your last remark about the lack of quality in conducting inservice education. In the 1970s and 1980s I had people who were pretty awesome at it. When Labor took over in 1989 it took a while, but after Frank Peach (later to achieve considerable fame in corrective services, then family services) did his review of the Department it really was like George Orwell’s “Family Farm” ie. the pigs took over the palace. The Department lost it’s memory and much else besides.
In 1991 when I saw Prof Roger Scott, then Director General, for an exit interview, as was my entitlement, he said “We’re bleeding, Brian, too many good people are going.” But what could he do? He was only Director General after-all.
Oops, that’s Orwell’s “Animal Farm” of course!
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