Australian primary English curricula and their planned exclusions

In my last article I ran a very simple 'word count' analysis on Australia's current National (primary) English Curriculum. This curriculum was issued by ACARA in the December of 2012.

A word count analysis is probably the simplest and quickest way of statistically checking a literacy curriculum document to find out, within reasonable confidence limits, precisely what its writers are choosing to either write or not write about. In the case of the Primary School sections of our current national English curriculum, our word count exposed a large number of inexplicable omissions that had been driven out by an 'educational' ideology:

In effect, our national primary English curriculum had omitted almost totally to advise teachers on what they should teach in order to help them in the testing and tutoring of (a) English Read Aloud Skills (b) the English Alphabetic or 'phonic' Principle and (c) English spelling.

The ideology that had excluded these three foundation skills was named as the whole language ideology. My article then went on to list a number of the consequences of this ideology. Over the past 3 decades, this ideology had been largely instrumental in producing up to 8 million Australian workers and more than 1.5 million school students with problems in their basic reading and spelling skill.

Ignorance always lies at the foundation of fanatical ideologies like this: a primary English curriculum that is not meticulously detailed in its provisions for the teaching of the 3 most foundational of the 'literacy basics' is about a viable as a fruitcake without fruit or a brick house without bricks.

The sad/glad truth about the leading role of our current national English curriculum is that it now makes it is easier to evaluate the view that the spelling and reading problems in Australian schools and workplaces are planned nationally at the curriculum writing stages. I do not mean planned with any active malice mind you, but definitely planned with meticulous attention to every topic that is chosen for inclusion in the curricula. Blatant omissions such as year level spelling lists and even phonic check lists for each year of the primary school are simply never accidental.

Illiteracy in Australia then, is quite definitely planned, and we do not need any large or disciplined study to prove it. For present purposes only simple reasoning is sufficient to make the inflammatory charge of 'planned illiteracy in Australia' stick.

The very public literacy test record for Australian students and workers is a deafening rebuke of Australia's literacy curricula. There are only 3 basic literacy skills that we need to look at when we are called on by aspiring politicians and others to rally under a 'back to the literacy basics' banner. In summary, these skills are alphabetic (or phonic) skills, read-aloud skills and English spelling.

If a student or worker has a deficit in any one of these 3 skills he or she will remain disabled in basic literacy competence until that deficit is fixed. There is simply no other way around this teaching problem. Insightful but very simple diagnostic testing and competent reteaching, that is aimed at eliminating the specific skills deficit, is the only answer for students and workers like this.

That's why Education Department bureaucrats everywhere need to urgently promote the testing and teaching of these 3 skills with explicit attention to all necessary detail. But will they? Let's look at a few bleak and longstanding barriers.

The first basic literacy skill: The alphabetic (or 'phonic') principle

School curricula around the English speaking world often use the word phonics to refer to that part of basic literacy teaching that helps children to cope with the sounding-out of English words. This sounding-out process is alternatively referred to as the alphabetic principle or phonic skill, and no English word has ever been written without it.

So this principle, regardless of all the ideological arguments, will remain forever as the very first skill of the lot in basic literacy competence. Before we can expect any adult or student to read any word at all, each of its letters has to be written one correct letter at a time until the word is complete. This writing process has always demanded a rigorously disciplined alphabetic process every last letter of the way until each word has been written correctly.

Regardless then, of the chaotic nature of English spelling conventions, no academic argument can stand against the clear primacy of this alphabetic principle as the very first skill which underpins every spelling and every reading activity that confronts every student and every worker every day. That's why a later article in this serieswill have an age performance test of phonic skills for students between the ages of 8.5 to 13.5 years.

More to the point: despite the clear and crucial relevance of the alphabetic principle to the teaching of competent beginning writing and reading skills, no main Australian education authority has ever once surveyed the performance for agelevels of Australian school students for their basic abilities with the alphabetic or phonic principle: not even once in over 100 years.

And this does beg an inflammatory but obvious question about the critical relevance of the qualifications of our English curriculum writers. If none of our authorities have ever systematically investigated the school based emergence of the very first literacy skill of the lot, then how on earth can then they regard their curriculum writers as being validly qualified to direct our teachers on how and when to teach it and to whom?

This however, is still less than half of the problem that Australia's literacy curriculum writers have had with the foundational 'literacy basics' over the past 70 years and more. Let's now look briefly at what these same writers apparently have not known either about the second of the 3 'literacy basics'. This is called read-aloud skill.

The second basic literacy skill: Read-aloud skill

When students or workers cannot read aloud, they cannot read at all. Every parent and teacher knows of the importance of basic read-aloud skill: it is the subject of the second most important test of basic reading skill, especially with students who are in the early stages of literacy development.

Literacy specialists when assigned to problem cases, invariably produce simple and standardised read-aloud tests (a bit like the ones in a later article of this series) of easy through to hard words for students to read. The purpose of such simple tests is to gauge how well the student is performing for his age or school grade. Within only a few minutes, the literacy specialist can tell the parent or teacher how well the 'problem' reader can read when compared to other students of the same approximate age.

Tests like this are so fast and easy to give. They are indispensable as the first quick measure of the basic reading level or reading age of a student with a suspected literacy problem. The surprise again however, is that no Australian education authority has ever surveyed Australian school students for their performance for age levels in basic read-aloud skills either: again, not even once in over 100 years.

So this is now 2 out of 3 vital and foundational basic literacy skills about which our current Australian literacy curriculum writers can know nothing at all of any consequence: no relevant data collected in Australia for over a century does mean that no officially relevant Australian data is available for anyone, anywhere, at any price.

And by now you will have started to guess that the news on the 'health' of the third basic literacy skill is also bad. Your guess is correct. This is the skill of English spelling.

The third basic literacy skill: English spelling

Correct spelling is at least 50% of every basic literacy task. All words do have to be written accurately before we can require students to read them. Yet the most recent Australia wide test of the spelling for age skills of Australian school children occurred all the way back in 1936: a distance of precisely 11 entire primary school generations (!) As I explained in my earlier article (and will explain more fully in a later article) Australia's yearly national NAPLAN tests do not conventionally test student spelling skills.

There is no excuse for this longstanding nationwide failure in the survey testing of spelling skill: via a radio or television program, government education authorities could, at least theoretically, test all school students in Australia in a matter of only 20 minutes. This would probably make it the most inexpensive and thorough national literacy survey of the lot.

Then why hasn't this been done, you ask? All too likely, the survey testing of English spelling skills in this way would arm Australia's many parent and lobby groups with far too much highly relevant data.

Notwithstanding, when there have been no new national school based standards set for English spelling skill in a period of 77 years, how can any modern Australian school stake a claim to excellence or even normality in its spelling skill?

The disqualification of Australia's literacy curriculum writers

Let's quickly summarize this article. The 'literacy basics' that most politicians in living memory have promised to push our schools to get back to, comprise a total of only 3 basic skills. These 3 skills have been deliberately de-emphasised to points of extinction by all Australian education authorities. During the course of over a century, the first 2 of these skills have not even once been systematically surveyed by any school system in Australia. The third skill, spelling, was last nationally survey tested 77 years ago.

So when it comes to the essential testing and teaching of the 'literacy basics' in Australian schools, Australia's English curriculum writers in all the high places are much worse off than merely out of date. Even in the October of 2013, they remain deliberately ignorant of the 3 most vital skills that are critically relevant to the success of the very literacy curricula that they disseminate among Australian teachers of literacy.

How did Australian English curriculum writers manage to so completely lose sight of the literacy basics?