An unsound approach to teaching

Teachers are accustomed to perennial debates about education. Teachers are also used to reviews, reports, government and departmental inquiries on a host of issues, ranging from teacher training to school effectiveness and whether falling standards in literacy and numeracy are leading to a crisis in education.

Beginning with the Whitlam Government’s Karmel Report, the NSW based Carrick Report, the Blackburn Report in Victoria and ongoing curriculum reviews across Australia, it’s obvious that education, over the past 30 years or so, has been subject to continual pressure to change.

As acknowledged by Professor Peter Cuttance in a paper delivered earlier this year, the danger, though, is that much of the research and subsequent recommendations adopt a top-down approach, far removed from the reality of the classroom and the needs of hard-pressed teachers.

The result? After the initial news headlines, public comment and responses from governments and education bureaucrats, programs are introduced, resources are committed to materials and professional development, as bemused teachers wait for the caravan to move on and the next wave of school reform to wash over their schools.

The national inquiry into teaching literacy, chaired by Ken Rowe from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), is due to release its report, Teaching Reading, early December and the question has to be asked, as a result of the inquiry, whether anything will change at the classroom level.

Australia’s adoption of the whole language approach, where children are asked to look and guess, instead of being taught the relationship between letters and sounds, is criticised in the report.

An argument is also put that the reason many teachers are unable to teach literacy is because of inadequate teacher training and professional development. The report recommends, before being registered to teach, that teachers are tested for literacy skills and their knowledge of the research about successful literacy teaching.

While acknowledging the report’s value in highlighting poor literacy standards as a significant issue, a weakness in the report is that it spends a good deal of time stating the obvious, as evidenced by the 1992 Commonwealth House of Representatives report, The Literacy Challenge, the 1996 national literacy survey, where 29 per cent of Year 5 children failed and last year’s open letter written by 26 experts, there is nothing new about expressing concerns about literacy standards.

Those familiar with the reading wars that have been ongoing for the past 20 years in the USA, the UK and Australia, will also recognise that much of the Rowe report simply restates conclusions reached by already widely known research into successful reading.

Previous inquiries such as Teaching Children to Read, carried out by the US National Reading Panel in 2000, the New Zealand Parliament’s 2001 report Let’s All Read and the House of Common’s 2005 report Teaching Children to Read (pdf file 336KB), as does the Rowe report, all argue that the whole language approach is flawed.

Within Australia, critics of whole language, such as Byron Harrison in Tasmania and Chris Nugent in Victoria, have been ringing the alarm bells about the failure of the whole language since the late 1980s, meanwhile thousands of young children continue to be placed at risk.

It is not enough to ask beginning readers to look and guess, to memorise whole words and to use illustrations to decipher the meaning of what is being read. To read, children must be taught the relationship between individual letters and sounds and how words can be divided into combinations of letters and sounds.

A second concern about the Rowe Report is while recommendations are made about teacher training and professional development, the report fails to evaluate how effective state and territory curricula are in giving teachers a succinct and research-based road map on how to best teach literacy.

No amount of teacher training and in-service will help if the curriculum documents from which classroom teachers must work are based on a flawed and discredited approach to literacy that is the cause of the current problems.

As noted by Kerry Hempenstall’s analysis contained in a recent Commonwealth funded primary curriculum benchmarking report, the fact is Australian curriculum documents, with the exception of NSW, are based on the whole language, critical literacy approach, associated with outcomes-based education.

While the educrats responsible for writing English curriculum in Australia over the last 20 years or so argue that their documents have always taken a balanced approach, by acknowledging the value of both whole language and phonics, this is not the case.

On reading the Rowe Report, the evidence is convincing: many children are not being taught to read and many teachers and trainee teachers do not have a solid grounding in what constitutes effective literacy teaching.

How has this been allowed to happen? The answer is more than academic, as any attempt to improve literacy standards is doomed to failure, if the very programs and professional organisations responsible for the problem are the ones now called on to provide the solution.

Reading Recovery is one of the most popular programs employed to help problem readers. Originating in New Zealand, the program is based on the whole language model and millions of dollars have been invested in implementing it across Australia, the UK and the USA.

As the Rowe Report stresses the need for early intervention programs to help children at risk, it is strange that the report makes no mention of Reading Recovery. This is especially so, as there are increasing doubts about the program’s effectiveness.

The Victorian Auditor-General has questioned the value of the program, as while students involved achieve short-term benefits, over the longer term there is little, if any, evidence of improved literacy skills.

In the USA, as a result of President Bush’ initiative No Child Left Behind, some billions of dollars are being committed to literacy programs. Significant is that only those programs that have been proved to work will receive funding and 19 American reading experts argue that Congress should refuse funding as Reading Recovery fails such a test.

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the Australian Council of Deans of Education are two professional organisations that have consistently argued against the more formal approach to teaching literacy represented by phonics and phonemic awareness.

Over the years, the AATE has argued that the literacy crisis is a simply a political ploy and, in its submission to the inquiry, warns of adopting “narrow or reductionist approaches which cannot incorporate the complex, cognitive, social, linguistic and emotional variables which impact on student learning”.

The Deans of Education also argues that learning cannot be restricted to what is termed the old basics: where there are right and wrong answers and correct grammar and spelling. Instead, the deans argue:

Good learners will not come to any situation with pre-ordained, known answers. Rather, they will come equipped with problem-solving skills, multiple strategies for tackling a task, and a flexible solutions-orientation to knowledge.

Ignored is the reality that there is a right and a wrong way to teach children how to read and that no amount of "edubabble" can disguise the fact that reading is highly unnatural and totally unlike learning how to speak.

Finally, much of the Rowe Report is based on the belief that increased testing, assessment and reporting will lead to improved literacy skills. The focus on measurement, given that it represents a significant part of the ACER’s research interest, is understandable.

From a teacher’s viewpoint, the concern is that a preoccupation with testing and accountability diverts teachers from the real task at hand, teaching children how to read and being given the right tools to do the job.