Hawkes Bay Today
  • Hawke's Bay Today home
  • Latest news
  • Sport
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Property
  • Video
  • Death notices
  • Classifieds

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • On The Up
  • Sport
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Residential property listings
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology

Locations

  • Napier
  • Hastings
  • Havelock North
  • Central Hawke's Bay
  • Tararua

Media

  • Video
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-Editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

Weather

  • Napier
  • Hastings
  • Dannevirke
  • Gisborne

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Hawkes Bay Today

Tom Nicholson: Combo closes the reading gap

By Tom Nicholson
Hawkes Bay Today·
20 Jul, 2016 02:30 AM4 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Tom Nicholson.

Tom Nicholson.

It is well known that literacy achievement in New Zealand has been slowly declining, as reported in a recent OECD economic survey on New Zealand and in other surveys like Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

All show our rankings are slipping further behind other countries.

A major issue is that children who live in poorer suburbs do not achieve anywhere near as well in reading and writing as those in more affluent suburbs. This rich/poor divide is a worldwide problem. In England they call it the north/south divide that splits the country. In Auckland it is south and west Auckland versus the north and east.

Children in schools located in poorer suburbs start school much less well prepared to learn to read than those in more affluent suburbs. At Massey University's Institute of Education we were able to demonstrate this vividly in a recent study soon to be published in the Journal of Educational Research, where we followed a group of 126 children from socio-economically varied suburbs for 15 months, starting from their first day of school.

Our researchers followed them through their first year of school and through two summer breaks and found that children in poorer suburbs started school at age five with little in the way of foundation skills for reading.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

For example, many hardly knew any letters of the alphabet. After 15 months of schooling, children in the poorer suburbs were still reading at an early five-year-old level while children in more affluent suburbs were reading at a six-year-old level or better.

How can we close the gap?

Some will say it is impossible to overcome the disadvantage of a poor home background. But that doesn't stack up - there are many in our society who experienced hardship at home yet still learned to read and write. You don't have to be locked into low achievement just because you are poor.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

It has been said many times that one size does not fit all, especially when there is no level playing field. To compensate, you have to teach disadvantaged new entrants the skills they do not have and do it quickly. So what are the options?

We know that phonics is 10 times more effective for struggling readers than the book reading approach we currently use in schools. We also know that the book reading approach is a good fit for children in affluent suburbs because they already have the foundations to learn. Their well-educated parents have made sure they are well prepared for school, so they will (mostly - except for some in the dyslexia category) learn to read during that first 15 months.

Phonics, however, may be a much better fit for children in poorer suburbs. Phonics makes learning to read a fast process and that is what we want for these children.

Researchers in Scotland made it happen in the famous Clackmannanshire study of children in a poorer area who were taught with intensive phonics in their first term of school. With this approach they made instant progress in their first year. When re-assessed seven years later, the children were reading and spelling years ahead of their age in comparison with a control group.

Discover more

Dr Mark Avis: No shame in yearning for Brexit

21 Jul 05:00 AM

In a recent randomised controlled Massey study published in Frontiers in Psychology we were able to raise the literacy levels of Year 2 Maori and Pasifika children attending schools in poorer areas of Auckland to average levels with just a small change to current methods.

Although this is very compelling, there has long been a reluctance to introduce intensive phonics in New Zealand schools as they have done in England. Teachers here do not want to give up the mainstream big books approach which has many good points: the books are interesting and are graded in such a way that they are not too easy or too difficult.

Is there a way to keep big books and yet gain some of the advantages of phonics for children who are failing to learn to read?

We discovered that combining big book reading with explicit teaching of letter-sound correspondences (phonics) achieved better results in reading than either of these approaches on their own, so that children were soon reading at their chronological age level.

This new research promises to contribute significantly to closing the gap by making important changes to our current ways of teaching.

It has been published in an international journal.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

It was not dreamed up in an ivory tower, and it does work. The thing is: do we really want to fix this part of the education puzzle?

- Tom Nicholson is a professor of literacy education at Massey University's Institute of Education.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz

Save

    Share this article

Latest from Hawkes Bay Today

Premium
Hawkes Bay Today

End of swimming pool weeds: Family's delight as cyclone-hit home gets green light

04 Jul 06:00 PM
Hawkes Bay Today

On The Up: The paddling club of breast cancer survivors set to represent NZ on world stage

04 Jul 06:00 PM
Hawkes Bay Today

Napier ice swimmer Davey Jones - what I gain when I dive into the chilly depths

04 Jul 06:00 PM

There’s more to Hawai‘i than beaches and buffets – here’s how to see it differently

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Hawkes Bay Today

Premium
End of swimming pool weeds: Family's delight as cyclone-hit home gets green light

End of swimming pool weeds: Family's delight as cyclone-hit home gets green light

04 Jul 06:00 PM

42 Havelock North homes are out of limbo after two-and-a-half years.

On The Up: The paddling club of breast cancer survivors set to represent NZ on world stage

On The Up: The paddling club of breast cancer survivors set to represent NZ on world stage

04 Jul 06:00 PM
Napier ice swimmer Davey Jones - what I gain when I dive into the chilly depths

Napier ice swimmer Davey Jones - what I gain when I dive into the chilly depths

04 Jul 06:00 PM
Premium
Trentham debacle sparks memories of another wrong turn: John Jenkins

Trentham debacle sparks memories of another wrong turn: John Jenkins

04 Jul 06:00 PM
From early mornings to easy living
sponsored

From early mornings to easy living

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • Hawke's Bay Today e-edition
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Subscribe to the Hawke's Bay Today
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • NZME Events
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP