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.
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.
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.
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.
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