Page 4088 - Week 13 - Thursday, 31 October 2013
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experts who appear somewhat frustrated at how educational policy developers are ignoring their advice.
Funnily enough, while the political debate between phonics and whole language was traditionally aligned with conservative and progressive sides of politics respectively, times are, in fact, changing. Julia Gillard called an end to the reading wars in 2010 when the national curriculum included, albeit limited, phonics outcomes. In recent days West Australia ALP member for Perth, Alannah MacTeirnan, strongly advocated the inclusion of phonics programs as she took a pot shot at reading academics who she thought were putting their commitment to whole language ahead of the reading development of our children. So the public advocacy on the side of the phonics team is now wider than just the traditional politically conservative side of politics.
My point in touching on all of that was not to engage or stir up the so-called reading wars, but rather to point out that this can be a very difficult issue to discuss in the public domain. But for the sake of improving educational outcomes for our children, we must not shy away from addressing issues with literacy learning in our schools.
There are large amounts of research that have been undertaken to address the big question of how we teach literacy. There are three key national reports that undertook a meta-analysis of this research, perhaps the three most relevant to us here in Australia. In 2000 the US report of the National Reading Panel Teaching children to read was released in the US. It is one of the most comprehensive and influential investigations ever undertaken.
In 2004 the then federal education minister, Brendan Nelson, commissioned the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. Its report was released in 2005. In 2006 in the UK there was the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, otherwise known as the Rose review.
Each of these reports reached similar conclusions: in order to improve the teaching of literacy to children, literacy curricula needed to include explicit teaching of what is known as synthetic phonics, a bottom-up approach that explicitly and systematically teaches the relationship between sounds and letters. But what I find most interesting is that each of these reports warned against introducing this bottom-up, structured version of phonics tuition without ensuring the ongoing teaching of reading in a rich language environment and in conjunction with other reading and writing activities.
Indeed, reading experts say that a good model of teaching includes five different areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary knowledge and text comprehension. So the push to improve literacy teaching was about additional ways of teaching, not using just one method at the expense of another. This certainly does not need to be a war. After its release, many recommendations from the Rose report were implemented by the UK government. By contrast, there was little implementation of Australia’s National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, and that was nearly 10 years ago.
Why is all of this important for children with learning difficulties? It is important because researchers and specialist teachers are telling us that children with learning
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