Education journalist Emily Hanford has spent years investigating why so many American kids are struggling to read.
In the podcast series Sold a Story, she argues the early-intervention literacy programme Reading Recovery (developed by New Zealand educationalist Dame Marie Clay in the late '70s) is out of step with discoveries in cognitive science.
Emily Hanford Photo: supplied
Listen to the interview
Emily Hanford will visit Auckland and Christchurch in late August to speak at a Literacy Symposium.
Although Marie Clay's work was "incredibly important" in recognising that children with reading difficulties need to be identified early and given extra help, time and attention, Hanford tells Kim Hill that the success kids have with Reading Recovery usually doesn't continue after their first year of school.
"One of the things that was found in this longer-term study of Reading Recovery is that the kids who were in it actually did worse in third and fourth grade than the similar kids who were not in Reading Recovery ... Kids can look like good readers when they're in first grade and they're in a program like Reading Recovery. When they're taught cueing strategies, they can look like they're reading the words, but in fact, they don't really have the skills. They need to read all the words that they're going to encounter in second, third, and fourth grade, and many of those kids really start to fall apart because they don't really know how to read the words on their own."
Most reading instruction methods in the United States are built upon a belief that learning to read is a lot like learning to talk, Hanford says, but scientific research now indicates otherwise.
"We, as human beings, entered written language relatively recently, we've been talking to each other for hundreds of thousands of years. But we really didn't start this reading and writing thing until a few thousand years ago. So we're not born with brains that are really wired to do it. We can get really good at it but we're not really wired to do it."
"Cognitive scientists started getting really interested in this question in the '70s and '80s ... what's going on when people struggle [with reading]? And one of the really big 'aha' [discoveries] was that learning to read is very different than learning to talk."
Marie Clay's method of reading instruction, sometimes known as the 'whole language' approach, is based on the idea that learning to read and write is a natural process and children don't need a lot of explicit instruction in letters and sounds to become good readers, Hanford says.
But since the late '90s, cognitive scientists had discovered that teaching children to sound out words bit by bit - known as phonics - is also "really critical" to literacy learning.
The 'science of reading' approach, which embraces phonics and which Hanford endorses, is working to encourage existing education establishments to embrace and employ what we now know from scientific discoveries.
Although some people try to spin this movement as "anti-teacher", Hanford says many teachers have told her they're grateful to learn about how teaching phonics can support their work.
"That is not what I hear from teachers in my email inbox, in the interviews I do with them, in what I see on social media and blogs that they're writing. Instead, they're saying 'Wow, I want to learn more about this because this is really different than what I had in my head about how kids learn to read and what I need to teach them. I don't know as well as I should the things the little kids need to be taught in order to have the best chance at becoming a good reader. So they really want this information.
"I've talked to a lot of teachers here in the United States who knew that they were supposed to teach phonics and maybe had a phonics programme, but they didn't know why. They didn't know why phonics was important because they didn't know how kids learn to read. And when they started to learn that it made much more sense to them. And in fact, many of these teachers then identified that there were some problems with their phonics instruction or the phonics curriculum that they had been handed, or they were actually willing to follow that a little bit more faithfully because they understood 'Oh, there's sort of like a reason behind why I'm teaching these kids these things in this way and in this order'.
"Yes, there are many reasons why kids can struggle with reading ... but there are lots of kids who are not getting the instruction they need in school. Some kids are getting what they need outside of school because their parents are providing the instruction that their schools don't provide, either by teaching their kids themselves or by paying for tutors, or in some cases by paying for specialised private schools.
"This is really an equity issue. It's a civil rights issue. Because when teachers don't teach kids how to read in ways that line up with what the scientific evidence shows, there are some kids who are going to get what they need outside of school. But those kids tend to be kids who have various kinds of advantages ... they tend to have our parents with chequebooks that can write cheques to pay for the help they need. But what about all the other kids?"
Photo: Sydney Bourne / Cultura Creative via AFP
Children who aren't taught to sound out words via phonics can fall into the bad habit of just looking at the first letter of the word and taking a guess at what it is based on the context, Hanford says.
"So often, kids are wrong when they [guess that way]. And all it takes is being wrong on a few keywords by the time you're reading a big chunk of text when you're in fifth or sixth or seventh grade, you miss a few keywords like that, and you don't know what you're reading. So reading becomes the is confusing, laborious, slow task when you haven't gotten really good and automatic with reading those words, when reading the words hasn't turned into a reflex. And that is really the goal here - to turn the reading of words into a reflex again, to free up space in the brain to focus on the meaning of what you're reading.
"Comprehension is really important. What's the goal here? Let's make sure kids are focusing on the meaning of what they're reading ... That is really the hallmark of being a good reader, because good readers are not stuck on the words, the words come really easily to them. And that frees up their attention, their mental energy, their cognitive space to think about what they're reading."
Everyone agrees that improving children's comprehension of words is the goal, Hanford says, and now it's a case of getting the scientific information about how to do it out there.
"There are lots of kids who aren't getting what they need in school when it comes to being taught how their written language works ... Most people actually need much more and better instruction than they're getting in many American schools, as I understand it, in many schools in New Zealand as well."