What’s changing with the teaching of reading in Australia (and why?)

This episode answers the common questions schools and parents have when changing from a whole-language or balanced literacy way of teaching to one supported by scientific evidence.

• “Why wasn’t my older one taught reading this way”
• “Why have the take-home readers changed and why do the new ones look so basic compared to the old ones?”
• “Where have the levelled readers and Running Records gone?” “What’s this stuff about phonological awareness?”
• “Why are the students and teachers doing activities that look like ‘rote learning’ and ‘drill’ in the classroom?”
• “What happened to “chunky monkey” and “flippy dolphin” and why must we insist on kids sounding out words now”
• “Why do parents now have to do a course before being able to volunteer to listen to kids read in the classroom?”
• “Why didn’t my struggling 12-year-old get this type of intervention when they were in year one?”

These are the types of questions that schools who have begun changing how they teach reading (and spelling) face from parents who have noticed the differences. They’re excellent questions because when a school flicks the switch and starts to jettison a whole-language or balanced literacy way of teaching, there are highly noticeable changes. So as well as teaching the kids, schools are needing to also teach parents about what’s happening. Some of these questions are very awkward to answer because the ugly truth is that there are students at the end of primary school who have missed out on this higher quality instruction. It’s not fair, but it’s inevitable. This fact breaks the heart of educators and we all look back, with much sadness when we think about what we did before, and the students we could have done better for. If any of us could turn back the clock, of course, we would have taught this way all along.

Is this teaching just another trendy educational innovation that will soon pass? No! Phonics teaching dominated the landscape before whole language and its offspring, balanced literacy became the norm in schools. These ideologies were based on some understandable misconceptions. The popular thinking went like this:

Because (most) kids learn to speak by being immersed in their mother tongue (naturally – with no repetitive explicit teaching needed), then reading instruction should also involve a similar immersion in the printed word, and learning to read must also be a natural process.

This turned out to be a logical fallacy that gave us three decades of way too many struggling readers.

So what came next?

The U.S. published an inquiry into this situation in 2000, the U.K. did their own and then Australia also inquired into this in 2005. All three inquiries looked closely at current reading research. Some of this research was from brain imaging studies that were discovering that there are indeed, brain circuits (hardware) ready to go to learn spoken language. However, no such hardware had evolved in the brain that’s ready to learn to read and write. There was nothing innate or natural about learning to read. The skills of reading and writing have to be carefully and meticulously welded on, through highly explicit teaching, to neural circuits that are designed for other tasks. So, these inquiries from the U.S., U.K. and Australia found the same thing: the teaching of reading needs to be highly structured, highly explicit, sequential and heavily based in phonics to get the best results for the maximum number of students.

Following the release of the Australian inquiry’s findings (2005), not one recommendation was implemented. Blows your mind but also gives you an idea of how deeply embedded whole language approaches were in the DNA of reading instruction and how anti-science the educational policymakers and teacher training institutions really were. There was also significant pushback from big corporations who had built very lucrative businesses based on selling whole language-based programs to schools. So, the vast majority of Australian schools continued on their merry way, doing the same thing. This wasn’t malicious, it was just a failing of quality research to make its way into policy and classrooms and not at all uncommon in education. It was kind of like what’s happening with climate science!

Fast forward almost twenty years and only now are we seeing a groundswell of schools acting on the research in Australia. Listen to our previous podcast with Dr Sandra Marshall and you’ll hear about what’s caused this tectonic shift.

We hope you enjoy(ed) this Dyscastia podcast and that it puts what is happening in schools into a helpful context.

Links from Episode

What ar