Society/Culture To what extent are Universities to blame for the current children's literacy crisis?

[Cmarsh]

How to ensure students get the teaching and support they need to read well - ABC Education

What do state and territory governments need to do to ensure every child is taught how to read well, regardless of where they go to school? Amy Haywood from the Grattan Institute explains.

www.abc.net.au

Popular teaching style 'contrary to science' costing Australia $40 billion, report finds

One-third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new study.

www.abc.net.au

One third of students are below minimum standard for reading.

For decades, many teachers have been teaching in the non scientific whole of language method where students are assumed to read by associated pictures and not teaching the more scientificality backed method of phonics and explicit instruction.

Primary school teachers are a product of their training - the Universities.

So why aren't Universities directly blamed for responsibility for their contribution to this mess?

 

[Gethelred]

How to ensure students get the teaching and support they need to read well - ABC Education

What do state and territory governments need to do to ensure every child is taught how to read well, regardless of where they go to school? Amy Haywood from the Grattan Institute explains.

www.abc.net.au

Popular teaching style 'contrary to science' costing Australia $40 billion, report finds

One-third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new study.

www.abc.net.au

One third of students are below minimum standard for reading.

For decades, many teachers have been teaching in the non scientific whole of language method where students are assumed to read by associated pictures and not teaching the more scientificality backed method of phonics and explicit instruction.

Primary school teachers are a product of their training - the Universities.

So why aren't Universities directly blamed for responsibility for their contribution to this mess?

I mean...

Australia's population in 2000 was 19.03 million. It's now 26.5 million. In the past year, India and China were the biggest two immigrant sources, with England in third; of the top 10 nations, 7 are from non-english speaking countries (or at least, countries with the national language being other than English. India has large English speaking populations, and so does Hong Kong). These people emigrate with families, frequently, and those kids are frequently raised bilingually. All of which to say it's harder to teach literacy when you also have to teach english language alongside it.

The other side of it is, there's a rather predictable long bow being drawn here: of course a conservative is seeking to kick education around over student failings in standardised testing. You've not really demonstrated that schools aren't teaching phonics at all either; merely pointed to low literacy standards and asked why they're not teaching it.

If you want people to humour you when you want to go on a journey, at the very least you need to give me a reason to go with you.

 

[Andre]

Universities or Education departments? Whole word teaching is garbage. Phonics (with Fitzroy readers), is how I was mostly responsible for my kids learning to read, rather than the school doing it. I don’t blame the teachers, they don’t get much input into what they get to use. Phonics has always been better, so hopefully the recent debates around this kicks whole word learning to the bin, where it belongs.

 

[kickazz]

Whole word teaching is garbage. Phonics (with Fitzroy readers), is how I was mostly responsible for my kids learning to read, rather than the school doing it.

Phonics should be prioritised, but whole word teaching does have its place, particularly in a language like English.

Where they get the idea that reading is 'natural' and you just 'do it' or whatever they say - I'd like to see an actual academic paper that says that cos it sounds like bullshit.

Most important thing for reading is that kids are exposed to it, parents should read, first to, then with, their children. As mentioned by the West Sydney uni academic, different styles suit different students - you can't cater for all easily in the classroom but you can at home.

 

[btdg]

Phonics should be prioritised, but whole word teaching does have its place, particularly in a language like English.

Where they get the idea that reading is 'natural' and you just 'do it' or whatever they say - I'd like to see an actual academic paper that says that cos it sounds like bullshit.

Most important thing for reading is that kids are exposed to it, parents should read, first to, then with, their children. As mentioned by the West Sydney uni academic, different styles suit different students - you can't cater for all easily in the classroom but you can at home.

The latter part is definitely the problem.

If anything, the whole language movement was popular in the 1980s and 1990s and has died a long slow death since. Some teachers still use a hybrid approach but since the early 2000s everything in education has been about evidence-based practice and it's been clear for a long time that phonics is supported.

And yet... the downward trend in reading achievement levels starts after that time period, peaked in the 90s/early 2000s and has declined even as schools have swung heavily back towards phonics. It's also mirrored in an equivalent downward trend in writing, numeracy and science performance scores, which indicates the issue isn't a reading specific practice, it is broader.

The problem to me also isn't teachers / teacher quality. I've been in education long enough and there are far fewer objectively bad teachers now than before. There's a bit more turnover (particularly losing young people) but also far more consistency of 'solid' practice, particularly in primary schools.

There's clearly more at play, and in my experience it is more about:

• a much higher proportion of Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds, for whom reading (and sounding out words in particular) is far less intuitive
• less reading and more technology. The facebook 'pivot to video' was huge here. Even in the early 2000s people used to read a LOT: newspapers, magazines, websites, forums etc all had a much bigger role in the world. Now it is all images and video. I would say half my secondary age students are readers (mostly fiction... almost no informative or persuasive) and half NEVER read anything longer than a comment on an instagram post outside of school house
• far fewer parents who value and respect the importance of education in the way they used to. Far fewer parents who 'want their kid to have a better life than them'. Even in the middle classes, where going to uni is an assumption, it's far more about unique little Johnny battling his ADHD so he can do an RMIT course in applied digital media (which is really a TAFE program repackaged for middle class parents) than it is about being a doctor/lawyer/engineer
• alongside this is the increasingly normal desire for parents (and students) to externalise everything about their child. They're not behaving badly, they have ADHD. It's not that they can't read, it is a learning difficulty, or the school is at fault, or... I can barely remember speaking with a parent who would just roll up their sleeves and say "Ok, I'll just read to them for 2 hours extra each night then". It always starts with blaming the school, shifts through to 'well I'll get a tutor' and then onto harranguing doctors for a diagnosis...

If universities have a role to play in this it isn't in relation to phonics, but:

• a continued insistence on teacher education as a philosophical exercise ('lets learn about theories of psychosocial development') rather than a practical craft;
• a particular tendence of universities to pander to modern young people and reinforce/normalise what is above. Lectures recorded and online, so you don't have to go in person, for example. But that's not education specific, and a bit more of an 'old man yells at cloud' thing anyway, I guess

 

[Gough]

Phonics should be prioritised, but whole word teaching does have its place, particularly in a language like English.

Where they get the idea that reading is 'natural' and you just 'do it' or whatever they say - I'd like to see an actual academic paper that says that cos it sounds like bullshit.

Most important thing for reading is that kids are exposed to it, parents should read, first to, then with, their children. As mentioned by the West Sydney uni academic, different styles suit different students - you can't cater for all easily in the classroom but you can at home.

Channel 9 cricket yearbooks for Christmas every year from the time I was about five taught me to read better than any school readers did.

 

[Rusty Brookes]

Channel 9 cricket yearbooks for Christmas every year from the time I was about five taught me to read better than any school readers did.

And to take up smoking Benson and Hedges

(Only kidding!)

 

[Leeda]

No we all are to blame...kids are chortling at the idea of reading books...there is an abundance of spelling
mistakes as well as hydroneuferial ranking of the tedious ..."7look at me".....

Cantering to the effusive LOTR...

 

[ShanDog]

There are definitely institutional issues that need to be addressed, some of which are the fault of universities and some of which are the responsibility of government. The problem is that they feed into each other until one of them breaks the cycle.

In SA, phonics, levelled readers and the like is still the mainstream method of teaching reading literacy, which is excellent - it's the only proven method that works for the vast majority of kids. However, I believe that's not the case for all education systems around the country (but haven't looked this stuff up in a while). OP is correct that the whole of language method is complete arse, and kids who have been brought up with that are starting behind the 8-ball.

It's hard to say who has the burden of fixing the bad pedagogical practices of schools because the university system is what churns out the ideological biases of the future government or education department leaders, who then reinforce those practices in the public schools' policies.

From my experience, a significant issue is an aversion to streaming kids by ability, which is almost purely a political decision. If you don't stream kids, you don't get the opportunity to put additional support systems in place to help bring them up to where they should be. Instead, they get lost in the crowd and continue moving up the year levels, getting further and further behind. We set them up to fail.

Further, I was a secondary English teacher, and hardly any of my education degree was about teaching middle and senior high school kids HOW to read. It was almost entirely about child development, political issues associated with curriculum and other similar topics. A sprinkling of 'How to plan a lesson', and then off we go to teach high school kids who still read at third-grade level, with no idea how to deal with that.

 

[FreoGirl]

I blame parents. I had this argument over and over when my son was at primary school. If you don't normalise reading and writing in the home, and spend time engaging with them, then their best mentor is letting them down. In a busy classroom, teachers just don't have time to sit down for hours with a kid (if there's say 30 in the room), but parents do!