Daniel Willingham: Map of reading instruction across countries

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Thanks to Susan Godsland for flagging up this fascinating and important information provided via Daniel Willingham's site. This is the map I used for my talk at the Reading Reform Foundation conference in March 2015 - because I found it very helpful, indeed powerful, for putting across the point that errors in reading and difficulty of teaching reading is as much about the complexity of the alphabetic code of the country than anything else!

See:

Reading instruction across countries - English is hard

http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel- ... -countries

Are we to conclude that the differences are due to educational practice? The vaunted Finnish system shows smashing results even at this early age, whereas the degenerate British system can't get it right?

Countrywide differences in instruction could play a role, but Dehaene emphasize that the countries in which children make a lot of errors--Portugal, France, Denmark, and especially Britain--just happen to have deeper orthographies.

A shallow orthography means that there is a straightforward correspondence between letters and phonemes. English, in contrast, has one of the deepest (most complex) orthographies among the alphabetic languages: for example, the letter combination "gh" if pronounced differently in in "ghost," "eight," and "enough."

In short, children learning to read English have a difficult task in front of them--and so too, therefore, do teachers.