Reading Recovery and its failure in New Zealand

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Reading Recovery and its failure in New Zealand

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Yet another very important article in the excellent LDA bulletin:

https://www.ldaustralia.org/BULLETIN_NOV13-RR.pdf
Reading Recovery and the failure of the New Zealand national literacy strategy

In this LDA bulletin article, we summarise arguments and evidence reported in the detailed paper (Tunmer, Chapman, Greaney, Prochnow and Arrow 2013) showing that New Zealand's national literacy strategy has failed and particularly the role of Reading Recovery in contributing to that failure.
Will we ever, as a world, be able to put a stop to Reading Recovery's multi-cueing reading practices which are potentially damaging to our youngest learners?
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gracevilar
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Re: Reading Recovery and its failure in New Zealand

Post by gracevilar »

Multi-cueing and mixed methods and so on and so forth have really damaged and delayed the whole reading and writing process not only in the English speaking countries but its influence is in Spanish speaking countries too. In Argentina, when the "tsunami" of the whole language approach hit the country, some "experts" on reading and writing instruction based themselves on this method and came up with their own Spanish version....Emilia Ferreiro from Argentina, came up with a nice interesting "project" on the Constructivist approach, where basically teachers should scaffold the children´s process of learning which was based on their discovery process, the child would relate, discover, hypothesise, connect with previous learnings, and conclude with a new hypothesis, which of course 50% of the time was wrong, so there the teacher would "scaffold" and help the child to relate well guiding him on the correct "hypothesis"....all in all it was a never-ending building of hypothesis over hypothesis over hypothesis...delaying the whole process of learning to read and write!

Well the story goes, that someone in the Ministry of Education "borrowed" Emilia Ferreiro´s lovely "Project" and made it a METHOD!!! The marketing at that time (25 years ago) was, the latest trends in reading of the world, based on the whole language approach (the Goodmans) in the US and then Reading Recovery and Clay in New Zealand..! Well, this has done ENORMOUS damage to our Spanish speaking children! The results of its mediocre application was...our children don´t know how to read well, they have very low reading comprehension, and the handwriting... HORRENDOUS!!! Handwriting ...another issue....another story:

The story of handwriting: Someone said that is was better for the children to learn how to write using print CAPITAL LETTERS....that it was easier to trace....than the cursive. Well probably if we compare all the loops and squiggles of the cursive handwriting with the straight tall lined print capital letters, this might be true...but....capital letters are used for capitalization only and for eye catching banners or signs! Books are written in print small case....The big question is..."Why this "someone" didn´t propose print in lower case instead!!!??" Well, the story goes on like this: this became like a myth - a golden rule that every teacher should follow....because based on Piaget and Vigotsky, they should follow the child development....Wrong understanding!!!! Piaget and Vitgotsky didn´t pose that, their studies were social and psychologically based...not pedagogical..if I am not wrong....?
So, end of the story...thank goodness! This is changing! I am doing my best to change all of this...mess!!!

I started from synthetic phonics in English and basing on it, I am now battling to bring the Spanish version in !!!
One outstanding piece of evidence: I show two copybooks belonging to the same Year 1 child, one in Spanish and another in English (bilingual school with 50% and 50%). English using the lovely "English" pre cursive and Spanish the same child using print capital letters! (I also provide more samples) I ask them: " How come this child can write in precursive.?...Why is it that this child CANNOT write with pre cursive when writing in Spanish then ?" ... Answer: No physical response...open jaws...their "Someone´s" lovely theory crumbled down!...
I am happy to say that every day I have more followers! Evidence is unbeatable!!! A GOOD method is unbeatable.

As for Reading Recovery in Latin America....for English teaching....Not used...! and .. no government has ever bought the programme...(well no money here...lol..)
But the strong whole language approach invaded the reading schemes...so the method was widely used...then mixed methods.
However now, I can say that 70/80% of schools are in synthetic phonics for teaching English!

Let´s carry on KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON!!!
We will win!!!
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