Greg Ashman: 'What Australian parents need to know about the reading wars'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Greg Ashman: 'What Australian parents need to know about the reading wars'

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...and not just Australian parents...

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2017/0 ... ding-wars/
What Australian parents need to know about the reading wars

Let me tell you a story.

Many years ago, there were two great armies. One army consisted of starry-eyed dreamers who believed in a whole language approach to teaching reading. The other army was made up of drill-em-and-kill-em phonics obsessives (who mostly had a commercial interest in selling phonics programmes). These armies battled and skirmished until, one day, pragmatic academics and bureaucrats negotiated a settlement. “Best practice involves a balance of approaches,” they proclaimed. And thus the sensible, pragmatic, utterly reasonable and measured ‘balanced literacy’ was born. And this is how we teach reading in Australia.

It’s a good story. It’s an uplifting story. But it’s a story nonetheless. And it is a story that has been manufactured quite deliberately.

Systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), the approach championed by those phonics obsessives, is supported by the best scientific evidence available. Despite the alternatives to SSO grabbing hold of words like ‘whole’ and ‘balance’, SSP is a complete approach to teaching early reading and not a dry worksheet shuffling exercise. Three English speaking governments have commissioned expert panels to review the evidence and SSP was broadly found to be the most effective by all of them (here, here and here).

Balanced literacy achieves its balance by adding in less effective whole language practices such as the three-cuing system (searchlights), asking students to memorise large numbers of sight words and incidental rather than systematic phonics teaching.

Typically, children’s readers are not chosen on the basis of which grapheme-phoneme correspondences they have learnt but on the basis of various approaches to ‘levelling’ books, often based on factors such as sentence length. This can lead to a frustrating early reading experience. Given that much early reading instruction is outsourced to parents, this frustration will play out in the family home.
Do read the whole piece and follow the links!
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