Noella Mackenzie and Martina Tassone explores what the media say about reading. This is the sixth and final post on reading to celebrate Book Week. The original can be found at https://blog.aare.edu.au/reading-part-six-the-media-say-we-have-a-reading-crisis-now-do-we/
Recently the debates around the best ways to teach reading have been reignited (Mackenzie & Tassone, 2024). The media coverage has been fierce, and is often led by people who have little or no experience in mainstream classroom teaching of language or literacy. Media reports have also been negative (Baroutsis & Lingard, 2023) and polarising; providing reductionist definitions of reading, simplified solutions to a perceived crisis, and calling for a phonics first (and fast) approach to teaching and assessing reading for all children, without evidence to demonstrate that all children need or benefit from this narrow approach to reading instruction.
Comber (2023), a highly regarded Australian researcher, argues that Australia’s ‘right-wing media have a lot to answer for in terms of fostering narrow approaches to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment . . .’ (p.88). In England and the United States of America (USA) the aggressive media commentary on the teaching of reading has contributed to policy mandates that demand or exclude specific literacy instructional practices.
In recent times, media outlets have switched their narrative from the Simple View of Reading (SVR) and the Science of Reading (SOR) (Post 4) to Structured Literacy (SL) (Post 5) and explicit teaching. We dispute the perceived literacy crisis that is so often reported by the media and the idea that the science related to reading, is settled (Post 4). It is the perceived literacy crisis that we tackle here.
Crisis? What crisis?
Recently Larsen (2023) conducted an analysis of 25 years of Australian national and international standardised assessment data, and found that student literacy data have remained consistent, despite different policies and approaches to literacy teaching. Australia has participated in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test every four years since 2011. Australia’s results improved between 2011 and 2016 and then remained consistent. Table 1 shows the mean scores for Australia, England, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore in 2011, 2016 and 2021.
Table 1
PIRLS data (https://www.acer.org/au/pirls/key-findings)
| Country | Mean scores (out of a possible 600) | ||
| 2011 | 2016 | 2021 | |
| Singapore | 576 | 576 | 587 |
| Hong Kong | 571 | 569 | 573 |
| England | 552 | 559 | 558 |
| Australia | 527 | 544 | 540 |
| New Zealand | 531 | 523 | 521 |
In 2021, Australia had 80% of students reaching the PIRLs benchmarks. Only six countries achieved higher: Italy (83%), Finland (84%), England (86%), Russia (89%), Singapore (90%) and Hong Kong (92%). Twenty-eight countries had lower scores than Australia in 2021.
See also https://blog.aare.edu.au/naplan-time-to-think-differently/ and https://blog.aare.edu.au/naplan-there-is-no-need-to-panic/
Funding and fairness
A continuing trend for Australia is, however, the poor outcomes for students from low SES and Indigenous backgrounds. Perhaps Australia’s literacy outcomes have more to do with funding and fairness than pedagogy.
The data from the 2022 programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), which assesses the literacy skills of students who are 15 years old, show that Australia’s performance is above the OECD average, comparable to America, and slightly above students from the United Kingdom. Eight countries were identified as performing significantly higher than Australia and 68 countries performed significantly lower. Australia’s performance has remained relatively unchanged since 2015, whereas the United Kingdom’s results has declined. Despite this evidence, there are still those who think we would benefit from importing approaches to literacy teaching from England and the United States of America (Hunter, Stobart & Haywood, 2024).
Borrowing policy
Countries often “policy borrow” from other countries; despite advice that innovation is more likely to be more effective than borrowing. Hargreaves (2010) and Dinham (2015) are two Australian researchers, who have questioned the appropriateness of Australia looking to the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom (UK) for guidance in education.
Dinham (2015) described Australia’s borrowing of educational ideas from other countries as ill-advised, arguing that Australia has accepted the myths and beliefs underpinning educational innovations almost without evidence or questioning, because of our close links with the UK and the USA, instead of their proven success and transferability.
Lingard (2010) also questioned Australia’s policy borrowing and argued instead for policy learning that takes into account ‘national and local histories, cultures and so on’ (p. 132). Policy borrowing led to the decision to introduce a standardised testing system based on the systems used in the USA and England. It is questionable whether Australia learned from the mistakes of the USA and England when designing the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).
Why are we borrowing policies from countries that are not doing any better than Australia?
In England, a policy shift to a mandated approach to the teaching and assessing of synthetic phonics in the early years has led to an improvement in children’s ability to pass the Year One Phonics Screening Check (PSC). England’s Department for Education (DfE, https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education) has acknowledged that “evidence suggests that the introduction of the check has had an impact on pupils’ attainment in phonics, but not an identifiable impact on their attainment in literacy’ (DfE 2015, p. 8; Patmore, 2021) and enjoyment of reading by children in England is at its lowest level since 2005 (Clark et al, 2023).
In addition to the falloff in enjoyment of reading, it has recently been estimated that up to 25% of upper primary school students in England are unable to meet expected reading standards, and lack the fluency required to extract meaning from age-related texts (Herts for Learning Education, n.d. https://www.hfleducation.org/).
Despite this, in a recent report from the Grattan institute (Hunter, Stobart & Haywood, 2024) Australia is encouraged to follow existing policy initiatives from England (and America) to improve literacy learning despite any evidence to suggest that approaches to literacy teaching in these countries are working any better than those already operating in Australia.
Who should we follow?
When policy shopping, perhaps we should choose the countries we follow more carefully. In the republic of Ireland children outperform their English peers in reading without an emphasis on Synthetic phonics (Ingram et al, 2023). Additionally, Canada’s success, where curricula until most recently were mostly aligned with Balanced Literacy (BL), has largely been ignored.
We contend that policy makers should critically consider what is happening in Canada (and Australia) before adopting policies from other countries that have not been proven to work better than approaches well established in Australian schools, as demonstrated by data. They should also consider the plethora of reading research that is available.
Reading Research
Much is written about reading research. But teachers sometimes only get to read research papers or summaries of papers that their employer has pre-chosen to support current policy or to provide the rationale for proposed changes. Further doubts and insecurities are fuelled by inaccurate media reports of declining reading standards, suggestions that teachers are the cause of this decline, and claims that reading science is settled. A common claim from those outside education, is that teacher education courses have neglected to teach what teachers need to know about reading. That’s despite rigorous teacher education accreditation processes.
A narrow view of reading
Suggested solutions to the perceived reading crisis are often based on a narrow view of reading and reading research. They do not take into consideration the needs or contexts of all learners. At this time the recommended approaches are scripted, commercial packages that prioritise phonics and decoding using texts with phonologically regular words (called decodable texts), and controlled language with limited meaning. These texts were originally designed for use with beginning readers. But publishers have taken up the challenge of creating this style of texts for all primary grades. The outcome? Some schools have removed all of their predictive and authentic texts and those classified as wider reading. They have been replaced by decodable or controlled texts. This is also a time when schools have reduced their investment in libraries and librarians. (Merga et al, 2021)
An emphasis on phonics and a diet of decodable texts won’t help students become readers who read for pleasure. Nor will it prepare them for the texts they will need to read in high school or for that matter, life. A narrow, one size fits all approach to the teaching of reading, based on what works with students who have dyslexia or reading difficulties, cannot possibly meet the needs of all Australian students, and does not acknowledge that teachers are best placed to make teaching decisions for the students in their classrooms.
Focus on those in need
While we do not agree that there is a crisis in reading in Australia, we do agree that students from low SES backgrounds, Indigenous students, and those experiencing learning difficulties need more focused assistance. Much research has been conducted in this area and should be utilised to make the necessary changes for these students, including funding and staffing measures based upon equity rather than equality.
Teachers must always think critically about research, and the various reading models and frameworks being suggested or promoted and make teaching decisions based on the needs of the students they are teaching, not what is promoted by think tanks or the media. With their theoretical and practical wisdom, along with their content and contextual knowledge, teachers should be supported to make decisions that best meet the needs of the students in their classrooms. As authors of this paper, we are confident that teachers continue to work hard to meet the different needs of the diverse children in their care, despite the many traps in the reading jungle.
References
Baroutsis, A., & Woods, A. (2018). Children resisting deficit: What can children tell us about literate lives? Global studies of childhood, 8(4), 325-338. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610618814842.
Clark, C., Picton, I., & Galway, M., (2023) Children and young people’s reading in 2023. National Literacy Trust, https://nlt.cdn.ngo/media/documents/Reading_trends_2023.pdf .
Comber, B. (2023). An interview with Professor Barbara Comber. Literacy, 57(2), 88-93.
Dinham, S. (2015). The worst of both worlds: How the U.S. and U.K. are influencing education in Australia. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23(49), 1–19.
Hargreaves, A. (2010). Andy Hargreaves on the fourth way. In N. Barnard (Ed.). The NAPLAN Debate: Professional Voice 8(1) 55–60.
Hunter, J., Stobart, A., & Haywood, A. (2024). The Reading Guarantee: How to give every child the best chance of success. The Grattan Institute.
Ingram, J., Stiff, J., Cadwallader, S., Lee, G., & Kayton, H. (2023). PISA 2022: National report for England. Government Social Research.
Larsen, S. A. (2023, September 29). Are Australian students’ academic skills declining? Interrogating 25 years of national and international standardised assessment data. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hvw3j
Lingard, B. (2010). Policy borrowing, policy learning: Testing times in Australian schooling. Critical Studies in Education, 51(2), 129–147.
Merga, M. K., & Ferguson, C. (2021). School librarians supporting students’ reading for pleasure : A job description analysis. The Australian journal of education, 65(2), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004944121991275
Patmore, H. (2021). The Impact of the Introduction of the Phonics Screening Check in English Schools (2012-2021) (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield.
Mackenzie, N.M., & Tassone, M. (2024). Reading Research: beyond the media hype. Hot Topic, Australian Literacy educator’s Association.
Thanks so much, Noella. As Iâm sure you know the right wing activists have been as busy in Canada as they have the rest of the world. Your blog is a breath of fresh air in the midst of the cloudiness that they are spreading, once again, across Canada. Your blogs are clear but honour the complexity of both the process and our current understanding of literacy learning.
Have you ever wondered, as I have, whether there is a Reading Acquisition Device (RAD) in our cognitive structure, similar to the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) posited by linguistics? I ask because of the evidence that some children learn to read almost effortlessly. I was one of those children, having learned to read with no instruction before entering school at age 5. When I suggested to my mother that it must have been because she read to us faithfully every night at bedtime, she reacted negatively to my simplistic view, pointing out that my brother who sat beside me every night didnât learn to read until he was in Grade Three, and then only after much effort and frustration (he became an architect, the most successful of my siblings). My older son also struggled, things clicked for him earlier than my brother, but he was in Grade Two before it all came together (he is also an architect). And there is the phenomenon of the hyperlexic child, who reads too soon, an isolated written skill among a range of otherwise limited social language skills. From my understanding, the LAD was posited by linguistics because there was no stimulus-response way to understand how children acquire language, so perhaps overtime our brains began to pick up the necessary clues and put them together for us, so long as we were in a rich verbal language environment. And children apparently varied significantly in how efficient and well developed their LAD operated, so some still needed support in learning to speak effectively. My sense is that the same might be true for reading acquisition: there has to be something different happening in the brains of young children that make learning to read an effortless process for some, a relatively straightforward process for most, and a struggle for 10-15 %.
Having taught Kindergarten and Grade One for a number of years, and working in special education with children from K-4 who were experiencing difficulties with both spoken and written language, I have observed these differences and struggled with an explanation for these wide variations. Iâd be interested in your thoughts about this.
Cheers,
Pat
Hello Pat, Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful response to the posts. I wish you were closer so we could chat. I have, like you, wondered why some children learn easily and others do not. The message from Gough and Hillinger in the 80s ‘ learning to talk is ‘natural’ and learning to read is an unnatural act seem to still be the accepted wisdom. However, the discussion at the moment seems to have moved to include recognition of the need for time and space for implicit learning -” Leaving implicit learning out of the picture has resulted in overreliance on explicit instruction and learning via the slower, conscious system. That creates a problem of “too much to teach, too little time”. Bringing explicit instruction and implicit learning into better alignment is the solution” “With so much instruction about components of reading there is little time left for reading .” Seidenberg, June 2024
This is good to hear from one of the founders of the SoR movement.
Perhaps there might be hope for a meeting in the middle. Seidenberg is saying that we are teaching children things they do not need to be taught – ‘The learning part has been extensively studied elsewhere, however. If you think of learning to read as an iceberg, learning via explicit instruction is the visible part above the surface. The much bigger part that is below the surface is learned implicitly. It is hidden from view, but researchers have uncovered its properties using the methods of brain and behavioral sciences.’
Keep in touch Pat – love the way you think.
I like the iceberg metaphor, Noella. Imagine if we spent as much time with explicit teaching of oral language as we do written language, when we now know that most oral language learning is an implicit process. I’ll never forget my shock when I attended an in-service provided by a kindergarten teacher in a local board of education where they were excited about a systematic phonics program they had adopted. When I asked her how much time this took in what was then a half-time kindergarten program, she said it was their entire program. Need I say more?
Having said that, I do realize there are some children who do require explicit instruction, with both oral and written language, in order to be successful speakers and readers. But, surely, we have ways to identify and support these children while still providing enriched programs for children who, fortunately, do not need this level of explicitness.
Hello again Pat,
I also like the iceberg metaphor.
You would probably not be aware of my pedagogical approach to teaching writing – Draw, Talk, Write, Share (DTWS). It is based upon Vygotskian principles of starting with what children know and can do and building on. There is a whole chapter on this in our second edition of our Understanding and supporting young writers from birth to 8 book. There are also older blog posts on my blog that talk about DTWS I have been working on it for years. In preschool the idea is to encourage children to draw and talk informally as they draw and then to share more formally with others – learn to ask and respond to questions using their drawings as the focus. When they move into school their text construction starts this same was but they learn to add labels to their drawings and then add sentences to their drawings. The idea is they are creating multimodal texts from the start and writing is added to their drawn and spoken texts rather than replacing these. I would love to chat to you about it – I think it would appeal to you. It respects what children know and can do when they start school – and builds on. It is also an amazing observation process and sitting with children and drawing and talking with them has taught me so much about what they know and can go. Things you don’t find out using tests. I am still enjoying working in schools using this flexible approach – No blank pages! Everyone can participate. I talk about text construction of which writing is one part.
Must go – send me an email address if you want me to send you anything to read. Noella
Thanks Noella and happy Friday!
I look forward to having some time to read now!
Jenny