I don’t remember when or how I learned to read. I know that when I was a child, our house was filled with print material.
My mother was a voracious reader of novels, everything from Raymond Chandler to Nevil Chute, and my dad preferred Reader’s Digest and Life magazine.
Reading was just something everybody did for personal learning and entertainment.
Conversations among my friends were more often that not based on “something I just read.”
Then in 1956, TV supplanted the daily reading habit for many of us. Learning to read was something you did at school and what followed was nearly 70 years of essentially unproductive academic debate about how reading should be taught.
The ongoing debate about the best way to teach reading focused for much of that time (and still does) on two methods: phonics-based and “whole language” reading programs.
Phonetic reading instruction requires children basically to dissect both familiar and unfamiliar words into parts and then join the parts together to form sentences and find meaning.
Whole-language learning, on the other hand, has been less focused on rules and repetition and emphasizes the flow and meaning of the text, accentuating reading for meaning and using language in ways that relate to the students’ own lives and language patterns.
There have been countless arguments on each side, but never any strong enough to convince educators and policy makers that one method is clearly better than the other.
One province, Ontario, has even gone as far as to consider what I’d like to call “literacy by litigation” in support of the phonetic approach.
A conclusion of that debate has yet to be accomplished, but before we go any further, let’s consider 91原创 reading scores in the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment. That assessment had 15-year-old 91原创 kids in sixth place of 88 countries internationally.
91原创 kids led the English-speaking world in PISA reading scores, behind only China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong and Estonia and well ahead of Ireland, New Zealand, the United States and Australia.
I say the English-speaking world because learning to read in English involves a confusing system with only 26 letters but about 44 phonemes (the smallest unit of sound in speech) that can be spelled in hundreds of ways but that “sound out” the same.
This makes teaching beginning readers by “sounding out words” a formidable task, if only because of the number of words like tough, bough, cough and dough that look different (male and mail) but sound alike.
Our complicated language also raises a whole other series of questions about whether both teaching reading and learning to read (the latter is, after all, an intimate and very personal achievement) are both better accomplished individually or in groups of various sizes, as if those alternatives are available in the public school system.
That question was certainly not resolved or even assisted by the Nov. 9, 2012, Supreme Court of Canada unanimous decision recognizing that learning to read is not a privilege, but a basic and essential human right.
No argument there, but the Supreme Court went even further.
Specifically, the court found that Jeffrey Moore, a British Columbia student with dyslexia, had a right to receive the intensive supports and interventions he needed to learn to read.
The claim was that the North 91原创 School Board and, for that matter the provincial Ministry of Education, both failed to provide special education programs and services, including intensive individual intervention, and by doing so denied Moore meaningful access to education, resulting in a discrimination case under the B.C. Human Rights Code.
While that certainly applies to children with disabilities like dyslexia, it does not take into account that in any classroom of 20 to 30 kids there are children from a wide variety of backgrounds, some of whom arrive from literacy-rich households and others who arrive from homes that are quite the opposite in terms of preparation and motivation to learn to read.
The Moore vs. School District 44 (North 91原创) decision went on to essentially to “have its cake and eat it too,” by avoiding the age old “phonics” versus “whole language” debate, saying: “Early word-reading skills are critical, but they are not the only necessary components in reading outcomes. Robust evidence-based phonics programs should be one part of broader, evidence-based, rich classroom language arts instruction, including but not limited to story telling, book reading, drama, and text analysis.”
The debate continues but the good news from PISA is that in Canada, the kids are learning to read.
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
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