The results of an international study into reading skills offer reason for optimism for Australian students. But tragically, too many children are still being left behind.
Education Minister Simon Birmingham is right to be concerned about the number of children struggling with literacy - but this test is not the solution.
Many young children can give the false impression that they are learning to read, when in fact they are mostly guessing words from pictures or context. This test will help to identify these students.
Being able to sound out letters in words doesn’t mean you can understand them. There is no clear evidence that a new phonics screening test for children in Year 1 will help improve reading levels.
Phonics programs can be helpful for students with very particular learning needs - but it’s not a one-size-fits-all literacy solution. Here are some things you should be wary of.
Channel Ten’s newly announced show, The Great Australian Spelling Bee, may seem like a great platform for promoting literacy skills. But it is promoting the memorisation of pointless, low-frequency words rather than anything helpful.
The Reading Recovery program assumes reading is a natural process that can be guessed from pictures, but there are far better programs with proven effectiveness.
We all want young children to be given the very best opportunities to become successful, engaged and passionate readers. The teaching of reading is constantly mired, however, in a tired old debate between…
A new batch of Australian five-year-olds has just started school, eager to learn to read and write. Unfortunately for them, English has one of the most difficult spelling systems of any language, thanks…
Teaching children to read with phonics has been a central plank of recent “Govian” education policy. A new set of statistics shows that 74% of children in the first year of primary school now meet the…
How can there be such high profile disagreement about an issue as extensively researched and important as the teaching of reading to young children? In July, a group of teachers and phonics consultants…
Reading capability is vital for young people to be able to access and engage with the curriculum by the end of primary school and even more so at secondary school. But the data we have indicates that a…
Almost half of all Australians aged 15-74 years had literacy skills below the level required to participate effectively in our society, according to a 2008 study from the Australian Bureau of Statistics…
Children and teenagers today do all the things that children and teenagers have more or less always done – they talk to their friends, have dinner with the family, and watch TV. However, as even the casual…
Human speech has long been present in every culture, and our brains have evolved specialized features to enable its rapid development when we are exposed to the speech of others. Reading however is a relatively…
Senior Research Fellow, The Centre for Independent Studies; Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University