Results from a recent trial of England’s phonics check in South Australia show teachers liked it and students need it.
Despite improvements in the national average score, the 2016 PIRLS report confirms many Australian children continue to be left behind.
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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.
Research in England has found that the proposed test was no more accurate than the teacher’s judgement in identifying children with reading difficulties.
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Education Minister Simon Birmingham is right to be concerned about the number of children struggling with literacy - but this test is not the solution.
Children need to learn how to sound out words they haven’t seen before.
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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.
Phonics helps teach children how to merge separate sounds together to make it one word.
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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 are not helpful for all learners.
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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.
Pressuring kids to memorise obscure, low frequency words does not promote good learning.
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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 small amount of research that has been undertaken on Reading Recovery does show a positive effect. But all teacher interventions show some positive effect, and it’s not enough to justify continued use of the program.
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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.
Literacy doesn’t just mean being able to recognise letters and words on a page.
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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…
English is a complex language with roots in many others, and the teaching of it should reflect this.
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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…
Spell it out.
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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…
The writing’s on the wall – and they can’t read it.
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…
Struggling to read? You may not be using your brain effectively.
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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…
Despite ideas to the contrary, the evidence shows that texting does not make us bad spellers.
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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…
A year four slump can be avoided if children are given the tools to read when very young.
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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