Reading Recovery

A Meta-synthesis of the Research

(Prepared for the Edmonton Public School Board)

Abstract: Reading Recovery, aimed at struggling, beginning readers, has been the subject of much debate from its beginnings as an intensive psycholinguistic program to its current, balanced literacy approach, whereby pseudo-phonics instruction and cueing systems are integral to its teaching strategies. In question is its efficacy and cost effectiveness.

Introduction

It is not without some apprehension, indeed diffidence, that I embarked on a journey into the cloistered world of reading research—to say nothing of broaching the hallowed halls of Alberta Education—in an effort to understand two simple truths: first, why, with one of the best educational systems in the world, do we have so many functional illiterates; second, why is the preponderance of these troubled readers, boys?

Axiomatically, then, reading instruction—and reading research—should focus on what works for boys. (Recent reading research has shown that what works for boys, works equally well for girls. E.g., The Effects of Synthetic Phonics – A Seven Year Longitudinal Study. Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson.)

Understanding the truth of functional illiteracy—to say nothing of the costs to society—becomes one of knowing the optimal method, in a classroom environment, of teaching boys how to read. This method (not methods—more on learning styles later), as the research will show, is not to the detriment of girls’ learning; rather, their learning is also enhanced; it’s mutually beneficial.

Though my research revolves around Reading Recovery™, as with any research, I am reminded of Muir’s Law, which states, “Whenever you try to look at something by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Now, because Reading Recovery™ is aimed at the (typically) lowest 20% of beginning readers, among this 20% will be identified those with dyslexia, ADHD or other purported phonological inhibitors to learning to read. As I will show, from the research, these inhibitors also have an ameliorative, common denominator in the optimal method for teaching children how to read. It should also be understood that though the lowest 20% of beginning readers are more readily identifiable doesn’t mean that the remaining 80% will become functionally literate and therefore can be neglected for receiving this method of instruction. Canada’s 42% functional illiteracy rate for adults 16 to 65 speaks to the need to address this 80% as well.

In the contents of this report, rather than narrow the discussion to specifics around Reading Recovery™, I provide a historical context for some of the “modern” theories of how children learn to read that have influenced Reading Recovery. The names or attributes of these theories may have changed with time but their atavistic legacy remains

Contents

Background

•A Brief History of the English Alphabetic Communications System

•Reading: The Great Debate

Definitions of Literacy

Literacy Terms

Three Cueing System

Learning Styles and Modality Matching

Reading Recovery

CONCLUSIONS

LAST WORD…for parents

Background—A Brief History of the English Alphabetic Communications System

Our inherited sound-to-symbol communications system is an alphabetic invention, Roman/Latin but derived from the Greek (Alpha, Beta…, )

Just as in learning to read, I said, we were satisfied when we knew the letters of the alphabet, which are very few, in all their recurring sizes and combinations; not slighting them as unimportant whether they occupy a space large or small, but everywhere eager to make them out; and not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognise them wherever they are found.

Plato—The Republic

When we first learned to read was it not necessary at first to know the names of the letters, their shapes, their value in syllables, their differences, then the words and their case, their quantity long or short, their accent, and the rest?

Dionysius of Helicarnassus

Cited by R. M. Wilson, Reading – A History

From earliest times, learning to read using an alphabet began with knowing the letters.

The Beginnings of English

Though the Romans were in Britain for about 400 years from 43 BC to 410 AD, they had little effect on the Celtic language. Almost immediately following the Romans’ withdrawal, the basis for Old English began with the invasion of the Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. By the end of the sixth century Old English  (also known as Anglo Saxon) was well established. The name of the language, Englisc (sc spelling representing the sh sound) is found in Old English texts from this period. Latin, though, was still the communications medium of the church. In 731, as one of the best examples of early Latin, the Venerable Bede wrote the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation). Much of the Old English (including Bede’s work) that survives today (compiled in the University of Toronto) is a result of translation ordered by King Alfred (849 - 899). J and Q were notably absent from the 24-letter alphabet. Spelling would have been exactly how the language sounded to the scribe. The language varied considerably, especially in the north of England where the volume of Viking incursions by the middle of the 8th century caused a geographic division of England, known as Danelaw, which was approximated by a line from Chester to London. Norse and Old English vocabularies intermingled across this divide.

To mitigate mispronunciation, new conventions of spelling were introduced such as consonant doubling to identify short sounds in the preceding vowel, as in hopping, but long, where not doubled, as in hoping. At this time, too, all letters were pronounced, including the final ‘e’ as in stane (stone). Gradually, pronunciation of the final ‘e’ was dropped but retained in the spelling to indicate that the preceding vowel should be stressed. While these generalizations guided spelling and pronunciation, spelling still followed pronunciation and pronunciation still followed dialect, ergo so did spelling. This serves to illustrate that reading and writing are complementary but, nevertheless, discrete processing skills. It is possible to know how to read efficiently but not to write at the same level.

The Caxton printing press (1476) heralded the start of Early Modern English—the period between the 15th and 18th century—and inchoate, standardized spelling and pronunciation, but with all the extant irregularities thrown in. To obviate the problems of an alphabet ill-matched to a vagarious orthography, an artificial phonetic alphabet was suggested by John Hart, 1551, in his series of books on "the vices and faultes of our writing, which causes it to be tedious, and long in learnyng: and learned hard, and evill to read." This was followed with similar proposals by Sir Thomas Smithe, William Bullokar, James Elphinston, Alexander Gill, Charles Butler, Ben Jonson, Alexander Ellis, Sir Isaac Pitman, and many others including Benjamin Franklin.

By the end of the 18th century, lexicographers, grammarians (Johnson, Sheridan, Walker…and Webster, particularly his Blue-backed Speller) and the ubiquitous printing press contributed to the stability of the language—a relative term, the English language being always fluid, but now more glacial.

The throes of the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and 19th centuries profoundly affected social and economic life leading to many calls for reform, among which were laws on child labour and the Elementary Education Act of 1870. In the U.S., Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance laws in 1852, followed by New York in 1853. New Brunswick School Act of 1837 paved the way for the establishment ten years later of a central authority, and the special inspection of 1844 of all schools in the province. In Alberta in 1895 there was one separate and 58 public schools districts. When Alberta became a province in 1905, there were 602 school districts.

With compulsory education, first came the need to teach reading, since reading is the basis of all learning. History provided many instructional examples and like today these ranged from an alphabetic approach (sometimes referred to as bottom-up) to a picture/whole word approach (top-down).

Friedrich Gedike (1754-1803) influenced educators with his proposal for a natural approach whereby children would learn from whole words first rather than meaningless letters. Reading could be delayed until the child was ready, about ten, when it would naturally occur. Comenius (1592 – 1670) in his Orbis Pictus advocated picture reading, since from the mere looking at the picture the child would know the word. Contrasting with these methods, John Hart’s (1569) An Orthographie and Richard Mulcaster’s (1582) Elementarie both advocated the utility of the ‘alphabetic principle’ via explicit teaching of

letter-sound relationships for beginning reading .

Of significantly greater influence, Horace Mann (1796 – 1859) derided a decoding process, referring to letters as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions”.  In teaching whole words, he said, “This lesson would be like an excursion to the fields of Elysium.”

In the first part of the 20th century, two world wars sandwiching a protracted depression left little room for further discussions of literacy. Status quo, as evidenced by the examples given in the primers at the turn of century—Alberta’s reference to phonics notwithstanding— would become entrenched with the birth of Dick and Jane in 1927, fathered by William S. Gray, with Scott, Forseman & Co as paternal guardians and Zerna Sharp as the watchful consultant. It would be the start of the Great Debate

A Chronology of Reading: The Great Debate

Before delving into the Great Debate I will define some terms commonly used in reading research. When reading experts, such as Yetta Goodman (The Reading Teacher, Vol. 44, No. 6, p.377), lend credence to populist beliefs that phonics has been tried and found wanting, using the Dick and Jane Series as an example of phonics instruction, then defining terms helps contextualize the debate. Further, as noted in What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching, National Council on Teacher Quality, May 2006:

•Many texts correctly note the importance of explicit and systematic teaching but then redefine what such teaching entails. Texts tell future teachers that it is possible to provide explicit instruction in phonics while still acting as a coach, not an instructor. For example, “Explicit phonics instruction is best delivered in the coaching style.” Systematic, defined by science as phonics instruction within which “all of the major letter-sound correspondences are taught and are covered in a clearly defined sequence,” is redefined as a “balance between instruction geared toward helping children develop conventional literacy concepts and activities in which children are allowed and encouraged to explore literacy on their own terms.”

Following, then, are some common, literacy terms:

Glossary of Terms

Let’s start with ‘A’:

Alphabet: noun a set of letters or symbols in a fixed order used to represent the basic set of speech sounds of a language.

•What this means—and just looking at the word alphabet won’t give you its meaning—is that symbols, which we know as letters, represent discrete speech sounds, known as phonemes. There is no intrinsic meaning to the sound (phoneme) represented by the symbol or symbols (grapheme).

The Many Definitions of Literacy

1.UNESCO: A person is literate if s/he can both read and write a short simple statement describing his/her everyday life.

2.IALS: [Literacy is] the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities at home, at work and in the community - to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. (Stats Canada)

•Prose Literacy— the knowledge and skills needed to understand and use information from texts like editorials, news stories, poems and fiction;

•Document Literacy – the knowledge and skills required to locate and use information contained in various formats, including job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables and graphics;

•Quantitative Literacy – the knowledge and skills required to apply arithmetic operations, either alone or sequentially, to numbers embedded in printed materials: balancing a chequebook, calculating a tip, completing an order form or determining interest on a loan from an advertisement.

Analytic Phonics: A passive instructional technique associated with child-centred learning whereby the logic of word structures is to be implicitly acquired. Sight words have first to be memorized with picture clues as aids.

Balanced Instruction: Multicomponential [instructional] elements should include the development of decoding skills, sight words and rich vocabulary development, specific comprehension skills, and reading within a sociocultural context. Other multicomponential instructional areas necessary for developing balanced reading include extensive authentic reading and writing; use of semantic and syntactic contextual cues; self-monitoring and self-regulation; and practice in reading with fluency, speed, and accuracy.

Coarticulation: The articulation of two or more speech sounds together, so that one influences the other.

Contructivism: A theory of knowledge which claims that knowledge is not passively received but actively constructed by the learner, and that the function of cognition is adaptive, serving to organise experience, rather than discover reality. Fundamental to social constructivism is the concept of scaffolding, and working within the learner's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD).

Digraph: A combination of two letters representing one sound, as in ph and ey.

Diphthong: A sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves (elides) towards another (as in coin, loud); a diagraph representing the sound of a diphthong or single vowel (as in feat).

Direct Instruction: A specific instructivist curriculum developed by Siegfried Englemann at the University of Oregon, found to be the most effective teaching method in Project Follow Through study.  Children receiving Direct Instruction were found to outperform controls on all scales, including achievement, basic skills, and self-esteem.  Developed originally for disadvantaged children, it has been tested in all groups, including rural, urban, disadvantaged, working and middle class, and gifted children, showing success in all groups. (DISTAR is an acronym for Direct Instruction System for Teaching Arithmetic and Reading.)

(1) Explicit Phonics: A logical, sequential instruction in the letter-sound correspondences of the alphabet, then application of that knowledge to form words as a first step in beginning reading for all students.

(2) Explicit Phonics: Explicit, systematic phonics instruction is instruction matched to students' developmental levels. It incorporates a scope and sequence for content delivery and a variety of word-study activities. Such instruction promotes student engagement and accountability through direct teaching.

Grapheme: The smallest, meaningful, contrastive unit in a writing system; the graphical instantiation of a phoneme; for example /b/, /sh/, /oi/.

Onset: An onset is the part of the syllable that precedes the vowel of the syllable.

Phonological Awareness: Cognitive awareness of the sound structure of language. It includes the ability for auditory segmentation of units of speech, such as a word's syllables and a syllable's individual phonemes.

Phoneme: Any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. English is variously represented as having between 40 and 45 phonemes depending on the accent (see example earlier on Mary, Marry, Merry).

Phonemic Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate sounds in a language at the phoneme level.

Phonics: A method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with symbols in an alphabetic system

And an opaque explanation from the IRA on the role of phonics:

Explicit instruction in phonics, or the relationships between sounds and letters, has become as much a political issue as an educational one. IRA therefore asserts the following:

•Teaching phonics is an important aspect of beginning reading instruction. However, effective phonics instruction is embedded in the context of a complete reading and language arts program.

•Classroom teachers value and teach phonics as part of their reading programs. Rather than debate whether phonics should be taught, effective teachers of reading and writing ask when, how, how much, and under what circumstances phonics should be taught.

Rime: A rime is the part of a syllable that consists of its vowel and any consonant sounds that come after it.

Schema: A representation of a plan or a theory in the form of an outline or model.

Sight Reading: Memorization of words by their shape.

Synthetic Phonics: An accelerated form of active, or direct phonics that does not use sight vocabulary. Children are taught letter-sound correspondences first then how to blend (synthesise) the sounds to make words. The logic of word structures is explicitly acquired in matter of weeks. (Alberta Education curriculum continues with analytic phonics into the fifth and sixth grade.)

Systematic Phonics: Phonics instruction within which all of the major letter-sound correspondences are taught and are covered in a clearly defined sequence

Zone of Proximal Development: the zone between what the learner can do alone and what he/she can do with assistance (Vygotsky, 1978).

Whole Language: A philosophy of language instruction emphasizing integration of all language skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening); reading for meaning; and contextualized language learning and use.

Goodman (Ken and wife, Yetta) and Frank Smith are credited with popularizing Whole Language as a derivative of their psycholinguistic guessing game. Goodman states, “Three language systems interact in written language: the graphophonic (sounds and letter patterns), the syntactic (sentence patterns), and the semantic (meanings). We can study how each one works in reading and writing, but they can’t be isolated for instruction without creating non-language abstractions.” Whole Language is the antithesis of Synthetic or Explicit Phonics.

And now, back to the past:

The Great Debate actually began in 1955 with Rudolf Flesch’s book, Why Johnny Can’t Read. The book was a damning indictment of the prevalent beginning reading method of teaching, the Look-and-Say, Dick and Jane series. Gray immediately denounced Flesch. But, 30 weeks on the bestseller’s list for Flesch’s book—which also had a section on how to teach reading using phonics—meant Gray had to do something to defend his look-and-say, whole word method: with the help of his publisher, he established the International Reading Association (IRA), installing himself as the first president. Other notable presidents after Gray, which speaks to the philosophical orientation of the organization, include Theodore Clymer (1964-65), Ken Goodman (1981-82) and Marie Clay (1992-93). Publications of the IRA include The Reading Teacher and Reading Research Quarterly—a caution to consider the source.

In 1955, Flesch had brought literacy to the attention of the American public, particularly parents; in 1957, with the launch of Sputnik and the Western world in the throes of the Cold War, the consequences of illiteracy came to the fore with politicians. With the U.S. apparently falling behind in the space race, perhaps there was a problem of national significance.

Following three years of study from 1962 to 1965, Jeanne Chall’s eponymous study, Learning to Read—The Great Debate, came down on the side of Flesch: “The long-existing fear that an initial code-emphasis produces readers who do not read for meaning or with enjoyment is unfounded. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that better results in terms of reading for meaning are achieved with programs that emphasize code at the start than with programs that stress meaning at the beginning.”

And so the controversy raged unabated.

Proscribing phonics with equal disdain, Smith’s Whole Language cohort, Goodman rejected any research that disproved his theories: “Many so-called ‘skills’ were arbitrarily chosen. Whatever research they’re based on was done with rats and pigeons—or with children who were treated in the research like rats and pigeons. Rats are not kids; rats don’t develop language or think human thoughts. Artificial skill sequences turn schools into mazes for children to stumble through.” (What’s Whole in Whole Language, 1986. p. 9.)

Three Cueing System

Central to Whole Language theory and by association, Reading Recovery, is the notion of the Three Cueing System, illustrated on the next page. Adams, one of the most cited of reading researchers, was flummoxed when one of her audience first asked her about the Three Cueing System. It was as foreign to her as it was to other reading researchers. Particularly distressing to Adams was that Syntax and Semantics completely subordinated Graphophonics cues, which went against all the research. Poorly developed word recognition skills [sound-spelling relationships] are the most pervasive and debilitating source of reading difficulty (Adams, 1990; Perfetti, 1985; Share and Stanovich, 1995).

Though Goodman did not conceive the Venn diagram, Adams’ continued investigation uncovered that the term "cueing systems" comes from Ken and Yetta Goodman, Carolyn Burke, Marie Clay, Brian Cambourne, and New Zealand's Reading in Junior Classes.

Despite Adams’ et al injunction related to miscue analysis, that phono-graphemic deficiency identifies poor readers, not any semantic or syntactic cues, as recently as 2007 Alberta Education was entertaining the idea (and may now have introduced it) of a Diagnostic Reading Program based on (Goodman’s) miscue analysis.

In his book, Phonics Phacts (1993), Goodman expounded on his theories of how children lean to read, including the encouragement for invented spelling. He makes a virtue out of solecism as a convenience to his dogma, which doesn’t surface till page 84:

We learn to read and write as we learn to speak and listen. From whole to part, not from part to whole. Only when we comprehend the whole are we fully able to see how the parts relate to it. Kids who can read are usually good at learning phonics because they can put phonic relationships into context of making sense of print.

Reading instruction in Alberta through the 50s and 60s was Look & Say; in the 70s and early 80s it was Nelson’s Language Experience; and in the late 80s and 90s Impressions’ Whole Language dominated. In reality, very little changed in the fundamental, meaning-first, philosophy towards reading instruction through this period, except it may have worsened, precipitating reading recovery programs. The sidebar shows how Alberta Education transitioned from Language Experience to Whole Language in the recommended material. Spot the difference.

Alberta Education, mired in Goodman’s psycholinguistic (Whole Language) guessing game, uses his invalidated strategies to teach children:

By using such visual cues as location of the text, capital letters, word shape and length, beginning letters and double consonants, together with context cues, students recognize the names of characters in favourite stories or words associated with personal interests, such as hockey, pizza and dinosaur.    

When reading, a student pauses at an unfamiliar word, skips it and says a placeholder word like blank, and reads on to make sense of the sentence: “The blank has a long grey trunk, big feet and large ears.” The student then rereads the sentence, inserting the word elephant.

It was no wonder that in the 80s, Flesch came out with his second book, [After 25 years] Why Johnny Still Can’t Read.

Pictures cues, saying “blank” and trying to use context are the strategies of poor readers. Encouraging such strategies further debilitates the poor reader by inculcating processes that are inefficient and ineffective. 

Of particular importance in Adams’ report, for current practice, is that training phonemic awareness produced little reading benefit unless children were also taught the printed letters by which each phoneme was represented (p. 54). Perforce, this instruction in sound-letter [phoneme-grapheme] relationship has to be explicit. More recent research (McGuiness. Language Development and Learning to Read [2005]) shows that even very young children are explicitly aware of phonemes in natural speech, and that this can be demonstrated at least by the age of three (p. 80). Called into question, then, is the practice of onset and rime or other associative (non-specific) tasks intended to induce development of a condition—phonemic awareness. Specific instruction that calls attention to the phoneme-grapheme relationship is what enables, cognitively, phonemic awareness. Rhyme and alliteration may be enjoyable to listen to, but are neither the cause of phonemic awareness acquisition nor its enhancement. There is no evidence that children become more aware of phonemes due to some global-to-segment developmental process (words-to-syllables-to phonemes.

Learning Styles and Modality Matching

Gagne (1965) identified environments conducive to learning in his Conditions of Learning, in which he introduced eight conditions, including the stimulus-response ridiculed by Goodman (rats and pigeons). His “conditions” failed to capture the same attention as Dunn and Dunn’s (1974) learning styles, whereby learning preferences were based on environment, emotional, sociological, physical and psychological needs. Each need was further broken down. The physical need was subdivided as auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic. Because beginning reading had been taught by sight (memorize these sight words) and by sound (phonics), could this be the source of the problem for troubled readers, that their different learning styles weren’t being accommodated?  Learning styles (the VAK, Visual Auditory Kinesthetic, model) became mantra: your child is a visual learner; he prefers to look at pictures; he needs balanced literacy. Your child has an auditory preference; he will learn with phonics (analytic, of course).

Others thought differently: Stahl (2002) Different Strokes for Different Folks stated that “There has been utter failure to find that assessing children’s learning styles and matching to instructional methods has any affect on learning.”

And more recently in the Times Educational supplement (July, 2007), Susan Greenfield stated, “…from a neuro-scientific point of view the learning styles approach to reading is nonsense.”

Reading Recovery (RR)

The English language is alphabetic; its grammatical syntax plus some basic vocabulary is Germanic while the remainder of the vocabulary in large part is of French origin.

Because the English language is represented by an alphabet, an alphabetical method, perforce, is needed to teach it. That method, today, is known as synthetic phonics. All children, boys and girls, regardless of phonological disposition (including dyslexia), derive greatest benefit from systematic, explicit instruction in this method. Is this what is taught in Reading Recovery™?

Synthetic phonics, by that label, was unknown to Marie Clay, the founder of Reading Recovery™. She would have known it as direct, systematic or explicit phonics and she would not have favoured this approach. She favoured the whole language approach to phonics known today as analytic (balanced literacy) but then as intrinsic or implicit phonics. Phonics to Marie Clay was just one, and by no means the most important, of three components of beginning reading, the others being syntax and semantics—the infamous three cueing system. From her book, Becoming Literate:

“Teachers may feel that the critical thing for the child to learn is his sounds, and they may provide an elaborate scheme for teaching that overrated aspect of reading known as phonics ... Current thinking suggests that we may have to revise our thinking about the value of phonics...”

The Beginnings of Reading Recovery

Notwithstanding the research shortcomings, in Clay’s Observation Surveys for RR selection, poor readers would be noted as being deficient in auditory discrimination skills. So, quite serendipitously, instruction in phoneme-grapheme correspondence (sounding out), based on a purported auditory discrimination deficit in poor readers, would result in enhanced reading ability. However, this ostensible success is only because these poor readers were never explicitly taught the sound-letter relationship in the first instance. And if the phonographic instructional process ends up being an act of discovery (see description below) on the part of child—as would be the case if analytic or implied phonics is used (more typical with Reading Recovery or Balanced Literacy)—the child may still learn the associations, but only tentatively (no long term benefit), or not at all.

Reading Recovery is begun [in NZ] one year after formal instruction. The program does not have a set of materials or a step-by-step curriculum, but instead depends, for its effectiveness, on the trained teacher’s ability to observe reading and writing behaviour, to infer the child's intentions and underlying cognitive processing and to make instructional decisions including whether the teacher needs to adjust her/his own behaviour in response to the child.

The goal is to help children discover [operative word] effective reading and writing strategies.

In a longitudinal study of RR, Chapman et al., 2001) found that children selected for the program were, without exception, experiencing major difficulties in detecting sound sequences in words, in relating letters to sounds, and in identifying individual words out of context prior to entering the program. What this means, at the risk of belaboring the point, is that if children were explicitly taught the phoneme-grapheme correspondences in the first instance, they would no longer be candidates for RR; in fact, they would be on the road to becoming independent readers. It would seem, though, that actually teaching a specific skill such as reading is anathema to some teachers. But this attitude is learned, whether by conversion or deference. When Alberta Education, and by default all the school boards, swallow hook, line, and sinker the proselytizing of Goodman, Smith, Harste, Burke…and, yes, Clay, are teachers to blame for toeing the mandated line? No reputable scientist believes that learning to read is as natural as learning to speak, that it is a biologically-developmental, meaning-first process, yet that is the dogma of Whole Language whose mantle is now taken up by Balanced Literacy.

Canada’s literacy problem, unlike other English-speaking countries is not addressed at the Federal level; it is a provincial responsibility. There is no national program to combat functional illiteracy (other than non-profit groups). It would be interesting to see how other countries are addressing what is a common issue to the English speaking nations:

The U.S. National Reading Panel, April 2000

•The characteristics of PA training found to be most effective in enhancing PA, reading, and spelling skills included explicitly and systematically teaching children to manipulate phonemes with letters, focusing the instruction on one or two types of phoneme manipulations rather than multiple types, and teaching children in small groups.

•Systematic synthetic phonics instruction (see sidebar for definition) had a positive and significant effect on disabled readers’ reading skills. These children improved substantially in their ability to read words and showed significant, albeit small, gains in their ability to process text as a result of systematic synthetic phonics instruction. This type of phonics instruction benefits both students with learning disabilities and low-achieving students who are not disabled. Moreover, systematic synthetic phonics instruction was significantly more effective in improving low socioeconomic status (SES) children’s alphabetic knowledge and word reading skills than instructional approaches that were less focused on these initial reading skills.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

U.K. Department for Education & Skills, Rose Report, March 2006

•For most children, high quality, systematic phonic work should start by the age of five, taking full account of professional judgments of children’s developing abilities and the need to embed this work within a broad and rich curriculum. This should be preceded by pre-reading activities that pave the way for such work to start.

•High quality, systematic phonic work as defined by the review should be taught discretely. The knowledge, skills and understanding that constitute high quality phonic work should be taught as the prime approach in learning to decode (to read) and encode (to write/spell) print.

Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training

Teaching Reading—National Enquiry into the Teaching of Reading, December, 2005

•The findings indicated that a strong phonics emphasis is significantly more valuable than a basal-driven, meaning or sight-word approach to early reading instruction, while emphasising other important language factors that require more than just alphabetic code-breaking skills to support reading instruction. The conclusion that systematic phonics is a necessary and effective way to teach all children to read, regardless of method and students’ socio-economic background, was a major contribution to the teaching of reading.

•Consistent findings from this work [NICHD] indicate that the majority of children who enter the early years of schooling at-risk of reading difficulties can and do learn to read at average or above average levels:

… but only if they are identified early and provided with systematic, explicit, and intensive instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies. Substantial research supported by NICHD shows clearly that without systematic, focused and intensive interventions, the majority of children rarely ‘catch-up’. Failure to develop basic reading skills by age nine predicts a lifetime of illiteracy. Unless these children receive the appropriate instruction, more than 74% of the children entering first grade who are at-risk for reading failure will continue to have reading problems into adulthood. On the other hand, the early identification of children at-risk for reading failure, coupled with the provision of comprehensive early reading interventions, can reduce the percentage of children reading below the basic level in the fourth grade (i.e. 38%) to six per cent or less (Lyon, 2003, pp. 3-4).

An International (U.S. & N.Z.) Group of 30 Researchers

EVIDENCE- BASED RESEARCH ON READING RECOVERY

Reading Recovery is not successful with its targeted student population, the lowest performing students.

May 20, 2002

•Reading Recovery is not successful with its targeted student population, the lowest performing students. There is little evidence to show that Reading Recovery has proved successful with the lowest performing students.

•Reading Recovery is not a cost effective solution. Even if it were maximally effective, Reading Recovery is not cost effective because the developers require one-to-one interventions by highly trained teachers. An analysis by Hiebert (1994) found that Reading Recovery was very expensive, costing over $8,000 per student, reflecting in part the costs of training.

•Reading Recovery efficacy studies do not use standard assessment measures. Most evaluations are restricted to the Reading Recovery developers’ own, nonstandard measures. These same measures are used to determine which students will be considered as part of the sample (continued versus discontinued students). Thus, outcomes are inflated and unconvincing to the research community.

•Reading Recovery does not change by capitalizing on research. Reading Recovery developers have been and continue to be resistant to integrating the findings of independent, scientifically based reading research into their program and making it more cost effective. The failure to attend to research in modifying the program is its major downfall. The lack of efficacy of Reading Recovery with the poorest readers is not surprising given the research base that highlights the importance of explicit teaching of phonics for this group. Reading Recovery teaches phonics, but the instruction is not sufficiently explicit.

text (that is, read the words) does not necessarily understand what he or she is reading”. For children particularly, but adults as well, receptive language—the language we can understand but not necessarily articulate—exceeds our productive language—our every day, common usage language. For a child well versed in phoneme-grapheme correspondences, it would be possible to read text beyond even his receptive language, thus giving the appearance but not the substance of comprehension. This task—the mere reading of the text— would be impossible for a child for whom sight words, guessing, saying “blank” (see Alberta Education’s advice), using syntax, or attempting semantics are the inculcated choices. Here we see the distinct advantage of phoneme-grapheme training: the facilitative movement from receptive language, and beyond, into productive language through the actual reading of text. Such lexical expansion is an iterative process: the more a child reads the better reader he becomes, the more advanced texts he is able to tackle. This effect, the Matthew Effect, also works conversely: the less a child reads, the worse he becomes. It is easy to see the social, emotional and self-esteem consequences of a “can do” approach or “can only guess or say blank” approach.

The Reading Recovery™ Council states, “During lessons, teachers attend to letters, sounds, and words and incorporate learning about letter-sound relationships during the reading and writing of extended text and as explicit, direct instruction”, yet in an review of the 176 papers presented at the 2007 and 2008 national conferences years, only four (2%) obliquely tackled phonics, citing (as is seemingly obligatory at RR conferences) Clay’s words. Beginning readers, according to Clay, "need to use their knowledge of how the world works; the possible meanings of the text; the sentence structure; the importance of order of ideas, or words, or of letters; the size of words or letters; special features of sound, shape, and layout; and special knowledge from past literary experiences before they resort to left to right sounding out of chunks or letter clusters or, in the last resort, single letters" [emphasis added] (p. 9). (Note similarity to Smith.)

Unequivocally, the research (Adams, Stanovich, Pressley, Tunmer, Chapman, et al) proves, that letter-sound cues are more important than semantic or syntactic cues and that reliance on the latter is a “disastrous strategy” for beginning readers.

CONCLUSIONS

•Beginning reading strategies advocated by Alberta Education (semantic, syntactic, meaning first, three cueing system, learning styles) are inconsistent with the research. References: 1, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 41, 42, 43, 50

•Alberta Education has failed to incorporate synthetic (systematic, explicit) phonics instruction with a prominence and emphasis commensurate with the research. References: 1, 6, 7, 10, 12, 22, 27, 30, 33, 43

•Reading Recovery™, as a Whole Language derivative and in compliance with Alberta Education curriculum, fails to appropriately address the needs of its target recipients whose beginning reading deficiencies are unambiguously characterized in the research. References: 2, 8, 13, 22, 31, 46, 47

•Reading Recovery™ speciously supports the lowest 20% of beginning readers with an illusory certificate of “successfully discontinued” on completion of training. References: 8, 45, 46

•Boys, in numbers vastly disproportionate to girls (75-85% selected for RR intervention programs.), are failing to learn to read at functional levels because of the sanctioned teaching methodologies. References: 3, 4, 5, 12, 14, 22, 26

•Functional illiteracy is disproportionately a male issue. References: 12, 26, 36

LAST WORD:

Recent studies of the brain behavior of fifth grade poor readers before and after instruction in synthetic phonics shows post-instruction brain behavior is the same as good readers and is maintained one year after this instruction. Inappropriate beginning reading strategies taught to young children affect their brain centres inappropriately and temporally. This induced condition, caused by the inculcation of ineffective reading strategies, can be reversed, but only when appropriate (phoneme-grapheme correspondence) instruction is given. Better yet, with appropriate instruction in the first instance this condition can be obviated. Parents can preempt spurious reading strategies by teaching their children, boys in particular, the sound-letter relationships before they go to school.

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Addendum:

McGuinness, D. (1999). Why Our Children Can’t Read And What We Can Do About It. A Touchstone Book. Published by Simon and Schuster