Could not agree more Alanah!
There is only one way to fix this problem, and that is the wholesale sacking of all of those obdurate, obtuse, rigid, recalcitrant academics, who continue to promote the clearly failed/flawed intellectual concept, called whole of language learning, which in their entirely inflexible rigidity, they will defend with their dying breath!
And that may require federal intervention and the withholding of funds, until the required cooperation is received!?
In no way does whole of language learning resemble the mother tongue method of learning to talk, or acquire new language skills.
Mother tongue by the way, is basically both pictorial and repetitive! And is founded on immutable principles, key building blocks, (one of which is clearly phonetics) plus an equally immutable order of sequence! As is virtually all early learning.
A good education is like a very tall building, built story upon story, and like that very tall building, needs a solid foundation to continue to stand; and, withstand the later rigors/demands that follow!
In a simple to understand example, whole of language learning turns 1+1= 2 into a difficult to comprehend 11?
If you can read you can demonstrably teach yourself virtually any discipline, even the flawed one now imposed on our kids by, I believe, highly educated, dictatorial nincompoops.
Good on you Alanah for continuing to fight this extremely arrogant intellectualism, which has far more in common with the flat earth society, (another equally irrelevant if flawed religion/belief system) than modern education?
Not for nothing is all remedial reading founded entirely on phonetics!
Because it alone works!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Go you good thing Alanah!
Rhrosty.

Correction, Alanah should read Alannah. Sincere apologies Alannah. Should have used Phonetics, Al-an-nah.

It sounds to me that educators have compared language acquisition with learning to read. It is not postmodern theory that tells us that language acquisition is a more "natural" process it is evolutionary theory. There exist inherited structures in the brain that enable us to pick up language without being actually taught. This signifies that language is evolutionarily very old. Reading, on the other hand is not. There is no inherited structure in the brain that facilitates it. Such a structure has to be acquired through intense teaching and that means phonetics. To insist that reading is naturally acquired is simply wrong.

Peter Sellick

Well Alannah from Chris Nugent

Chris Pyne would do well to start by sacking at least the English Curriculum staff of ACARA. With two dyslexic teenagers at home he certainly has top motivation to do so. I have written extensively to Chris over the past 3 years and I would like to send material to you too. Please send your contact details to me at literacytesting@bigpond.com and I shall send some of my more useful stuff to you too. Well done!
Chris Nugent

I appreciate Alannah’s earnestness and sincerity: it must be difficult for anyone to stand by and see things happening that don’t produce the desired result without wanting to step in and help.

There are a couple of points I would like to make which may take a lot of the heat out of this discussion and enable light to be shone so that we may see clearly.

The first point is that English is not a phonetic language. Over the years English has borrowed words from other languages and given them an anglicised spelling. There is little correspondence between the spelling and the pronunciation of many words in English. The same combination of vowels and consonants can be pronounced in many different ways, depending on the context. Take the innocuous combination “-ough” as one example: bough, enough, through, though, thought and thorough. In other cases, the addition of one letter to a word can change its pronunciation: taking ‘having’ and ‘shaving’ as an example.

The second point is that English is a world language and the local dialect can change the way the same word is pronounced. In Louisiana, for example ‘cat’, ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ all sound the same while ‘garage’ is pronounced differently in different parts of Australia.

The third point is that neither phonics nor whole word approaches should be used as the sole way of teaching word recognition. As I saw in my wife’s primary school over many years, the most successful teachers used a mix of methods. Every pupil is different with different pre-existing skills and the word and sentence recognition programmes recognised this, offering a mix of methods so that a suitable method was available to each child.

It is short-sighted to blame ‘academics’ and ‘bureaucrats’ for a conspiracy to deprive children of the ability to read when all concerned are working their hardest to help children become better readers than their parents.

Pushing one line of action to the exclusion of others is not the way for those outside the profession, or in the case of some inside the profession, to generate effective change.

Reply to Brian of Buderim

To my recollection, arguments about the ‘phonetic’ nature of the English written system has been an intermittent topic in the literature since the writing on spelling reform by a person called Hart in the 16th century. At one extreme of the unphonetic English argument, Noam Chomsky in 1982 argued that written English was near ‘optimal’ just as it is and did not need to be changed at all. At the other extreme in 1955, Rudolf Flesch argued that written English contained 181 phonic rules that needed to be taught to children in schools.

Both the curses and the blessings within written English lie in the observation to the effect that whilst written English is definitely not ‘phonetic’, it definitely is ‘predictable’. This means that it does follow a large number of quite reliable and relatively predictable rule patterns for pronunciation. Literally every competent reader and speller has learned these rule patterns either as a set of responses to direct teaching or as an incidentally assimilated byproduct of his reading experiences.

All basic perceptual processes of a consistent type in written English require a mastery of these rules patterns or they simply cannot exist as reliable processes. Regardless of any preferred ideological persuasion, it is the responsibility of literally every literacy teacher to at least test systematically in order to ensure that literally every student knows these rules. Students who don’t know the rules should be taught them. All students who don’t know them (at least intuitively) fail at least in spelling but usually also in reading. There is no option to simply knowing what the main rules are.

Finally the most destructive curse of the whole language ideology has been that it adamantly eradicated both the systematic testing and teaching of these rules from virtually all government sponsored schools and colleges in Australia. And this for over 30 years. That's the main reason why Australia now has up to 8 million workers and over 1.5 million students with reading and spelling problems.