Think you may have omitted the 6th, and possibly most important element necessary for children to become good readers.
That of parental enthusiasm and encouragement.
However given that a lot of parents themselves are possibly not good readers this will be very difficult to implement.
Guess I was very lucky when young in that both my parents, despite their poor education levels, were avid readers themselves, pre TV and computer days, and passed this habit on to me.

This is one of my pet grievances. I accepted that I had to teach one of my sons to read, he was severely dyslexic and not once in his school years did I come across a teacher with any understanding of the condition. But years later, there were no excuses for the failure of several of my grandchildren being able to read beyond basic preschool level half way through primary school.
They were not dyslexic, not delayed, not absent from school. Yet I had to purchase a set of progressive readers, at a fairly large cost, and teach 3 of them to read.
Teachers had failed to pick up on their lack of reading skills and when pointed out to them commented, "but they always try hard".
Even the grandchildren who can read aren't terribly proficient. They have no knowledge of phonics, a poor vocabulary and terrible grammar.
Apart from the lack of phonic teaching, one of the biggest issues is the readers sent home with the kids. Unlike in my school years, the books are not progressive in content. Each book is a different topic, with different characters, the words do not build on words learned in precious books and the level is different every day.
I struggle with teachers complaining that I teach the kids the old ABC (short sounds) not the long American ABC sounds.
However, I have got them reading, and reading well, with a vocabulary that enables them to understand most information.
Complaints of lack of parental help at home don't wash. Nobody ever helped me to read at home. I learnt at school.

I had no formal training in education but 30 years ago when my daughters' teachers said that they were using a variety of methods to teach their pupils to read I went and bought the Hay Wingo series to teaching phonics. We just went through the 3 books and by the time they had finished (took a year) they could read perfectly. Another benefit was that I also learned a lot about the English language and how phonetic it really was.

"Written English is a code. Once children learn the code, they can read almost any word. Some children learn to read without much formal teaching in phonics; these children are the minority...."

Both my children were reading fluently before they started grade 1, Not because I formally "taught" them - both of them just appeared to "get it" and off they went.

My son, now 13, began to read fluently while still in kindergarten. He was a late talker (around 3) and yet reading fluently 22 months later.

I was amazed at the time that he could come up against a silent "k" in a word like "know" and still be able to read it, taking his cues from the rest of the words in the sentence.

I can remember not being able to read before I started school and desperately wanting to know how. Neither of my children have that memory.

Who is the person writing this article?
Has she ever taught a class- at primary level, for instance?

Does she have qualifications in teacher education or any experience thereof?

What is this "research" she refers to? Could we have some names and publications?

My understanding of research on reading is that many of us learn to read in very different ways. Even the experts disagree on how best to do it and so often it depends on the person leaning to read and his or her different attributes, strengths and weaknesses.

It's all very well saying these nice-sounding things in the article, but one suspects that Pyne is up to some tricky business. His record isn't very good in these matters. And if he's supported by the Murdoch Press I'm confident he is - as the teacher unions say- trying to distract us from implementing the Gonski review.

What a shame Gillard and Rudd did so little in education…except spend money and start enquiries. This Liberal Government seems little better.

Agree with the article, Big Nana and EQ!
Typically, the only detractor, thus far, challenges the qualifications of the writer!
However, we do find teachers, whose literacy is substandard, and in a few cases, it would seem, less competent readers and or spellers; than those they're trying to teach!
And only able to keep earning a "generous" pay packet, due to union activity!?
Teaching as an occupation, is all about kids and their advancement, not protecting (OFFICIALLY QUALIFIED) incompetent workers and drones, whose only consideration is the size of the pay packet and its protected continuation!
So much for much touted and relied on official qualifications and their real worth in this long overdue debate.
I have a dyslexic brother and but for Phonetics and super competent remedial teaching, he would still be unable to read, as was the case for my Father; who kept his shameful secret, well into his seventies, by having an excellent memory and pretending to read the news, when in fact, he was repeating it verbatim from a prodigious memory!
I understand that colored lenses, and different for each eye, is reportedly helping some students, to stop the whirl of letters, that often prevents learning in some cases!
And hear hear to more local autonomy, and Principals at long last enabled to jettison patently incompetent/hopeless teachers/deadwood!
Rhrosty.

What Jennifer says is probably true enough but I would suggest that there other factors at play too, and also that back in the olden days many people never learnt to read much too

The pernicious influence of television and how it brain-washes the childs developing nervous system and psyche.
Many babies are plonked in front of TV from day one. How are they thus being brain-washed?
The Jesuits used to boast if given a child for the first 7 years of its life, they could indelibly bind the child to the church
How many hundreds of hours does the normal child spend watching TV in its first 7 years?

Many children, especially from the more down-and-out segments of society are also zonked out on junk food with all of its sugar and toxic additives.

Many children also suffer from chronic systematic emotional abuse too via their "toxic" parents who also in many cases wouldnt have much of a clue about anything, let alone what it takes to be a parent.

For anyone to learn anything one has to have a certain degree of free energy and attention - the more the better. Furthermore you cant really teach anyone if they are not essentially balanced and happy - this is especially the case with children.

Combining all of the above many children have very little capacity to even sit still let alone develop any kind of reading skills.

It is also interesting to note that in the Steiner Waldorf system of education children are not taught to read until at least 7 or 8, perhaps even later. They are of course read to a lot, especially traditional fairytales. Parents who send their children to Steiner schools generally do not let their children watch, and thus become addicted to and BRAIN-WASHED by TV.

From another perspective our entire culture is effectively toxic, and what we call "education" is a process whereby we brain-wash our children to become "well-adjusted" to this toxic anti-"culture".

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote extensively on this beginning with Magical Child. His work is introduced here:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/EE.html

It starts at home. My kids are great readers and writers and I don't give their schools much credit.
Literacy and illiteracy are generational phenomena. Even so, for most kids and adults reading just can't compete with all the other diversions.
The ratio literacy:illiteracy hasn't changed, it's just that now some illiterates can.
This elitist quote isn't far from the truth, and we may equate discrimination in reading with discrimination in thinking.

My 2 oldest were both reading, writing & arithmeticing before they started school. The youngest one had trouble. She was so lucky to get a 60 year old teacher for first & second classes, [70 kid school with 3 teachers including teaching headmaster], who refused to have anything to do with "all this new fangled muck", & taught by the old book.

With this & a couple of good games learning computer programs, & a literary mother she got the idea. I have still never seen her read a book.

Daffy I went to school a long time ago in Queensland, Townsville actually. Kids & their parents were less well prepared than today. Many parents were functionally illiterate. My teachers had 40 or more in their classes, & we all learnt to read & write, & do arithmetic.

Fortunately in those days we had good teachers, who at least knew their subjects, & we were streamed starting from about 6 months, at the end of "prep 1".

I was unfortunate enough to move to Sydney, [Ryde] for the start of 5Th class. Ryde was a small school in the 50s, with 5Th & 6TH classes combined. I had already done all the work they did in 6Th class. NSW was that far behind Queensland & has not improved.

In fact the quality of the teaching & the curriculum for my kids was considerably below that when both their parents went to school. In fact in a 1700 kid high school, there was only one teacher capable of undertaking the physics or math C courses for matriculation, & 4 who were pretending to teach them.

The feminisation of school has been disastrous

This is in response to Bronte’s comments.

I don’t know the author, or her qualifications. I dislike the Centre for Independent Studies and the Abbott Government. However this is why I think the message in the article is correct.

Firstly, to the research. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, issued in December 2005, contained a volume entitled “Literature Review”. It can be downloaded from this page: http://research.acer.edu.au/tll_misc/5/ if you scroll down a bit.

This comprises a comprehensive review of studies into the teaching of reading, concluding in its Summary section:
“For beginning reading during the early years of schooling, findings from meta-analytic syntheses of a large volume of local and international evidence-based research consistently indicate that direct, systematic instruction in phonics makes significantly greater contributions to children’s initial and subsequent growth in reading, writing, spelling and comprehension, than do alternative approaches involving unsystematic or no phonics instruction.”
Chapter 3 of the Literature Review discusses a large number of these research studies in detail.

The understanding of the research that Bronte has, that ‘many of us learn to read in very different ways’, is simply incorrect. What the research actually shows is that phonemic awareness is an essential skill early readers need to master. Phonemic awareness is the ability to detect specific sounds in words. It is an aural skill, which is a prerequisite for understanding phonics, which is letter/sound correspondence. Phonics is in turn necessary to allow readers to decode words into groups of words, and vice-versa. In many of us who take to reading quickly this all happens so fast we don’t really notice the steps. But it is different in those who struggle.

(To be continued)

The Reading Recovery people for years tried to avoid the significance of phonemic awareness, as their system was not based on it. I have an article from August 1999, the abstract for which states:
“Success in Reading Recovery was closely associated with phonological processing skills ..... We conclude that Reading Recovery can be more effective in a whole language instructional context if greater emphasis is placed on the development and use of word-level skills and strategies involving phonological information. “
(The article is ‘Success in Reading Recovery Depends on the Development of Phonological Processing Skills’ by James W. Chapman, William E. Tunmer and Jane E. Prochnow, and was Revised Research Report for Phase Three of Contract ER35/199/5, submitted to the Ministry of Education, New Zealand).

By 2005 Reading Recovery seemed to have got the message. Here is a quote from Marie Clay’s 2005 publication ‘Literacy Lessons designed for Individuals’, Part 2, page 69:
“What research began to uncover in the 1970s was how young children learn to consciously isolate the phonemes of a language from the flow of speech. .....
......... And it is clear that becoming aware of phonemes is essential for becoming good at word recognition.”
So while there might have been some academic disagreement from the 1970s to the 1990s, the necessity for phonics training has been common ground for at least 10 years.

The significance of phonics which was revealed by accumulating literacy research in the late 20th century has now been confirmed by the results of medical imaging over the last 10-15 years.

Earlier this year I read a 2009 book called ‘Reading in the Brain - The New Science of How We Read’, by Stanislaus Dehane, then the Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France. It sets out how the eye and the brain connect to process language, based mainly on brain scans and other scientific methods. In Chapter 5, the book identifies the implications for the teaching of reading.

(To be continued)

Among its conclusions are:
# p.218: “... it is simply not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read. Every child is unique .... but when it comes to reading, all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence.”
[In other words, the ‘hardware’ in our brain can only learn reading in a specific way.]
# p.219: “.... Considerable research, both with children and with illiterates, converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child’s brain and the way in which it processes speech sounds. This process whereby written words are converted into strings of phonemes must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously .......”
# p.228: “The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby letter or grapheme represents a phoneme.”

I am not a teacher. However my wife has 30 plus years in special education. Her experience is instructive. Her undergraduate teaching degree in the late 70s did not contain anything about phonemic awareness. In the mid 80s she did a masters degree and learned that lack of phonemic awareness was a predictor of reading failure. Teach phonemic awareness and failure can often be avoided.

She has subsequently successfully put the theory into practice, but apparently undergraduate teaching has not changed much. Most classroom teachers have not been taught what the research shows. Bureaucrats in the NSW Education Dept can now parrot the words ‘phonemic awareness’, but without understanding their true implications. The politicians, such as that ultimate lightweight, Bob Carr, latched on to the alternative of Reading Recovery, but have never undertaken a thorough, peer-reviewed study of its effectiveness.

Reading Recovery is not cost-effective. What we really need to do is re-train K-2 teachers.

That definitely makes sense to me Philip Howell, so much of what was good & successful has been thrown out, & the replacement never properly evaluated.

The old rote learning is similarly denigrated, however, 67 years since I was effectively chanting my multiplication tables daily, I still know that 6 X 8 is 48, without having to work for it. The knowledge is just there, & always will be.

The progressives threw out all the good, with no real knowledge that what they were replacing it with would work. Now we have a whole couple of generations of teachers who have to find a calculator to answer 6X8, & actually believe that is OK.

My kids thought my mental arithmetic ability was amazing, where it is just normal for my generation

Yes, rote learning works particularly well for basic number facts like times tables. I still recall mine easily. But I had to drill my sons in them while we cycled to school, because the method was no longer in favour. Rote learning is only a problem when taken to excess. (Mind you, I don't know what the research says on this.)

Kids become good readers from reading, the school gives them the basics but the family gives them the encouragement.and that is where reading is born.