Nick Maley's article seems logical...but there's one important problem. He shows no understanding about how children actually learn and what motivates them to be better readers.

Analysing the phonetic structure of the English language is all very fine. But we need to know what the learner brings to the challenge of learning to read.

There's no warrant for the argument that because this is the way English works as a phonetic language that is the best way to teach children to learn it. (Besides, the phonetic structure is only one of the ways we can describe how English works; but that's another argument.)

Nick's conclusion that "phonics should be taught first, as the foundation technique" is simplistic. Thousands of families (and I'm one of them) have taught their children intuitively using the whole-word approach: labelling objects around bedrooms, kitchen etc; reading words in shopping malls; headlines in the newspaper; writing stories on wet days; playing school in the cubby house; reading voraciously to their kids and pointing to key words in books. Scores of opportunities are seized by parents who understand that the joy of what you read is found in meaningful whole words and whole ideas.

The question is not whether whole-word comes before or after phonics. That's a phoney debate. The real issue is when is it best for the child to experience the essential benefits that come from a sure grasp of phonics?

For many the introduction to phonics seems like a backwards step (e.g. Sally Morgan, "My Place": 'Every day I endured the same old adventures of Nip and Fluff' while every day she longed to move on to the reading feast in the library.)

There would be plenty of time for Sally to learn that ghoti could spell fish in English (gh as in tough; o as in women; ti as in station). Sally came to hate school because she was bored to tears by the phonics approach. A more subtle integration of phonics and whole-word is needed by many children - not one and then the next.

I tend to agree with most of what FrankGol says but I suggest that the reality of the teaching situation is even more complex.

Due to heredity, developmental variations and life experiences, children differ considerably in the types of learning abilities they bring to school. Some learn best through vision, some through hearing, some through touching and moving. Some need to reflect on new information or experience before integrating it, while others are to test it by immediate application. And you can list other differences.

Kids who have trouble with auditory perception and skills may fare better by starting their reading with sight-learning. The tactile-kinaesthetic (haptic) types may start better with, for example, letters and words made of sand-paper that they can run their fingers over.

Another point is that as the child grows the preferred modes of learning can change considerably.

So phonics is important, but not to the same degree for every child or for every stage of development. And research indicates that boys tend to be less able in the auditory department. Perhaps this is why so many of them tend to struggle more than most girls with a program based heavily on phonics.

So let's give phonics an important place in the school program along with sight-learning, whole-language, and other components. Apply each at the best stages and in proportions that suit the student's individual learning abilities.

This is a bloody childish argument: you try all the methods that you can, and even with a kid who is doing well with one approach, you give her a burst of the others. Of course, there's no one-and-only method. I love Sylvia Ashton-Warner's whole meaningful word method, but I'm sure that even she also used the phonic approach, not to teach kids 'ghoti' but to get a solid foundation with kiss, hit, cry, smack, eat, drink, sleep, burp, etc. - and once the kids have got a solid phonic grasp, then to move onto anomalies, of which as we all know the English language is packed, partly because of its bower-bird approach to pinching words from other languages, with their different orthographies.

In any good english language intervention program you would think that practitioners would use a range of technigues which include whole language,rote or phonics.

The traditionalists versus the modernists?

I reckon most professional people and parents readily engaged in trying to teach children language aquisition skills are too busy to engage in this petty ideological debate between idle theorists.

FrankGol writes: "The question is not whether whole-word comes before or after phonics. That's a phoney debate. The real issue is when is it best for the child to experience the essential benefits that come from a sure grasp of phonics?...A more subtle integration of phonics and whole-word is needed by many children - not one and then the next."

Loudmouth writes: "This is a bloody childish argument: you try all the methods that you can, and even with a kid who is doing well with one approach, you give her a burst of the others. Of course, there's no one-and-only method."

Duh?

I am baffled by the lack of interest or even of criticism of the experiments to resolve the phonics-WholeWord controversy put forward in Revolution in Education http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7010, OLO 20 February.
At present, all approaches fail weaker students. Whole Language, analytic phonics, synthetic phonics and eclectic combinations still fail too many disadvantaged students who do not arrive at school aged five with 5,000 words etc, and there is a long run of continuing failures into adulthood – see the recent news furore from an international survey www.acal.edu.au/publications/ papers/acal_view/acalview.shtml that indicates that nearly half of all adult Australians cannot read or write properly. (The survey, which involved analysts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics,www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/ 4228.0Explanatory%20Notes12006%20(Reissue)?OpenDocument reported that 7 million Australians are below the acceptable benchmark for understanding their own language. Radio National,The World Today, 21 February.http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2168798.htm)

Innovation is needed in all aspects of how literacy is learned and taught – and the aim of ‘Revolution in Education’ was to arouse interest in 'revolutionary ideas in Education'. At present fashions go round in cycles because none are fully successful – except for brilliant teachers, and only fortunate students have them.

Consider which social groups are advantaged/disadvantaged by these differing teaching methods and the impact it has on (socially engineered) performance outcomes for those groups.

Herein is the answer to why this thing has become politicised.

This sort of thing is borne out of the same mindset that doesnt keep score in competitive events and gives everyone a winners ribbon. It feels good, but its a lie. One which the poor kids, when they become capable of figuring out the truth, arent going to cope very well and wont be very happy about the deciet. Santa, the easter bunny and the tooth fairy is one thing, this is another.

Cna yuo raed tihs?
fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too
Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.
i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind!, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt.
Pohcins or wohle lngauage, taehcing kdis to raed is mroe tahn usnig one theory or another.

I agree that a variety of methods should and can be utilised: gender, hereditary characteristics, socio-economics, stress - all impact on individuals. Surely we know enough now about how these variables affect people to know that the old one-size-fits-all position fails?

However, just to throw the cat among the pigeons:- in China education is still done by rote learning. English is not presented in the whole-word method. Primary school students start their day at 7.40 and finish after 6. Homework takes them until around 9.30. They start learning English in Year 1.

By the time they get to Uni they have been studying English for 12 years. Yet two thirds of them are unable to produce a sentence in correct English and the majority don't understand spoken English at all. It has to be taught as a completely separate subject.

However, I have yet to come across a student who, when presented with the text Rainier printed, do not read it effortlessly and almost without pause. If, as the text says, only a percentage of native English speakers are able to do so, then what conclusion is one to draw from this evidence? That phonetics and rote learning produce inarticulate people who are exceptional readers?

Personally, I have concluded that the figures given are apocryphal, but if anyone had difficulty with reading the text I would be very interested to know, as I think it would give a valuable insight into teaching methods.

Romany,

The most disadvantaged groups of aspirational readers in Australia are unfortunately those who are impoverished, low socio economic or Indigenous status.

One of many points I make in terms of posting the 'text' is to highlight the fact that the real challenge for teachers, researchers and policy makers is that irrespective of the system of literacy intervention utilised - those who come from the above stated groups tend to start school with fewer of the linguistic and literacy resources that are required as 'beginning points' of learning by schools.

As such, even if one is able to read the text above, this does not mean that readers are able to comprehend the underlying meanings or subtext. In fact many do not.

The social capital of literacy skill is varied amongst different sections of the Australian community. School is seen as the only educational avenue to remedy this deficit.

I believe a broader based approach to literacy intervention is required that includes schools.

Bear in mind that it was recently estimated that 7 million Australians are not functionally literate.

This threatens to deliver dire economic and social impacts over the next decade.

Literacy, as it was one hundred years ago, is a clear indicator of social exclusion or inclusion. We currently hover somewhere in the middle.

So the problem of literacy is much broader than attempting to devise didactic instruments for skill acquisition.

I have been involved in reading recovery at school, not for my children as they are intellectually gifted and were reading fluently by 2 and 3 years old but for children who were struggling to read in the early years. I found that all children in reading recovery had trouble with phonics. They couldn't easily recall the sound of the letters and that made them get stuck, loose their confidence and struggle.

The way that reading recovery was being taught we were asked to read the passage to the child first. The children, who were not dumb, were developing amazing memory skills wherein they would remember the story and read it back to you but they were not actually reading the words and so they were not actually learning. This method of memorising could easily see them through until high school and they could just be seen as not very good readers when in fact they couldn't read very well at all. If you did not read the passage for them first they struggled to decipher the word as they had trouble with phonics.

I tried different methods and put the focus on phonics and the letters that they consistantly struggled to grasp the sound giving them games that they could ask their parents to do with them so that they could have quick instant recall of sounds to letters. I stopped reading the passage to them first. It made a difference to their reading ability and their confidence.

Thanks for that Jolanda, fascinating, interesting, and etcetera.
I must confess to loving stories from parents and others on how they approached, modified, tested, and persevered with teaching little ones.

Romany and Rainier,

That interesting jumbled passage from the Cambridge research was read easily by all the teachers on my school-staff in a workshop. I would suggest that in doing so we are using our long experience of oral/aural English semantics and syntax combined with the initial/terminal graphemic cues to predict and verify as we read. People without much experience of spoken English of similar complexity or with insufficient phonic/graphemic learning would probably have difficulty with that passage.

If so, the perhaps the experiment shows that effective reading is the result of bringing to the text your prior experience of syntax and semantics in oral/aural language plus some skills in decoding individual words through phonics, syllabification etc. But that's nothing new: I was teaching reading with that theory in the 1970s, and so were many others. It simply reinforces what I was saying in my earlier post.

As far as the Chinese situation goes, you have to be cautious about drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of teaching methods. The methodology, dedication and skills of the teachers vary hugely across that vast country. Many of the Chinese teachers teaching English speak very badly indeed, so is it any wonder their students follow suit? When a school manages to have a native English-speaker as a teacher, that person may have little or no prior teaching experience. A class may have a British or Kiwi teacher one semester and a North American the next, so consistency in pronunciation could be a problem for some students.

Most important of all, very many students are simply not interested in learning English at all. Most of them will actually have no need for it when they leave school because they will rarely or never have to deal with foreigners. And they know this. When I was teaching English classes of tertiary students in China it was like pulling teeth just to get most of them to speak. They didn't even want to be there. So, as with Australian six-year-olds learning to read and write, motivation is a prime factor in success.

Ranier - I think the scrambled letter passage is a con - I was impressed too when I first say it some years ago, then read a truly incomprehensible scrambled passage which then when on to explain the trick. Look again at the passage you posted - nearly all the words contain their correct first and last letter. If all the letters are genuinely scrambled, ti eoebcms humc rdahre, fi ton ebsomipsil, ot dera. (it becomes much harder, if not impossible, to read). See what I mean?

On Reading Recovery, I believe the theory behind the passage being read out to the child is that this helps minimise their fear of failure, which in my experience can render a disheartened poor reader absolutely mute for a whole session. The repeated readings help them learn.

Candice it would only render a student mute if they cannot read the passage in reading recovery if they thought they were there to prove that they can read. If they understood that they are there to learn to identify the sounds and decipher the words then they wont put the expectation on themselves that they have to be able to read to story. Fluent reading will come, but first they have to get their sounds right and be able to put together the sounds and the words.

There is far less chance of future failure if kids get the reading right.

Too many children have developed bad habits with regard to their recall of sounds. These bad habits can often be very difficult habit to break and they need direct focus and attention.

Bad habits, good habits they are just habits. Whatever it is that is causing the reading difficultly in the individual student needs to be identified and addressed. Better a kid having to deal with failure at a young age if it is going to make things better when they are older and if it is more likely going to be linked to success.

I'm not sure Chomsky would agree with the article's assertion that reading can be learned 'naturally' by children in the same way they learn their first language. I know he believes all humans have an innate capacity to learn a spoken language but even then children must be exposed to meaningful input prior to the age of 5 or 6 (or thereabouts) when the ability of the brain to set innate grammatical parameters changes. Children not exposed to language by this time may never develop an innate knowledge of grammar.

I'm not sure what this has to do with reading though. Speaking is a natural activity that every single normally functioning human being (i.e. not disabled) will learn with NO help. Conversly, reading is a skill that practically no cognitively normal human being will learn WITHOUT help. That is, there is absolutely nothing natural about reading.

I'm certainly not an expert in UG or whole word 'theory' but the whole word approach doesn't seem to sit with what I understand of Chomsky.

To go back to Nick Maley - he proposed that the whole language-phonics issue came to head in 2004 with the famous letter from 26 prominent academics to the editor of The Australian's HES, asking for an enquiry into teaching methods in our schools. In fact in the Australian context the issue peaked in October 1996 when Channel Nine's Sunday program dumped on whole language in an hour long special. In a world context whole language's precedent methodology of 'sight words' got a pretty rough going over with Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read, a book that sold in the millions in the 1960's. What puzzles me is how the issue keeps re-surfacing as if it is a new or relatively new debate, in which the outcome is still unclear. We need the sociologists to come in and explain this one. All children gain considerable mileage once they understand the decoding principles that shift written or printed text back into spoken communication. Leaving children to struggle to figure out the linkage between symbol and sound for themselves does have undertones of sadism, or minimally a complete disregard for children's intellectual development or needs.

For some families such as the first poster Frank Gol's reading is important and they read to and play word recognition games with their children.
These children will arrive at school ready to read, and already able to recognise some words.
That was me when I arrived at school. Before I went to school I would carefully peruse the newspaper and pick out the words I knew. Each time I said I could read, my elder brother would point to a word and ask what's that, (often it was the word the) and I wouldn't know what the word was.
I finally arrived at school and our Primer opened at a page of vowels with the appropriate pictures apple egg ink orange umbrella.
Well that was dead easy, and the next two pages with the consanants as well.
The day we linked together the sounds and spelt out the words was a huge mind blowing revelation for me. I drove my family nuts when I was introducted to my first diphthong "ch" insisting that they tell me every combination whenever I couldn't decipher new words.
I'm reasonably good at spelling.
My daughter growing up in the seventies had both lots of books read to her, and Sesame Street phonics and cannot remember ever not being able to read. Her spelling is a bit wonky though.
The answer to the problem of reading lies partly in the other article of this week's On Line Opinion "Effective Teachers where they are most needed" and where they are most needed at every level of education right through to tertiary level is in small classes.
Not phony average class sizes where some teachers never have any student contact time but classes of 12 to a MAXIMUM of 15 students and in early childhood Maximum 12.
Then teachers have time to know all their children and are able to give them all the individual attention they need with the the proper mix of phonics and whole of word techniques appropriate to each individual child.
That's the item which should be taken off the political agenda.

Denise, this may or may not be indicative of the overall situation- For the last 3 years I've played a small part in checking the Reports of students before they were sent home to parents.

In this particular school about one in three teachers was semi literate judging by their failure to present what was demanded by the Department and local authority; and by the number of nonsensical statements written on the reports.

One teacher had to rewrite 3 times to comply with what was called for; 5 or 6 others at least once.

Report time is a nightmare for the exec. at this school and meetings with staff begin months beforehand.

Rainier, great first post Sunday.

To Dane - the author (ie myself) never said that Chomsky invented, or even endorsed, whole language approaches. My minor historical point was simply that some of his ideas were appropriated (or misappropriated) in the early debate. To Candide - I agree with you on the irrelevance of that scrambled letter passage. Texts like that are often used by whole language enthusiasts (eg. Mem Fox) as evidence that the phonemic/orthographic association is not as important as the phonics supporters think. They don't prove any such thing, as you point out. To FrankGol and others who accuse me of being simplistic - my key point is that there is plenty of evidence from many different sources to indicate that phonics should be used very early on, as a foundation technique. That does not mean that it is the only thing you need to think about. I have enough practical experience of teaching kids to read to know that there are a hundred other things that matter as well. Nor should we just assume that all techniques claiming to be phonics based are equally effective.

In your article on Friday, Nick, you wrote: "For all that, the clear conclusion, warranted by both theory and empirical evidence, is that phonics should be taught first, as the foundation technique." The foundation technique.

Today (Monday) Nick, you wrote: "...my key point is that there is plenty of evidence from many different sources to indicate that phonics should be used very early on, as a foundation technique." A foundation technique.

Whole word approaches can be slip-shod Nick, when taught badly; but one of its benefits when taught well is that it teaches you the important difference between "a" and "the".