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.