In this edition of Inclusive Education we continue with our discussion on reading. In this part Darrell Wills discusses the Key Strategies of making a change to teaching all to read.
Reading has become essential to success in our society. The ability to read, although a "luxury" just a few decades ago, is now so highly valued that without it one will find their children in a sorting process that leads into a pipeline ending in 3 likely undesirable locations of "post school options": poverty, pensions and prisons.
Before 1970 in Australia, the 80% of students who left school at year 10 faced a plethora of opportunity in a blue collared society in the golden age of jobs. Australia held the world's number one position in employment. We were indeed "the lucky country". We HAD to seek immigrants because we had more jobs than people to fill them. We also had the lowest high school retention rate in the Western world.
Taken together, we can see that prior to 1970, reading and indeed higher education was not so valued. The educational sorting may have served our nation's industries well but these industries changed. Blue-collar jobs dried up. Australia was no longer immune. The evidence is clear; that as we move from an industrial nation to a knowledge nation, the ability to read is a critical safeguard against poverty, prison and pensions that await those who are illiterate.
During the Inquiry we discovered that even our governments don't know for sure if our teacher training universities are preparing our teachers to instruct reading in a way that is supported by research. The profession appears (from what we have heard so far) to be stuck in a movement where it is thought that children learn how to read in a fashion similar to how they learn to talk: "naturally".
The strategy is simply to allow children to "discover" reading by immersion in good books: guessing words and making up meaning from pictures and other context clues; allowing children to experiment with whatever spellings and grammar structures they want to invent. Unfortunately this is not true. Reading and writing are not "natural". They are a system of code invented about 3,500 years ago.
We have been able to teach the code to almost all children because it is less than 30 symbols which stand for less than 45 sounds and less than 130 combinations. These are small enough numbers to achieve mastery of a sound symbol relationship by the time of about 3-4 years old. Once the child masters hearing and recognising these sounds she can "unglue" and "reglue" these to blend to a point where it becomes automatic. Children 4-6 years old in our projects who were thought NEVER to be able to read because of their "disabilities" have achieved this. Each have gone on to read with fluency and advanced comprehension. And yet many, possibly most children, are not systematically taught this relationship.
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