http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11407967%255E32522,00.html

JANET ALBRECHTSEN

Rhetoric hides the human face of illiteracy

November 17, 2004

LET me introduce Roy, one of the human faces behind the reading wars. He is the same age as me. Like me, he has parents who were migrants to Australia, he went to a public school and was part of the whole word experiment that schools embraced more than 30 years ago, where teachers read books to the class, pointing to words and expecting children to follow and learn to read.

Whereas I learned to read, Roy didn't. Once he fell behind in reading, he never caught up but was pushed along by a system that did not recognise or treat failure. He was never asked to repeat a year, yet by high school, he could do little more than write his name.

Roy told me stories that should shame any educator. His life reflects the heavy price of illiteracy. Classroom humiliation ended when Roy left school but the lies told to hide his illiteracy continued. When his first job required him to purchase materials from a hardware store, Roy would wrap his hand in bandages. "Can you help me write the cheque because I've hurt my hand," he would ask the shop assistant.

When his boss wanted to promote him, Roy left. He couldn't take that responsibility because he couldn't read or write. He never worked for another person again because he feared somebody might discover he was illiterate. Roy is an intelligent man who became a cement renderer, not because he wanted to, but because he felt he had no other choice.

Roy is the face behind the studies that show that those who fall behind in the literacy stakes at school will often fall behind in the life stakes later on. Work prospects, relationships and self-confidence all take a battering. For Roy, the last straw came when his young son grew impatient at his father's faltering effort at reading: "I don't want Daddy to read to me anymore," his son told Roy's wife.

Roy is angry about the lies, the deception and the manipulation he has used to hide his illiteracy. But just over two years ago he met Helen Grant, or Miss Grant to her former charges at Ascham, an eastern suburbs school in Sydney where she taught for more than 30 years. That same day he was also introduced to two simple ideas – words are made up of sounds and you need to learn the sounds to learn to read.

The milestones have mounted ever since that September meeting. A few months later Roy read his first novel. Then, unprompted, he wrote his first full page essay. It took two hours. In December he wrote his first Christmas card – to "Dear Helen", of course. The following year he gave a reading at his new son's christening.

Teachers will say much has changed. They will point to school curricula that mentions phonics and will say that a combination of methods is now used in the classroom to teach children to read.

Yet this new hybrid rhetoric is mere camouflage to keep critics at bay. Soon to be published research by Ruth Fielding-Barnsley, from Queensland University of Technology, suggests that not enough has changed since the heyday of whole language when young trainee teachers like her were trained to teach reading without the alphabet being mentioned.

With co-author Nola Purdie, their study of 340 Queensland teachers found that while teachers now have a positive attitude to children learning the basic building blocks of language – like sounds and language rules – teachers' knowledge of those blocks is deficient. And interestingly there was a gap between what teachers think they know and what they do know.

While most primary school teachers (92 per cent) can spot a short vowel sound in the word "slip," only 24 per cent can recognise the number of speech sounds in a given word. More than half could not tell you what a syllable is.

If teachers have not been taught and cannot explain basic things such as sounds and syllables, then regardless of what a curriculum says, how can they teach their students?

Of course, phonics-based systems must recognise that not all words play by the rules.

So these systems include ways to cope with the rare exceptions. Whole language says that because exceptions exist, phonics is invalid and children are better off guessing and memorising words. It is a theory premised on the abnormal, not the normal, and one that requires very little from teachers.

At most, these teachers, untrained in the basic rules of language, end up dabbling in phonics, rather than giving children explicit, structured phonics instruction. And that's why nearly a third of Australian schoolchildren – another generation of Roys – reach high school with poor literacy standards.

Yet many teachers question the need for the review, announced last week by Education Minister Brendan Nelson, into how we train teachers to teach children to read and into what is happening in the classroom. They say the money should be spent on employing more teachers.

So let me introduce you to one final voice in this debate. The voice of a dedicated teacher who spoke with me at length one Friday afternoon about the remarkable success enjoyed by children through a phonics-based system. Children in her public school in Tasmania, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, now read well beyond their age level.

She talked also about the emotion infusing the debate, the lack of logic or evidence behind the whole language ideology to which teachers stubbornly adhere.

Early on Monday morning, the teacher rang to say she could not put her name to her comments. She had a career to consider – a career that could be jeopardised in a state education system where the anti-phonics boffins still dominate.

That trepidation tells you that something is still dreadfully wrong in our schools and that should shame us all. A review of what's happening in the classroom and at the teachers' colleges is the easy part. The real test will be taking on the teachers who teach our teachers.