Why did we ever stray from phonetics-based learning?
Assessing the dramatic decline in literacy standards among Australian students, Carolyn Pyne examines how traditional pedagogy weighs up against modern techniques that appear to be failing our children.
Australia is now so addicted to testing the abilities of our school students that it’s now easy to compare the outcomes of our children over any given period. But these comparisons deliver bad news.
The National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests indicate the basic literacy of Australian students has been in decline since 2008.
The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment report reinforces what we learn from our own testing regimes – Australian students are slipping down the international comparative tables.
Teachers are facing criticism from parents, academics and politicians. But why do teachers always cop it? All the teachers I know work hard and care about the future of their students, along with their immediate wellbeing and educational outcomes.
Surely, it isn’t the fault of teachers who have been trained in a certain ‘group think’ that has remained unchanged since the 1970s and have all received the same generalised ongoing professional development?
I don’t blame the teachers. It isn’t the teacher’s fault that didacticism became unfashionable and child-centred learning became the accepted wisdom. From this, whole-language-learning has become key teaching doctrine and phonics-based literacy has fallen to the wayside.
Writing in the Australian Financial Review in February this year, Matthew Hunter, a secondary school history teacher in the United Kingdom (and a noted blogger) outlined this problem superbly. He explained the ethos of child-centred-learning as:
“Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects…Imaginative tasks and projects can be excellent supplements to a history lesson, but when they become the mainstay of classroom activity, the consequences are disastrous. Proponents of child-centred-learning are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge… skills are seen as paramount.”
I have four children, ranging in age from five to twelve. I am closely involved in their day-to-day schooling and they are fortunate to be at a school in which I have great confidence. But even there it seems projects are very much the order of the day. The NAPLAN results for their school are the second best of all non-government schools in South Australia. So they appear to be doing well. But when I see the overall decline in results for the state and the country, I have a sinking feeling.
Maybe we are doing well against our peers here in Australia, but if my children were to compete against similar stage children from elsewhere in the world, would we be found out as second rate?
I think we know the answer. But who wants to tell the children? Some universities run bridging courses in their humanities faculty for undergraduates who leave school incapable of writing an essay. Employers complain that they sometimes have to train new employees in how to write a letter.
What do we do? Instead of taking remedial action to reverse results that have crippled whole school communities (as is the current situation), we, instead, need to return to the traditional didactic teaching methods of the past. Here, the teacher is employed to teach and impart knowledge, not simply guide students in finding their own way.
That’s why the programmes like Direct Instruction, Explicit Instruction, Jollyphonics and Macquarie University’s Making Up Lost Time in Literacy (MULTILIT) programme are being used in communities with very poor literacy outcomes. We know what to do when the prevailing orthodoxy of the last forty years has failed – we return to traditional teaching methods.
But the question remains, why did we ever depart from phonetics-based literacy (a teaching method we know to be successful) in the first place?
Carolyn Pyne is an Arts student at Adelaide University majoring in Art History and English Literature. She is also the mother of four school aged children who have attended both government and non-government schooling.
marylou
January 27, 2014 at 6:57 am
phonics based learning
This is my first comment on this open forum. I am responding because I agree with you about the demise of phonic learning. Starting teaching at 41, fourteen years ago, I have been an emergency teacher throughout Melbourne in both primary and secondary. Having taught at over 100 schools because I loved the variety, (the students and their learning), there does seem to be freedom for students to express themselves, often for the beauty and sake of it, with little real language focus in mind. Teachers are often pressed for time, so time for constructive feedback is lost and the expressing of expressing goes on. Where do the full stops go I don't know and iv i carnt spall hoos to no. English is so magnificent, and childhood the time to soak it up in all its glory and contradictions and hilarity. Teachers seem to have so many pressures and outcomes and meetings and directives to orchestrate, that their fundamental reason d'être has been hijacked. Whole language learning is like hol langwij lerning, and hence our beautiful language is undermined, sometimes at the word go. I teach about the language I was taught.