Thus, the posting reflects the growing internationalism of all things - including education.
This blog posting is well worth reading to illustrate the issue that 'which' teaching approach should be used for reading instruction really matters, and that this issue is of 'international' concern:
https://ofpossibleworlds.wordpress.com/ ... on-part-2/
Please do read the whole piece - and note the appalling special needs statistics and the woolly curriculum for Alberta's Outcomes for English Language Arts'!...Having recently read Robert Peal’s Progressively Worse and E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit, I think, at least in the English Language Arts classroom, this trend can be, in part, attributed to the following two factors:
In Alberta, students are taught to read in Grade One through a balanced literacy approach, a methodology that is continued through the primary years as students build reading competency.
With respect to this first point, students do not receive sole and explicit phonics instruction when learning to read. In Alberta, a “balanced” approach is taken, which means that phonics is simply one of a number of reading “strategies,” including the memorization of high-frequency words and the use of picture cues, among others. In Progressively Worse, Robert Peal comprehensively tracks the history of what he calls The Reading Wars in the U.K., a history that parallels much of what has occurred in Alberta. After much research into the many factors powering the tug-of-war between the whole language and systematic phonics approaches to teaching reading, and after citing numerous studies into the effectiveness of both methodologies, Peal reasonably concludes that systematic phonics is the superior methodology and that “for the effects of the phonics method to be beneficial, it must be taught ‘first, fast, and only’” (Peal 169). This is not what’s happening in Alberta. Why does that matter to a high school English teacher whose students all know how to read, if not fully comprehend? Peal cites several significant studies that determined that the early advantage of having learned to read using phonics is compounded for these pupils (Peal 171), meaning that students who were taught to read using a systematic phonics program in their first year of school were, on average, three years ahead of their chronological age in reading by grade seven. Conversely, students who were taught using a “balanced” approach did not experience near the same gains...