Robyn Ewing: Teaching literacy is more than teaching simple reading skills

[Susan Godsland]

This post on the 'Australian Association for Research in Education' blog is creating lots of comments.

Teaching literacy is more than teaching simple reading skills: it can’t be done in five easy steps
By Robyn Ewing
''Robyn Ewing is Professor of Teacher Education and the Arts at the University of Sydney. She teaches in the areas of curriculum, English and drama, language and early literacy development''

http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=1532

I agree with eminent Australian literacy educators and educational researchers Emmitt, Hornsby and Wilson who explain that the:

Three important sources of information in text are meaning, grammar and letter‐sound relationships – often referred to as semantics, syntax and graphophonic relationships respectively. Emmitt, Hornsby and Wilson (2013, p.3)

These sources, or cueing systems, work together simultaneously. Over‐emphasis on any one cueing system when learning to read is not effective.

Also, as teachers know, a rich vocabulary and fluency are significant but children need to be able to go beyond simple literal ‘comprehension’ of a text. They need to be able to make inferences and evaluate the importance of words within a text.

Teachers of reading today share rich authentic literary texts with their students. They know extensive research has demonstrated the importance of prediction and questioning strategies in learning to be literate.

One of the best ways for children to excel in reading comprehension tasks is for them to have the opportunity to interact widely with a wide range of books, selected by them, for enjoyment.

Children not only need to learn how to make meaning from text to carefully analyse the arguments or assertions in a text, to evaluate texts, but also how to create their own with confidence and creative flair.

One of the comments is from Greg Ashman:

Dear Robyn

Thank you for a very thought provoking article. I was wondering if you could point me towards the evidence to support these claims:

“An over‐emphasis on letter‐sound relationships can be very confusing for children learning to read.”

“These sources, or cueing systems, work together simultaneously. Over‐emphasis on any one cueing system when learning to read is not effective.”

I am sure that you will be familiar with the 2005 Rose review from the UK. Appendix 1 seems to be at odds with the second of these claims:

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/5551/2/report.pdf

Best wishes

Greg

Here's John Walker's comment:

I’m going to be far less polite than other commentators, So, here’s a trigger warning!

We’re told that ‘competent, experienced readers sample just enough visual information to feel satisfied that they grasped the meaning so far of whatever text they are reading ..’ and that ‘… teachers… already have a deep understanding of the repertoire of strategies and approaches…’ Blah, blah, blah.
Good grief! We had all this from our professors in UK for years. And where did it get us? By 1997, the OECD concluded that over 51% of adults were illiterate or poorly literate – mostly as a result of professors like Robyn Ewing peddling Frank Smith’s and the Goodman’s nonsense and dressing it up in academese to give it authority and make it sound reasonable.
This is pompous and pedantic nonsense. Has this professor ever seen a class of four and five-year-olds ‘sampling’ text and bringing all ‘their past experiences and knowledge of the language’ to it. This is cloud cuckoo land.
What’s more hundreds, possibly thousands, of students are likely to be taken in by this rubbish because they haven’t yet entered the classroom and don’t know any better.
And, as for quoting Krashen at Greg Ashman: Krashen has never drawn the distinction between the spoken word, which everyone in their own language learns naturally, and writing, which is not learned naturally and has to be taught. This professor also does not seem to be aware of the difference between the primary and secondary learning. Neither does she seem to understand that the writing system is an invented system to represent the sounds of the language. No expert on writing systems would deny this fact!
My advice to all of those would-be teachers and teachers out there is to not put thy trust in professors who wouldn’t know what a good quality phonics programme looked like if was sitting in front of them. Seek out the people, like Jennifer Buckingham, Greg Ashman and Alison Clarke (of Spelfabet) and read carefully what they have to say.
Finally, remember this: if a child can’t decode (read), they will never be able to ‘sample’ or enjoy a text. Teach them to read!

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Professor Pamela Snow, member of IFERI's Advisory Group, writes a full response to Professor Robyn Ewing's piece via Pamela's own blog:

Reading is a verb. Literacy is not.

April 30th 2016

http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/

How can a child who receives solid, teacher-guided instruction ranging across phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency be “short-changed”? Seriously?! Many children can but dream of having these basics in place in their classroom. Having them in evidence is one thing. Having them based on robust evidence, is another thing altogether. And where is the evidence that children exposed to phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency “disengage from the learning process”? What about the possibility that systematic attention to these features might have the very opposite effect for many at-risk learners?

One of the tired and hoary old chestnuts that is regularly trotted out against those who argue for better and more systematic phonics instruction is that there's more to reading than simply decoding text. That’s a bit like saying that there’s more to making a cup of tea than boiling the kettle. Advocates for evidence-based phonics instruction have always seen learning to decode as a necessary but not sufficient part of literacy learning. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) asserts the importance of both decoding and comprehension. So if you can't get words on and off the page, what hope do you have of participating in digital, critical, multi or any other sort of literacy?

Please do find the time to read in full.

[Susan Godsland]

David Hornsby, one of the authors of this paper: The Place of Phonics in Learning to Read and Write http://www.alea.edu.au/documents/item/773/, added to the comments section:

English spelling is more influenced by morphemes than phonemes, which is one of its strengths. For example, when we understand that meaning is central, we understand why there is a ‘g’ in ‘sign’ (it belongs to the same ‘meaning family’ as signal, signature, significant, etc. There’s a ‘w’ in ‘two’ because it belongs to the same ‘meaning family’ as twin, twice, twenty, between, etc. Phonics is important, but meaning is required to make phonics work. For example, no-one can read the word ‘wind’ on its own and sounding out won’t help. Does it rhyme with ‘find’ or with ‘sinned’? Meaning is REQUIRED to make phonics work. Synthetic phonics approaches emphasise the least helpful cueing system in text and downplay the importance of the most helpful cueing systems. We need a comprehensive approach that allows young learners to use EVERYTHING they know about language, not just sound. Why restrict young learners to one cueing system? A teacher’s core job is to make learning easy, not difficult. Allow young learners to use all the information available to them.

John Walker responded:

Yes, the English writing system has a morphophonemic structure. That doesn’t mean that you start teaching it by talking about how ‘sign’ is cognate with ‘signature’, etc. – good luck with explaining that to a beginning reader!
Here’s how:the English alphabetic code works:
Spellings, comprised on one, two, three or four letters, are used to spell sounds from left to right across the page;
Sounds can be spelled in multiple (but limited) ways – for example, [ n ], [ nn ], [ kn ], [ gn – ‘gnash’, ‘gnaw’, ‘reign’, oh, and ‘sign’], [ pn ], [ne ];
Many spellings can represent more than one sound – [ i ] on ‘sit’ or ‘kind’.
If children are to learn to read successfully, they need to be taught the code – how all the sounds in English are spelled – and they need to be taught the three vital skills needed to be able to use the knowledge they have: segmenting, blending and phoneme manipulation.
All of this takes three years on average, at the end of which most children are highly proficient readers and spellers.
Is anyone suggesting that meaning isn’t important? Of course not! It’s an old chestnut that anti-phonics people like to bring up. If a child reads the sentence ‘The wind left dust on the mat’ and they read the spelling [ i ] in ‘wind’ as /ie/ (to rhyme with ‘tie’) and not /i/, their brain would be saying ‘wind?’ (as in ‘kind’) and registering that it doesn’t make sense. But, if they’ve been taught that the spelling [ i ] can be /ie/ and it can also be /i/, they simply make the substitution. This is exactly what mature readers do when they come across a word in their reading they have never read before but have in their spoken vocabulary.
Far, from emphasising the least helpful cueing system, phonics is the only game in town as a first step to reading or writing a word, because if a child can’t decode, they can’t read and, if they can’t read, they can’t understand any text.
In the words of one of the experts on the world’s writing systems Peter Daniels: ‘Writing differs from language, though, in a very fundamental way. Language is the natural product of the human mind – the properties of people that make it possible for everyone to learn any language, provided that they start at a young enough age – while writing is a deliberate product of the human intellect: no infant illiterate absorbs its script along with its language: writing must be studied.’ I’d add ‘taught’.
You can read what else I have to say on the issue of decoding, comprehension and muddled thinking here: http://literacyblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015 ... ddled.html

[Susan Godsland]

Just found out that Prof. Pamela Snow mentioned the David Hornsby 'phonics' publication in an earlier Snow Report post:

Santa Claus, Homeopathy, and Phonics: Where's the link?
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/2015/0 ... onics.html