Nola Firth
February 25, 2008

Those to whom this article refers, including Rebekah Turner, may not be able to read it. About 10% of people have learning disabilities (sometimes called dyslexia). Compared with the US and Britain - and, more recently, New Zealand - learning disabilities have been ignored in Australia. The consequences are that these students are at risk of developing behavioural problems at school - of school dropout, mental health problems and delinquency. Policy and practice in Australia need to change to incorporate the significant knowledge now available to help this group.

In the UK and the US, the term "learning disabilities" is officially defined and is a part of policy and educational discourse and practice. In these countries, there are many schools established specifically to cater for the needs of these students; and in the UK many government schools have been awarded "dyslexia-friendly" status by the British Dyslexia Association.

In contrast, government inquiries in Australia and New Zealand in the 1970s argued against the existence of learning disabilities as a phenomenon intrinsic to the child. The genetic nature of the phenomenon that is now being indicated suggests that the US and UK decisions were accurate. Indeed, last year the New Zealand Ministry of Education finally recognised the need to take account of the particular needs of this group. Australia has yet to do so.

Because a shared definition of learning disabilities is not a part of Australian educational discourse, many teachers and parents are unaware of its genetic and permanent nature. In particular they are frequently unaware that learning disabilities are highly resistant even to skilled intervention.

This includes the teaching of reading by phonic methods, which relies on the ability to analyse sounds, a processing skill that is very difficult for many students who have learning disabilities. Consequently, governments and the media frequently focus on literacy problems and assume these are due to inadequate pedagogy. At least to some extent they are likely to be due to learning disabilities.

Reading syllabus hijacked by fringe groups as basics ignored

Justine Ferrari, Education writer | May 27, 2009

Article from:  The Australian

THE nation's most respected remedial reading experts have criticised the National Curriculum Board for caving in to the demands of a fringe group of university academics and teachers who argue against a back-to-basics emphasis on phonics in teaching reading.

The board, which is charged with writing the national guidelines on teaching from kindergarten to Year 12, has been accused of ignoring key players in drafting its latest advice on the shape of the proposed new English curriculum.

Researchers have told federal Education Minister Julia Gillard that the board, headed by chairman Barry McGaw, has failed to consider recommendations of the national inquiry into teaching literacy, which insists that the "explicit and systematic" teaching of the letter-sound relationships is required to learn to read.

The letter to Ms Gillard accuses professional associations representing English teachers and literacy educators of hijacking the national curriculum to remove the emphasis on the teaching of phonics as the essential first step in learning to read. The 20-plus signatories also say no recognised reading researcher or infant-years expert was consulted when the board produced the framing paper.

Among those unhappy with the position of the curriculum board - which will frame a national approach to English, maths, science and history teaching for all students by next year - are the researchers who sparked the national reading inquiry in 2004, including the Macquarie University group that developed the MULTILIT program being used with great success in indigenous communities.

The reading experts say they were locked out of the consultation process and no recognised expert was consulted "despite written requests, which included the names and contact details of recognised reading researchers".

"Any individual who can read themselves can claim to be a reading researcher, but the term 'recognised' reading researcher refers to those academics who have undertaken evidence-based research in the area of learning to read and write and how these skills are best taught," they say.

The letter says the teacher professional associations - the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, the Australian Literacy Educators Association and the Primary English Teachers Association - do not represent classroom teachers but are controlled by academics in university education faculties with little experience in teaching children to read.

All three organisations are members of the international Whole Language Umbrella group of reading and literacy associations run out of the US.

"(They) have very limited membership among classroom teachers," the letter says. "According to their own published annual general reports, these associations are better known to politicians and the media than to classroom teachers and their membership base amongst classroom teachers is so low that their existence is threatened.

"Executive positions on these associations are mostly held by academics from schools and faculties of education or by individuals with no expertise in basic research on learning to read and write and how these skills are best taught."

National Curriculum Board general manage Rob Randall defended the draft curriculum, saying the the research and findings of the national inquiry into teaching reading would be evident in the curriculum, which was yet to be written.

The framing paper was written by Sydney University education professor Peter Freebody, whose appointment was criticised for his association with the whole-language approach to teaching reading, which holds that phonics are not always necessary in learning to read.

The initial advice paper on English released by the curriculum board last October contains a half-page discussion about the teaching of reading in the early years of school under the subheading "beginnings and basics".

"The explicit and systematic teaching of sound-script correspondences is important, and not just for students who are in their first year or so of schooling, or for whom English is not a first language," it says.

"The explicit teaching of decoding, grammar, spelling and other aspects of the basic codes of written English will be an important and routine aspect of the national English curriculum. It should be planned, put into practice and consolidated as part of a program in English education, and it should be available to students throughout the school years."

In final advice to the curriculum writers released at the beginning of the month, reading is mentioned in the general context of literacy referring to "reading, writing, speaking, viewing and listening effectively in a range of contexts". "Many students when learning to read need systematic attention to fundamentals like phonological and phonemic awareness, and sound-letter correspondences as well as the development of skills in using semantic and syntactic clues to make meaning," the paper says.

The reading researchers argue the reference to the need to develop skills in using semantic and syntactic clues, such as the syntax of the sentence and the picture on the page, "invites confusion" and could be read as supporting the "debunked three-cueing system which confuses the skills needed for reading/decoding and the skills needed for comprehension".

The letter was sent to Ms Gillard and Professor McGaw, with copies to Opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne, NCB director of operations Rose Naughton, Professor Freebody and the NSW representative on the NCB, Tom Alegounaris, who is the newly appointed president of the NSW Board of Studies.

In an article by JENNA HAND called  Our 20-20 vision remains hazy on 5/04/2009 10:14:00 am,

ACT Council of Social  Services director Roslyn Dundas says:

''There are 78,000 people in the ACT who have insufficient literacy skills to get by in the modern world. That number hasn't changed since 1996. We need to try to bring that number down.''

Justine Ferrari, Education writer | March 19, 2009

• Miranda Devine
• March 21, 2009

Illustration: Simon Bosch

Ideological promoters of the discredited "whole language", or osmosis method, of teaching children to read have been unmasked this week. The whole language lobby's devious and irrational opposition to evidence was exemplified in a bid to derail the State Government's trial of MULTILIT, a successful remedial reading program based on explicit phonics teaching.

In an email stream last week from Associate Professor Brian Cambourne, of Wollongong University, to literacy educators who subscribe to a university mailing list, strategies for winning the "reading wars" were laid bare. Cambourne, regarded as the "godfather" of whole language in Australia, urges his network to "flood Verity's [the Education Minister, Verity Firth's] office" with messages designed to denigrate MULTILIT and undermine the trial "at an almost subconscious level". He also suggests linking the program to "readicide", which he defines as "the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools".

Confronted this week by The Australian's education writer, Justine Ferrari, Cambourne came up with this extraordinary quote: "When you rely on evidence, it's twisted … We rely on the cognitive science framing theory, to frame things the way you want the reader to understand them to be true."

That sounds like a postmodern justification for obfuscation.

To their great credit, it appears that both Firth and the federal Education Minister, Julia Gillard, are more interested in results than ideology. Gillard has tied literacy and numeracy funding to programs proven effective by evidence-based research. "This is about finding out what works," Gillard said in a press release last May. Similarly, Firth has said she is not interested in "internecine debates". She urged educators to "stop arguing about what we believe and start talking about what we know".

In other words, reading programs should be based on evidence of what works. Paying lip service to phonics under the rebadging of whole-word theory as "balanced" instruction isn't enough. Both Firth and Gillard are lawyers who understand the value of evidence. Interestingly, both are also members of the Labor Left, which will insulate them from the ideological ad hominem attacks usually employed by the leftists of the whole-language lobby, and may help to unhook the teaching of reading from its historic left-right baggage.

It has never made sense that the whole-word doctrine has been a hobbyhorse of left-wingers, when its results work particularly to the detriment of the working class. Underprivileged children have suffered most from the marginalisation of phonics in schools, as their homes are generally not rich learning environments. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (of which I was a member) found as many as 30 per cent of year 5 students had literacy problems preventing them from "effectively participating" in further schooling. The National Curriculum Board reportedly puts the figure for struggling readers at between 20 per cent and 40 per cent.

How can anyone dismiss the miracles that go on every day in classrooms in Uniting Church centres in Ashfield and Redfern and in a Noel Pearson-led trial in Cape York, where the reading age of indigenous students is three to four years behind the national average.

You just have to see for yourself the joy in the faces of children as they learn the sounds of the alphabet and how to put them together in words, and they suddenly realise what the "black stuff" on the page means.

In the program trial in Coen, on Cape York, some children started learning so quickly a special accelerated program had to be devised for them. After two terms there were average gains of almost two years in reading accuracy.

How can anyone ignore Melbourne's Bellfield Primary, one of the most disadvantaged schools in Australia, which transformed itself by rejecting whole language theory and instituting a program of explicit phonics instruction. The results were stunning, with 91 per cent of grade 2 students reading with 100 per cent accuracy compared to the previous 31 per cent. How can anyone reject results of the seven-year study of underprivileged children in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, who were taught to read using an intensive form of phonics, and wound up more than three years ahead of their peers.

In his email stream, Cambourne gives a clue to the origins of his ideological blinkers when he dismisses the evidence on which the MULTILIT trial rests as a "neo-liberal" concern.

"I believe that the neoliberal views of 'evidence-based research' … can be shown to be just as flawed as their economic theories". How the science of teaching children to read became an ideological battleground is a mystery to Professor Kevin Wheldall, the inspirational creator of MULTILIT. But there is no doubt it has been a tragedy, as the whole language movement has held sway for 40 years, with its Rousseauian notion that children learn to read naturally just by being exposed to books. When it became clear this was not the case for as many as two-thirds of children, whole-language proponents did not question their beliefs but turned to social justice for justification. Teacher education courses became infected with the revolutionary idea that only by eradicating poverty and underprivilege (by overthrowing the patriarchal, authoritarian, elitist capitalist system, of course) could students progress.

This has been as futile and damaging as the notion that we cannot prevent catastrophic bushfires unless we stop climate change. It is using the tragedy of illiterate children as the means to achieve an ideological end.

devinemiranda@hotmail.com

Different reading methods on trial

Justine Ferrari, Education writer | March 14, 2009

Article from:  The Australian

THE divisive debate over how best to teach children to read has prompted the first trial in Australia comparing phonics-based techniques with other methods.

The NSW Government is planning a pilot study assessing a reading program that teaches children letter-sound combinations as the first step in reading.

Their progress will be compared with students taught by methods that place less emphasis on phonics and more on "whole language" techniques, such as pictures and sentence structure.

It is believed to be the first head-to-head comparison of phonics with other reading programs in the nation.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, NSW Education Minister Verity Firth said the aim of the trial was to gather evidence of what worked.

"Surely all of us can agree we want the best for our kids, and stop arguing about what we believe and start talking about what we know," she said.

"As Education Minister, my job isn't to find myself in the middle of internecine debates, but to try to be able to look at how reading is taught with the primary motivation of what's best for our kids."

NSW will run the trial as one of the programs funded through the National Partnership with the commonwealth on literacy and numeracy that was agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments.

Ms Firth said the state's aims were in line with the federal Government's objectives, which had called for phonics trials.

The NSW study will use the MULTILIT (Making Up Lost Time in Literacy) reading program developed by education researchers at Macquarie University, which places letter-sound relationships or phonemic awareness as the foundation of learning to read. The details of the trial are still being finalised but it is envisaged it will run for at least a year, targeting students in Years 3 and 4 reading well below the level of their peers.

The debate in the reading wars is over the importance of teaching phonics to children learning to read, with "whole language" techniques supplanting the sounding out of words as the first step in learning.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Yuko Narushima
October 17, 2008

In a shift set to excite English language purists, the board has recommended students once again learn to sound out words, spell and correctly punctuate and structure sentences.

The push for students to get the basics right, before using the language for more complex tasks, comes as part of the Government's plan to install a national curriculum in English, maths, science and history, for all students from kindergarten to year 12.

At present students across Australia learn from more than 18 different senior English and history courses.

The board also proposed a return to phonics, a method of teaching based on sound. Sounding out each letter of the alphabet as an aid to reading was dropped in favour of a "whole language" approach, which uses a visual representation of the word next to its spelling, as in picture cards.

The board's chairman, Barry McGaw, said a renewed focus on teaching English as a language, rather than a tool for cultural studies, would help raise literacy standards for all students.

"We have to do better," Professor McGaw said. "Establishing a national English curriculum is an opportunity to raise standards for all young people and ensure no one slips through the cracks."

The board says between 20 and 40 per cent of children are struggling to read using the whole language system on its own. The study of grammar in Australia was removed in the early 1970s.

Also, children should be exposed to literature as soon as they start school and study classics as they progress through high school, the board recommended.

Literary texts should take a broad range of forms including digital and multimedia formats, but not at the expense of novels, poetry, drama and short stories.

In particular, the paper stated a role for works that "have become regarded as worth special attention" and those "judged to have particular potential for enriching young learners' lives", hinting at a return to traditional literature.

A refocus on Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen, as well as modern Australian writers such as Tim Winton, is seen as an about-turn on recent attempts to popularise the study of texts, under which some schools were analysing TV shows such as Home And Away and Buffy The Vampire Slayer and movies such as Clueless and Star Wars.

The proposal, prepared by a University of Sydney professor, Peter Freebody, is likely to allay fears the curriculum would weigh too heavily on critical literacy, the search for underlying meanings. Instead, tools of analysis should be introduced gradually with age-appropriate texts in the early years, the paper said. "In the culminating years, there should be a strong focus on analysing the historical genres and literary tradition of Australian literature and world literature," it said.

Consultation on the national curriculum continues until the end of February.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/10/16/1223750232631.html

ON LINE  opinion  - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

By Valerie Yule
Posted Monday, 8 September 2008

International Literacy Day has been celebrated with events and projects since 1966. It still needs to be celebrated by raising awareness that there are many unnecessary barriers to literacy that are not costly to remove. Sacking principals from non-achieving schools as has been suggested, would still leave these barriers in place.

Millions of research papers on reading have piled up over the past 100 years. Millions of dollars and pounds are spent annually on research and programs. Yet there is still too much needless failure in print literacy. “Forty million Americans cannot read a food label” is a common guesstimate.

The first barriers to literacy are set up in infancy, with language deprivation, and there other barriers, all along the line. There are barriers in old age, when declining vision adds millions more people to the millions who cannot read the tiny print in packet food instructions; the tiny pale print on guarantees and contracts; the white-on-black blocks of text, so trendy but glare-inducing, in some magazines (although so vivid on the computer screens of the graphic artists); and the names of railway-stations, when small signs with coloured backgrounds are too hard to read from moving trains, especially at night.

Language deprivation for babies is becoming more widespread, as new parents do not know what is already well known. Parents take their babies to Sleep Clinics for stern training to accept loneliness, in part because they are ignorant of the age-old traditions of singing lullabies, which help bond love and language together, and soothe adult as well as child. Popular CDs for calming babies are usually either soothing music that is sometimes like a sort of hypnosis, or lullabies that have instrumental accompaniments more suitable for play than sleep. It would be great if hospitals could give to all parents of first babies a CD of unaccompanied sung lullabies from round the world, that parents too could sing, or at least play for their infants, so that from the start they were learning happy associations to the human voice.

Schools used to put great effort into stopping children chattering in class. Now there is effort to encourage them to talk in class. Sometimes children are arriving at school with insufficient language to join in, let alone start to learn to read. One such five-year-old, normal except for no speech, had been baby-sat by a TV, and his mother did not talk with him herself, because “it was no use until he could talk”.

Public outings are a marvellous time for talking with babies and toddlers. There is so much around to talk about. But you can observe many littlies in forward-facing prams and strollers, sometimes even with blankets or coats over their heads, in the way that parrots are silenced in cages, being pushed by silent adults. Toddlers may be hauled along by adults who have music plugs in their ears. Children may be told not to talk on public transport. Some families still keep up a tradition of silence at meals, or have no meals together at all. Yet talking with littlies and telling them stories is even more important than reading to them to develop their language and thinking.

Children’s books today may make it hard to learn to read because publishers have to put sales appeal above user-appeal, and it is adults who buy the books for small children. If these books are to be pored over and are not mere disposables, buyers need to be aware of important features of “user appeal” that go beyond first novelty. The print should be clear and big enough for small children to start to “help themselves” in recognising the print in the storybooks read to them, and in the picture books they look at. The words should not have colour or picture backgrounds that obscure the print. Stories should have enough text on a page to help start good reading habits with unconscious peripheral scanning and sequencing in short-term memory.

And the child is right when it wants the same book read again and again and again. A dozen favourite books are better than a floorful of once-only little “amusers” that cannot even sit tidily on a shelf. And along with the whimsy or morbidity that some adults love to give children, small children love to learn about the world through adult quality illustrations, and to have a chance to develop tastes for literature, science and technology. Children taught to value books and to treat them carefully can be given “bookshop crawls” as treats to discover books they like.

TV entertainment is rarely a good language teacher because the visuals dominate; small children need radio programs that they can listen to as they play amid the everyday life of the family. And everyday TV needs Open Primary School and Open Secondary School - not tucked away somewhere special, but on a regular channel at accessible times, not just at midnight. After all, it is natural for children to find learning entertaining, because it is an innate drive, when it isn’t being squashed. We need brilliant teachers shown teaching, as entertaining as cooking shows. As the Principal of the Oxford Dragon School explained, the qualities of an excellent teacher are to “inspire and to entertain”.

Distance learning is coming along fast. It still needs to make more adequate provision for the children who lose out in the “lottery of the classroom”. While we say “every child is different, and we must cater for different needs”, in school that must often mean learning the same thing at a different time. We could have take-home short 30-minute cartoon-graphics literacy videos targeted to different needs and abilities, that give overviews of “what it helps to learn to read” and where failing learners can find out where they are stuck, to identify and prevent gaps and confusions that are often not realised.

There are still unnecessary barriers to print literacy in some classrooms, that every teacher could avoid, once aware of them.

There are some voices that say that perhaps everybody does not need to learn to read, or that point out how literacy can be used to oppress, or that print literacy is now only one among many multiliteracies today that need to be taught, and some of these can be taught more easily.

Certainly it is possible for people to live happily without being able to read. However, in our modern technological society, lack of literacy cuts the ignorant off from so many opportunities and consolations that they should be able to access as a right. To become able to read raises IQ, increasing chances in life (PDF 425KB).

B.O.O.K.s are Bodies of Organised Knowledge in a way that the Internet cannot be - they complement each other, and both really require knowledge of print, rather than restriction to the aids of audio and graphics.

Do we care that millions of English speakers in the world cannot read, when English is - for the time - the lingua franca? Literacy for centuries has been reserved for an elite. Today it is still reserved for those who are advantaged enough to be able to cope with the “discipline” (read “unpredictabilities”) of English spelling. There is now enough research showing how English-language children are held back several years in learning to read compared with children where spelling is not a problem. Now there needs to be research in what would help them - and us - with human engineering to improve the task, while still keeping our heritage of print accessible. There is nothing sacred about spelling today. It is only an instrument, which should be maximally efficient for reading and writing the language.

Current debate is raging in UK about allowing undergraduates to spell badly since so many seem unable to do otherwise. But this would add to the present chaos of unpredictable spelling. It would be better to start to make English spelling keep to its own rules. The first start, for example, could be dropping surplus letters, that are useless to show meaning or pronunciation and often only mislead.

Experiments which can be replicated show how omitting surplus letters can help child and adult learners, English language learners and readers. Current trends are to streamline English spelling, from dictionaries that have been admitting alternative spellings like demon, duet, economy error, ether, exotic, horror, medieval, music, program, develop, music, salad, satin and toxin, which increasingly replace the former daemon, omelette, oeconomy, errour, aether, exotick, horrour, mediaeval, musick, develop,  programme, and sallad to popular use of the shortest possible spellings in text messaging. Unpredictable English spelling has been used for two centuries as a social screener to prevent social mobility; but now society needs to make reading more accessible to the less advantaged world-wide. It would be good to have an International English Spelling Commission by the time of International Literacy Day 2009.

Some readers may dispute this last recommendation but they of course can read. I hope that they can still take seriously the recommendations to remove the other barriers to literacy which add up to stack the odds so heavily against the less advantaged.

The message of International Literacy Day is that everyone should have the right to free access to literacy, at any time, in any way that may help them, regardless of distance or disadvantages or ability to pay.

Valerie Yule is a writer and researcher on imagination, literacy and social issues.

Channel 4 BBC  Sept 05

By David Mills

Introduction | Why the silence? | The future of defining dyslexia

Introduction

As a current affairs producer, every story you tell brings surprises. No story I have ever been involved with before though has produced as many eye-openers as the Channel 4 Dispatches programme The Dyslexia Myth.

There were numerous small revelations: ranging from the discovery that dyslexic children do not reverse their letters any more than younger children reading at the same level, to the discovery that the Government has so far introduced no fewer than 650 different initiatives in primary schools.

Then there were even more dramatic discoveries: poor readers with high IQs, usually seen as dyslexic, respond in exactly the same way to help with their reading as poor readers with low IQs who are rarely labelled as dyslexic.

The biggest shock was that the 'dyslexia myth' story which sounded so controversial when I first started the research, turned out not to be controversial at all to the experts. The idea that the common understanding of dyslexia is a myth was startling when I first heard it. Yet I found it was a view shared by every academic that I talked to. The scientific consensus about it is overwhelming.

This poses two questions, both of which trouble me still, even though we did not deal with them in the documentary. I am raising them here in more detail. The first question is why has the story not been reported before? The second is what is the future of the term dyslexia?

Why the silence?

The expert knowledge that the popular understanding of dyslexia as a 'myth', has been around for at least ten years. The research findings, taken collectively, are devastating. Yet they have never been properly reported to the public. Perhaps the reason for this is the inadequacy of the journalistic profession.

Or perhaps it reflects perhaps a bigger problem: a natural reluctance on the part of researchers to simplify and popularise the findings of other investigators. Although academics understand the big picture, few feel comfortable about dragging together all the different research findings about a complex subject, simplifying them and putting them together to provide a simple overview. Academics are rated on their ability to come up with their own findings, not on how effective they are at popularising other people's research.

The future of defining dyslexia

The question of how dyslexia could be defined generated a lot of controversy in the run up to the documentary. The reason we did not deal with it in the documentary is that there is simply too much disagreement about it. There are at least five major views about the future use of the term 'dyslexia':

View 1
The term dyslexia should be dropped completely.
It is said that dyslexia carries so many wrong associations, and is understood in so many different ways by so many different people, that it serves no useful scientific or therapeutic purpose. It should be replaced by 'reading problems' or in more severe cases 'reading disability'.

I have a lot of sympathy with this view. As a journalist I like to know what words mean. There are problems though. The term dyslexia is so ingrained that a lot of people would still go on using it. There is also the fact that 'dyslexia' is a handy term for those trying to focus attention on the needs of those with reading problems.

View 2
'Dyslexia' can be redefined to describe all children who find it difficult learning to read because of phonological problems.
This would provide a clear definition which would identify children who have a sufficient problem detecting the smallest sounds in words which make learning to read difficult. It would thus identify children who will need additional tuition in a small group or even one-to-one help.

This could result in labelling up to one fifth of children as 'dyslexic'. Do we really want to suggest that so many children are in some way 'disabled'? Given that so many children have problems learning to read, we should look upon difficulty in learning to read as an entirely normal experience for quite a lot of children.

View 3
'Dyslexia' should only be used to describe children with the severest problems.
These children will need not only small group teaching but also often skilled one to one assistance to overcome their problem.

Such a definition has the merit that it would help institutions like the Dyslexia Institute focus attention on such children. Yet it would still label children as dyslexic who, with the right teaching at school, will learn to read perfectly well. It may also suffer from the difficulty of arriving at a cut off point. So on one side of this line a child would be labelled dyslexic, while on the other, a very similar child would not be.

View 4
'Dyslexia' should be used only for the 1-2 per cent of children with a long-term reading problem who do not respond to the best school teaching currently possible.
There is no doubt that these children need far more help than individual schools can provide, including diagnostic tests and long term support.

This view is supported by many leading researchers. It would mean that 'dyslexia' defines a clear group of children who are significantly disabled and for whom special help is both needed and justified.

View 5
'Dyslexia' should no longer be really associated with reading problems nor defined in relation to reading.
The argument is that there is a pattern disability, much wider than mere reading problems, which can be used to define who is, and who is not dyslexic.

The problem is, that as far as I am aware there is, precious little agreement on whether such a pattern exists or if it does exist, how at present it might be defined. There are indications that some adults who have suffered long-term reading disability do often share other problems, such as poor memory or poor organisational skills, but whether this could be used to redefine dyslexia seems, on the evidence, problematic.

So what do I think after all the research that I have done? I am tempted by the definition in View 3, that dyslexia should be used to define children with the severest problems. However in the end I think I would come down in favour of View 4, reserving the term 'dyslexia' for the 1-2 per cent of children, whose problems, on present evidence, are unlikely to be resolved by even the latest 'state of the art' school teaching. It would be a rigorous definition and focus attention on those who suffer most. They need all the help we can give them.

Ben Goldacre

The Guardian,

Saturday May 24 2008

Article history

How do you judge if an intervention is effective when you hear about it in the media? Perhaps you tot up the balance of opinions. Perhaps you do it unconsciously.

You might have noticed the Dore "miracle cure" for dyslexia, invented by millionaire paint entrepreneur Wynford Dore. It's hard to ignore. In fact just recently you may have seen "Strictly Come Dancing" star Kenny Logan - a rugby superhero, with 70 caps in 13 years - promoting the Dore Dyslexia Program with his own personal testimonials on the Jeremy Vine Show, Channel Five News, Radio Five Live, BBC London, ITV Central, ITV Yorkshire, in the Daily Mail, the Daily Record, Scotland on Sunday, and many, many more.

One earlier round of "miracle cure" publicity was so bizarre that Nasa, which is quite busy making spacecraft, was forced to issue a press release refuting claims in the Independent and New Scientist that Dore used special Nasa space technology and exercises in the treatment (Dore denies involvement in these claims). And we should remember that the published scientific evidence for Dore consists of an infamous research study on the "miracle cure", filled with fascinating methodological holes so serious that there were five resignations from the editorial board of the journal Dyslexia in protest at its publication, and an unprecedented nine critical commentaries from academics.

But in the media you will only ever see Dore being promoted intensely, glowingly, uncritically, with intimate personal testimonies which many, understandably, consider to constitute evidence. With repetition, after all, they can start to feel eerily quantitative.

And what shameless repetition. The Independent Television Commission upheld complaints about a Tonight With Trevor McDonald program promoting Dore's miracle cure (with an "information line" at the end which went straight through to Dore). Nothing changed. A year later Richard and Judy did exactly the same thing, because there aren't any very good treatments for dyslexia, so anyone with a miracle cure is welcome on the sofa. The ITC upheld a complaint again. It changed nothing. Ofcom found Dore's TV advertisement to be in breach of its rules on evidence, "assessment of medical claims", and "impressions of professional advice and support".

How do you make that kind of relentlessly positive media coverage happen? Dore retains Phil Hall Associates, headed by the ex-editor of the News of the World and one of the finest and most expensive PR men in Britain (he's quite a nice bloke on the phone). You may remember someone called Kenny Logan. He is paid for some of his promotional work for Dore, but he does not declare this fact to journalists or TV producers when he spreads his message of Dore miracles to the nation ("if journalists ask whether he is paid he confirms it," says Dore, "but he does not volunteer it when it does not seem an issue.").

You will never hear a negative Dore anecdote in the media. Why not? I spoke with three patients who felt the £2,000 programme didn't work for them. That's all. It's a fairly modest claim about their own experience, and you'd have thought the company might simply wear it. They asked for the names to discuss the cases specifically. I gave them two. In a letter to these patients asking for permission to talk about their cases they mentioned libel in a way that can only be described as threatening.

One was simply outraged. She thinks, incidentally, that the Dore Programme made her son's seizures and headaches worse. I make no comment on that, as it is simply one mother's story (but if Dore wants to live by extreme anecdotes, then that is one for them to think about). The other felt he dared not take the risk of speaking out - of simply saying "it didn't work for me" - as he felt so threatened, he does not have the resources to protect himself legally.

An academic has received a letter threatening legal action, delivered in person to her home, for daring to speak about her concerns over the evidence for Dore when asked by journalists. Dore's lawyers have sent multiple extensive letters and faxes to this newspaper, warning us against all kinds of things. I get paid the same for this column whether it takes me two hours or a week. This may go some small way to explaining why you will hear only praise heaped upon Dore in the media.

Meanwhile the Australian arm of the Dore business has gone into administration, workers are unpaid, and parents are out of pocket. But you will hear nothing about this in the brave British media. This very week, even as everyday folk in Australia were wondering if they would ever see their money again, Radio 4's supposedly investigative consumer programme You and Yours was promoting the Dore programme. And as ever, Kenny Logan was the studio guest. Pay now, up front, for the miracle cure!

The Epidemic of Reading Disabilities

By Carl L. Kline, M.D. with Carolyn Lacey Kline

Carl L. Kline, M.D. (Vancouver, B.C., Canada), a child and adolescent psychiatrist, is internationally known for his expertise in children’s learning disabilities, including dyslexia. With his wife, Carolyn Lacey Kline, who is a  Language Disabilities consultant, he has treated over 4,000 children with learning disabilities. Dr. Kline states that “every poor reader who does not receive appropriate help will develop significant emotional problems.”

When 35% of the population is affected by a disability, it is an epidemic. When that disability is the leading cause of emotional problems in children and adolescents in North America, we are talking about a serious public health problem. Consider also that this epidemic is a major etiological factor in school-dropouts and in juvenile delinquency. Furthermore, although a definitive study has not yet been done, it seems likely that teenagers who can’t read or spell and who consequently hate school are easy targets for drug dealers.

Remember the panic in the streets each summer before Salk discovered a polio vaccine? Mothers dreaded the hot months of July and August. Daily they read the latest newspaper count of children struck down by what was then a disease of mysterious ways. Dr. Salk’s discovery annihilated the risk of polio in all who are inoculated against it, and simultaneously abolished the anxiety and fear that made summers a family nightmare.

We already have the vaccine to attack reading disability, but we can’t get the educators to use it. Samuel Orton, Rudolf Flesch, Jeanne Chall, Patrick Groff and numerous other researchers have urged the educators to prevent this massive problem by inoculating primary students with a steady injection of synthetic, explicit phonics. (This is not what the schools mean by phonics—a word increasingly in bad taste among educators. Synthetic, explicit phonics is intensive, structured training in letter-sound associations and blending drills with beginning reading/spelling/writing limited to phonetically regular words of increasing complexity. It is not occasional, hit-or-miss, unexplained letter-sounds unrelated to reading and written work.)

The research supporting early, intensive phonics as opposed to whole word-whole language instruction has been researched and validated. The findings have been widely published. One can only wonder: Do our educators have a reading disability? If teachers were taught how to teach children to read and spell phonetically and were provided with appropriate, inexpensive materials, the learning disability epidemic would be over. Parents no longer would have to worry about whether their children would learn to read. And they would not have to suffer the devastating experience of seeing their children fall apart emotionally under the impact of being perceived as stupid.

When typhoid fever occurred endemically, doctors discovered that it often was carried by food handlers, usually women in those days. These women were labeled “Typhoid Marys.” Doctors would go into the kitchens of restaurants, hospitals, and boarding houses, locate the typhoid carrier, and remove her from the kitchen. Perhaps we will have to go into the educational faculties and schools, locate the “Typhoid Marys,” and get them out of the classrooms.

Those who question what the educators are doing and who dare to suggest that they are a major cause of this epidemic of reading disability typically are met with anger. However, iconoclasts who threaten an entrenched establishment never are welcomed by those in power. For example, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss in 1850 demonstrated that the appalling death rate from childbirth fever in hospital maternity wards was caused by the attending doctors. They came directly from autopsy rooms to the delivery rooms, carrying the virulent infection on their unscrubbed hands and bloody aprons. Doctors were furious. They refused to listen to the evidence. They attacked Dr. Semmelweiss with verbal abuse, and finally they drove him from his university teaching position. Yet, twenty years after his death, the simple antiseptic techniques he advocated were adopted, and childbirth fever was abolished.

If the faculties of education would study the impressive evidence demonstrating that teaching to read by explicit phonics prevents reading failure, the children would not have to wait twenty more years. It’s time for educators to stop behaving like those nineteenth century doctors whose bacteria-infected hands and clothing killed young mothers in childbirth. Today’s educators also are destroying the innocent. They are killing the hopes, and the potential, and the mental health of the children who are victims of the reading disability epidemic. How long must these children wait?

Bring on the reading revolution

Janet Albrechtsen | April 09, 2008

IF the steady stream of dismal statistics has numbed the national consciousness about indigenous educational failures, consider this.

In remote learning centres - note they are not even called schools - Mem Fox's picture book Wombat Divine was the only book used to teach literacy to indigenous children from years 1 to 10 during the final term in 2005. As Helen Hughes, professor emeritus at the Australian National University and a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, revealed in a paper released on Monday, indigenous students were taught to read by guessing whole words.

Is it any wonder that statistics tell us that pitifully few indigenous children learn how to read? Surely, then, an education revolution starts at the most basic level: when children learn to read.

As a Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd is uniquely placed to bury some enduring myths about Aboriginal education in general and the teaching of reading in particular.

The comparisons and anecdotes in Hughes's paper tell a bleak story in a way statistics never can. The present generation of indigenous children is less literate than that of their grandparents, who attended missionary schools. Immigrants receive better instruction in English than indigenous children.

Is it any wonder that, as Hughes reports, "two bright, well-brought-up girls of 15 and 16 who had attended the Homeland Learning Centre where Wombat Divine had been a text for (years) 9 and 10 respectively could not read The Cat in the Hat, write a paragraph describing their journey from East Arnhem Land to Sydney without assistance with almost every word, did not know when to use capital letters, thought there were 100 minutes in the hour, did not know how many weeks there are in a year, how many grams in a kilogram, how to divide a piece of material in two or how to add, let alone subtract, numbers higher than 10".

None of this is accidental. It is the result of deliberate policies that gave primacy to culture above all else. Put it down to an indulgence by anthropologists wanting to freeze indigenous people in time so they could study them. Put it down to education bureaucrats who believed that a mainstream education did not suit indigenous children.

Make no mistake: as Hughes concludes, indigenous children have been the victims of educational apartheid. About the time that assimilation became a dirty word, indigenous education went into free fall, dragged down by cultural imperatives that sidelined educational outcomes. Nowhere is that disaster better illustrated than in the teaching of reading.

Indigenous students are taught to read in a "culturally appropriate way". Apparently, culturally appropriate reading means exposing indigenous children to a pretty picture book about a wombat. Fox is a fine Australian author. Her books, such as Wombat Divine, have delighted thousands of children. She is a strong advocate that if a parent reads good books to their child, that child will learn to read. But reciting and reading are different skills.

It is here that Fox's influence as a vocal critic of phonics has not served children well. And it has proven disastrous for the most disadvantaged, those children without the luxury of a home full of books and parents who read to them.

Indigenous schools remain caught in the whole-word educational fad favoured by so-called progressive educators. For too long, those who control education in this country have derided phonics as the preferred reading method of conservatives. They treated the basic tool of teaching sounds that make up words as a throwback to the conservative 1950s.

Education luminaries such as Brian Cambourne said phonics was a tool to maintain prevailing power structures. The so-called progressive '70s could do better by students, they said. For Cambourne, literacy needed to be re-framed as a social movement that could be used to challenge the political status quo. Mundane tools such as learning the sounds that comprise the words on a page were dumped in favour of teaching students to think critically.

However, progress did not follow. It is difficult to think critically about a piece of writing if one cannot read fluently. Children are expected to memorise whole words, learn to read as if by osmosis, without knowing the basic building blocks. When learning basic skills was sidelined, children suffered. And disadvantaged children suffered the most. It is nothing short of reprehensible that our most disadvantaged students are subjected to such illogical reading instruction.

Learning to read starts with the most basic of basics. Phonics teaches children the one-letter, two-letter and three-letter sounds that make up words. They learn how to read and how to solve problems by thinking logically. Confronted with a new word, a child trained in phonics will break it down into sound blocks. By building it back up with those sounds they can decipher the word. If working out how to read a new word is empowering for a four-year-old, it is critical for a 17-year-old.

Yet those schools that say they teach a balance of whole word and phonics have, in essence, sidelined any systematic teaching of phonics. How could it be otherwise given that teachers are themselves not taught how to teach phonics in any meaningful way?

The biggest hurdle to reform is ideology. The left-wing teachers unions have become the latter-day equivalent of the Maritime Union of Australia, blocking sensible reform at every step. Be it phonics or merit-based pay, a notion that most teachers support, or greater freedom for principals in the hiring and firing of teachers, unions have blocked reform, preferring a cushy status quo. And their so-called progressive barrackers in the universities that teach the teachers are with them all the way.

As the leader of a Labor Government, Rudd can make a difference to the next generation of indigenous children. The PM has a unique chance to tackle the critics in a way the Howard government never could. When the Howard government spoke of the importance of phonics, critics regarded it as some conservative conspiracy aimed at keeping people in their place and dulling their critical senses. It never made sense, of course. Critical faculties tend to improve most when people learn to read well and enjoy reading.

And just imagine if Julia Gillard, the education revolution minister from the Labor Party's left faction no less, chose to confront the ideological critics of phonics? If Rudd and Gillard are serious about an education revolution, let it begin in the classrooms of indigenous children. Let it begin by telling it like it is. Learning the sounds that make up words is not a politically driven agenda. It is about literacy. It is the key to social mobility. Until that small step is taken, indigenous children will continue to suffer.

janeta@bigpond.net.au

Check this out for everything you ever wanted to know about teaching reading:

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/c42/

Articles from A-Z

Struggling Readers

One of the main missions of Reading Rockets is to provide resources to help parents and educators support struggling readers. This section contains important articles about why learning to read can be difficult and what teachers and parents can do to help. Be sure to also see the Strategies to Help Kids Who Struggle section of this web site.

This section contains 66 articles.

Students trailing those of the 60s

THE AUSTRALIAN Justine Ferrari and James Madden | February 11, 2008

TEENAGERS' reading and maths skills have declined over the past four decades, despite education spending per student more than doubling.

A study by Australian National University economists released yesterday suggests 14-year-olds today are, in learning terms, about three months behind their counterparts in the1960s.

The researchers from ANU's Research School of Social Sciences suggest the piling of resources into creating smaller classes, at the expense of paying more for better teachers, could be to blame.

Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan say the fall is not due to demographic changes, such as an increase in non-English-speaking migrants. In fact, the decline is even more marked after those changes are taken into account.

Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said yesterday the Government's national action plan for numeracy and literacy would address the shortfall.

"The Rudd Government understands that literacy and numeracy skills are the building blocks of a good education," shesaid.

But Opposition education spokesman Tony Smith said the report highlighted why "a real education revolution needs to be more than delivering computers in boxes to schools".

Dr Leigh said the findings suggested the boost to school funding over the past 40 years had been misdirected.

"In the 1960s, the Beatles were the biggest story around; since then we've moved on in technology, the labour market and Australia has become more productive," he said.

"I was surprised to see test scores haven't risen. There's a whole lot more money put into Australian schools and we don't seem to be getting more out of them in terms of literacy and numeracy."

The study estimates that real spending in schools rose 258 per cent per student between 1964 and 2003. If productivity in schools is estimated as the money spent for each point on the literacy and numeracy tests, the researchers estimate that their productivity has fallen up to 13 per cent between 1975 and 1998 and by 73 per cent since 1964. This is in contrast with productivity across the economy, which rose by 34 per cent from 1975 to 1998 and by 64 per cent from 1964 to 2004.

Dr Leigh said cutting class sizes by about 10 per cent over the past 40 years had increased the number of teachers in schools. At the same time, teachers' salaries were allowed to fall in comparison with those of other professions, also by about 10 per cent.

The newly announced head of the National Curriculum Board, Barry McGaw, agreed that trading teachers' salaries for smaller class sizes across the board was not the best decision.

Professor McGaw, director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne and architect of the OECD international student tests, said a better move would be to have some very small groups of students offset by some larger ones.

Professor McGaw said the study's findings were in line with the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment, conducted among 15-year-olds, with the latest study showing a fall in reading scores among Australian students at the top level.

"We have to target our investment better," he said.

The ANU study compared the results of national numeracy tests undertaken by 14-year-olds in Year 9 in 1964 and in 2003, and in literacy and numeracy tests taken in by 14-year-olds in Year 9 in 1975 and 1998.

Dr Leigh said students today might be performing better in skills not measured in the 1960s such as verbal communication or social skills.

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/writintro.htm

Here's an interesting site to have a look at.

This is on Mem Fox's own web site.  Her suggestions of things to do to help young children learn to read are fine, but, while many children do learn to read this way,  many do not.   At an educated guess, 30% do not.  This 30% of struggling children may well be brought up in a household where all the things Mem mentions are done, and brothers and sisters - 'born readers' - go ahead in leaps and bounds quite naturally, but the 30% need explicit, systematic alphabetic code teaching, preferably from sound to letter, as in my scheme Sounds of Reading Australia www.soundsofreading.com.au .