Is your child only pretending to read?—take this two minute test!

For a number of years now years now there has been concern about Australia’s performance in international education tests. Indeed with initiatives such as a national curriculum there seems to be concern about many things in education. In this article I am going to talk about the teaching of reading, and how in some classrooms reading is not being taught effectively. The result is that too many children are simply learning English, word by word, and guessing at what they cannot read because they have never been taught to read.

Zoom down the list, bang, bang, bang

So when you finish reading this article grab your child— assuming he or she is in an appropriate state to do a reading test—and have him or her read the following words. Explain what the test is about and why you want it done. You will need to copy the words out first, printing in large size, using three columns.

There’s 50 words. Children who have been taught phonics should get most of them right. A Year 3 child should be able to zoom down the list, bang, bang, bang, achieving an almost perfect score. Year 2 children won’t be as good but should only make say ten mistakes or less. Remember to encourage by saying “yes… hmm… good etc.” If you think your child is getting tired then the second half could be done later.

tish, chep, pret, trite, stoc, toff, whap, freg, drope, brot, cret, ruff, drite, labby, plink, lank, drend, geaf, jeat, smick, spig, plat, mok, gloll, telf, croot, bloud, clet, flot, slite, ust, swote, quate, dray, toat, frage, crang, jeel, ching, tine, strone, urp, crelt, tast, tust, throbe, bame, prusk, flote, triantiwontigongolope

But if your child just cannot read anything, or only gets only a few right, or just makes wild guesses then it

could be that they have not been effectively taught the phonetic approach to English.

Actually how your child does the test is also important as it could be indicative of your child’s approach to school work in general. If he or she wants to go to the toilet in the first ten seconds, or wriggles on the seat, or wants help all the time, or runs to the refrigerator, well….

Phonics is back—big time

Three years ago there was a newspaper report of a school in Raymond Terrace, near Newcastle, which achieved very positive results from a reading program that focused on “phonics and phonics awareness” according to the school’s principal (reported by Dodd & Mather 2012). This year the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority chairman, Steven Schwartz, said that “phonics based teaching was the proven and sensible method of helping children read”.

Dr Kevin Donnelly, a senior research fellow at the Australian Catholic University and Director of the Education Standards Institute, and co-author of the recent review of the Australian National Curriculum, has said that “schools must concentrate on rote learning and phonics based reading” (reported by Bita 2015, pp. 1, 6).

The amazing thing in all this is why teachers and principals have to be told the obvious. One would have thought that educators would have noticed that English is quite different from say, Chinese. Well apparently not, so let’s quickly review some of the Chinese basics, since this is the language some teachers want to teach instead of English.

Most words in Chinese are made up of two or more characters, and a well educated Chinese person might have learned some 7000 of these, although you could make some headway in a Chinese newspaper with say only 2000 characters. More complex types of characters are evolving which contain both a phonetic element and signifying element providing the meaning.

Learning the characters is pretty tough and you have to admire the Chinese for this. Pinyin, a phonetic translation of the spoken Chinese using Roman letters, is used to help. In 1954 the Chinese government introduced a simplified script so that Chinese people could improve their access to the written language. Hong Kong and Taiwan—the home of linguistic geniuses it seems—still use the traditional script, which is even more complicated. And now Chinese students are also learning English. I would like to think that our children are learning English too—but not really.

Spying on two teachers

Let’s jump into an infants’ classroom for a few moments to listen to how some teachers teach English. The class is about to read an animal story and so the teacher—Mrs Neanderthal, a lady who surprisingly is loved by everyone—is introducing some new words, one of which is ‘hippopotamus’. “Now who can tell the class what this word is?” she asks.

“Um, brontosaurus’ offers little Johnny.

“Nice try Johnny, you are getting better. Ah, Mary?”

Mary, with a smug grin triumphantly announces, “hippopotamus”.

“Yes, good girl. That was a clever answer.” But most of the rest of the class has tuned out by now as they cannot compete with this type of ‘cleverness’.

This is not teaching: it is the degrading of the English language—part of Australia’s heritage. The damage inflicted by Mrs Neanderthal will be long lasting. The children are learning that new words are to be guessed, and if you don’t guess correctly you don’t know the word, and that’s just too bad.

Now let’s step into the classroom of clever Mr Collingwood, right next door, who just happens to be introducing the same word, ‘hippopotamus’, in the same story. “Now who can help the class start reading this word? Let’s start right here…” and Mr Collingwood points to ‘hipp’

“Hipe,” says Fred.

“Close, Fred,” and hipe is written on the board, “but remember that the letter ‘e’ makes the letter ‘i’ say its own name, but there is no ‘e’, so what is it? Let’s all think about this. Amanda?”

“Hip?”

“And who else would have said that, or close to it?” Hands go up. “Great start… let’s continue.” And all the class is able to continue because of Mr Collingwood’s inclusive teaching style.

Mr Collingwood’s students can confidently attack any new word in any book they may be reading, and get it completely or nearly right. They are more likely to love reading, and more likely to be automatically improving their English at a rapid rate. Children in Mrs Neanderthal’s class will progress more slowly, and they and their parents will sometimes wonder why.

Meet the Neanderthals

Amazingly we still have in the teaching profession Neanderthals—the group of people with heads like gorillas who had no written language—who insist that the ‘look say’ or ‘whole word’ approach is better. They argue that many words in English cannot be approached phonetically and besides this if children are given a rich language environment they just learn words naturally. Well, let’s look at that. But first, some ideas on how our language actually works.

As you know there are 26 letters but 44 or 45 sounds in English, called phonemes, for example the ‘t’ sound. These phonemes are represented by combinations of letters, and these letter combinations are called graphemes. So our ‘t’ phoneme could be written as ‘t’ or ‘tt’ or ‘th’ etc. So we have thomas, tank, butter, and so on. Surprisingly, there are a lot of these graphemes—about 250—and thank goodness because words would look quite boring otherwise. More good news is that there are only about three dozen graphemes which you could say are more difficult to learn for students. The rest really are child’s play—if children are in Mr Collingwood’s class.

The truth telling dictionaries

So just how many words are there in English that cannot be readily pronounced phonetically by a young child in a recognisable way? In my office I have quite a few dictionaries so I selected two primary school dictionaries, having an average of some 10,700 words. I then went through and read every single word, classifying word root forms into three divisions:

the impossible or nearly impossible (unusual foreign words, words with altered pronunciation by convention, words with silent letters or other hard combinations which mostly are just difficult graphemes) for example cafe, swat, gunwale, starboard, macabre, finale, mediaeval, ochre, paradigm, plumber, souffle, taco, vogue, yacht);

difficult (very long words which can be overwhelming, or words with unusual graphemes etc.) for example poliomyelitis, oxyacetylene, executive, encyclopaedia, aerobics, bristle, muesli, pianist, prologue, specific, tragedy); and

All the other words which most young children, trained in the phonetic approach to English, could pronounce, independently of the meaning.

Now here’s the point—how many words are in each group? I found that the ‘impossible or nearly impossible’ group comprised only 3.5 per cent, and the ‘difficult’ only 2.7 per cent. So then about 94 per cent of primary school dictionary words are almost immediately and automatically accessible for young children in Mr Collingwood’s class, using a phonic approach, on the basis of the evidence presented here, assuming its reliability. Readers are welcome of course to do their own research on this, and indeed parents do need to be thinking about phonics.

Does this mean that children should never just learn English words by rote? Actually, children do need to learn some words by rote. These words are called ‘sight vocabulary’—words which should be instantly recognised. Surprisingly, only about 100 words make up approximately half of most simple English texts, words such as: the, you, was, are, with, they, this, what, were, there, which about, these, would more, could, people, now, down. These words should be drilled. Common graphemes should also be explicitly taught, and then followed up with appropriate reading exercises, including integrated story texts and actual writing. That is, our children need a very well designed complete phonics program, combined with other aspects of English.

Educators pretending to be clever

One would have thought that the approaches outlined here would be common knowledge and practice here in Australia, well at least since 1880 when in NSW the Public Instruction Act was passed, making education compulsory. But no, here we are in the 21st century, talking about phonics, and perhaps even thinking we are clever to have ‘discovered’ this new and effective method of teaching.

So if your child’s teacher is a Neanderthal you know what to do. You and the other parents must put that teacher on the first plane to China, since he or she really wants to teach Chinese. The trouble is that Chinese people have some very clear ideas about the quality of English teachers. Probably they will send Mrs Neanderthal straight back but since her position at your child’s school will have already been filled, Mrs Neanderthal will be teaching somewhere else, hopefully with a changed approach.

Bita, N., Curriculum shifts to focus on core skills, Australian, 20 Aug 2015, pp. 1, 6.

Dodd, T & Mather, J. Why we fail at education, Australian Financial Review 15 Dec 2012, p. 21.