| Reading advocate Graham Crawshaw has for many years "picked up the casualties of the present system of reading instruction" at his reading camps for boys and girls. He challenges the many glowing tributes to reading guru Marie Clay that have appeared since her death in April. |
A NZ Herald obituary to Marie Clay (I refuse to recognise her grand title of "Dame") concluded that "her influence on literacy in New Zealand is unparalleled." With that judgement I wholeheartedly agree - except perhaps for the equally disastrous influence of her mentor, Clarence Beeby.
Marie Clay [her first name is pronounced MAH-ree, but hey, just go right ahead and guess; it's what she used to encourage] has certainly earned for herself a place in literacy history that is unchallenged. She is credited with changing the face of primary school literacy in New Zealand, and she did: largely by discarding the teaching of phonics as the very foundation of learning to read, leaving several generations of New Zealanders adrift in a world of words, and. without any means by which to decode them.
The results can be seen in literacy surveys such as the 1996 world survey on adult literacy, which demonstrated all too clearly -and it's worth reminding ourselves of this fact frequently - that too many New Zealanders emerge from school without two of the basic skills that were once (pre-Clay) taught there: they can neither read nor write at a skill sufficient to function in the modern world.
The survey found that a staggering 66.4 percent of Maori are below the minimum level of "ability to understand and use information from text," and an equally tragic 41.6 percent of non-Maori. 40 percent of employed New Zealanders and 75 percent of the unemployed are below the minimum level of literacy competence for everyday life and work. Universities organising remedial reading and writing courses for first-year students report that "University students can't read, write or spell," and that "Students fail basic skills," and the Labour Department estimates that up to 530,000 New Zealand adults have inadequate literacy and numeracy skills.
530,000 New Zealand adults! You'd have to think that levels of functional illiteracy that dire did not happen by accident, and you'd be right. They happened after Marie Clay's "look and guess" method of reading was substituted for the teaching of phonics.
Phonics teaches children to match the sounds of letters and groups of letters that make up words, a skill that once mastered allows the student to match letters to sounds and vice versa - in short, to learn to read. Eighty-seven per cent of the English language can be easily learned using phonics, and the remaining thirteen per cent by rote and memory -- not a difficult task once the groundwork has been laid. It is a tried and true method by which the mystery is removed from those mysterious marks that appear on the page.
Marie Clay rejected this thinking altogether. In her book Becoming Literate (given me by a training college student for whom it was required reading), she writes,
Teachers may feel that the critical thing for the child to learn is his sounds, and they may provide an elaborate scheme for teaching that overrated aspect of reading known as phonics ... Current thinking suggests that we may have to revise our thinking about the value of phonics ...
Given the tragic results of lost generations before us, perhaps instead we might find more value if we "revise our thinking" about the work of this woman, who threw out the baby of phonics without even leaving any bathwater behind. I suggest a more appropriate name for her book is Remaining Illiterate, which sums up the situation for several generations of functionally illiterate New Zealanders who have her own overrated system to thank for their minds having been turned to mush.
Although some schools and even some of Clay's own protégées claim to teach phonics as part of a "mixture of methods," in reality this teaching is mostly confined in the early stages to teaching the 'names' of the letters (rather than their sounds) so that children may identify the first letter in words, at which point children are encouraged to guess what words say by using "the context of the story," or "picture clues," and then to commit them' to memory by "shape." Other approaches bizarrely introduce children to whole words first, only then getting them to sound out letter combinations within words. Where more structured phonics is taught it is usually later on, and then chiefly for spelling purposes.
However research evidence shows that pupils do not learn to distinguish between the different sounds of words simply by guessing, or by being exposed to books by a process of osmosis. They need to be taught the connection between letters and sounds, rather than an over-reliance on guessing.
Supporters of Clay will point to her much vaunted Reading Recovery programme, initiated by Clay to pick up the casualties caused largely by her own implementation in NZ schools of the wholesale rejection of phonics, and which earned for her a Damehood. It was adopted by NZ schools in 1983, and for a time even bought overseas in the UK, the US and in Australia.
However, research in the US and by James Chapman and Bill Tunmer at Massey University in NZ show that the true results for this programme have been grossly overrated. Reading Recovery programmes often resulted in lower self-esteem, they found,and no long-term improvement in reading ability. US education writer Martha C. Brown summarises the reasons that made California and Texas drop Reading Recovery and Whole Language and begin again to embrace phonics. Reading Recovery's stated goal, notes Brown, is to bring "the bottom 20 percent of readers up to the average reading level in their classroom."
The Reading Recovery programme claims an 83 percent success rate, promising to cut other remedial costs. However, Timothy Shanahan, professor and Literacy Center director at the University of Illinois, and Rebecca Barr, professor of reading at the National-Louis University in Evanston, Ill., found Reading Recovery rejects some eligible children and drops others who progress slowly. Reading Recovery omits these children in figuring its success. With this data included, the researchers found the short-term success rate was 51 percent, not the 84 percent Reading Recovery claimed with one group of children ...
A New Zealand Ministry of Education study blames Reading Recovery's failure on lack of "systematic instruction in word-level strategies" (phonics). Reading Recovery uses "principles and practices very similar to those of whole language," says Patrick Groff, emeritus professor at San Diego State University. Reading Recovery books, like Whole Language books, contain repetitive sentences and pictures to help children guess.
"The Whole Language approach to reading simply does not work for children with reading disabilities. A structured, phonics -based approach is more likely to help them," concludes a 13-year study by 100 researchers in medicine, education and psychology.
Despite flawed methods and high cost, Reading Recovery's average annual enrollment increase between 1986 and 1998 was 47 percent, based on figures from Reading Recovery Council of North America. Nearly 11,000 U.S. schools use Reading Recovery, and 560,000 children have participated.
A Battelle Institute study shows the average annual cost of a Reading Recovery tutor is 30 percent more than the cost of a teacher for other remedial programs ...
The scandalous problem of rampant illiteracy has for too long been denied, disguised and explained away by insiders in the training colleges and the elite clique of educationalists who have followed along behind Clarence Beeby and Marie Clay. Their confusing 'look and guess' system of illiteracy is increasingly discredited, and continues to consign the young people who can't cope with it to the scrap heap. Her influence on New Zealand literacy has indeed been unparalleled - and I do not intend that as a compliment.
July - August 2007-The Free Radical- 19
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