A rchive Date
[ 05-07-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Moira_MacDonald/2004/07/05/525439.html
Reinventing reading
With its stress on 'whole reading,' the education establishment has failed a generation of Ontario students
By Moira MacDonald - For the Toronto Sun
Mon, July 5, 2004
WE TAKE the business of learning how to read so much for granted I doubt many of us give much thought to how it's done. It's such a basic skill - not rocket science. Or is it?
Ontario Education Minister Gerard Kennedy recently announced he's hiring some 8,000 teacher specialists in literacy (another 8,000 for "numeracy" which, for those of you who don't speak educratese, means math). This is just part of a $160-million package of things the government is bringing in to improve elementary students' skills and stave off the slow leak of kids to private schooling.
Kennedy and his government are commended for recognizing there's a problem. They point out just over half of Grade 6 students are meeting the accepted standard in provincial tests. But from initial impressions, Kennedy has taken a status quo approach to dealing with the issue, by throwing more money and teacher bodies at it instead of considering radical changes in how kids are taught. Some are warning his approach will merely produce the same disappointing results.
For years, a contingent of education researchers, teachers and parents has complained that some children - with or without learning disabilities - will not learn to read well without being taught with a method called systematic phonics. In this step-by-step approach, children are first taught the basic sounds letters and letter combinations make. They then start to sound out words based on the letter combinations they see.
This approach got tossed out to a large degree during the 1980s when education researchers worried kids weren't necessarily understanding the words they read. That spawned "whole language," which promoted surrounding kids with books and teaching them to read through context, such as predicting or guessing what a word would be through the context of the story or through pictures.
Most school boards still try to use contextual methods along with some phonics, which phonics proponents say doesn't work because kids continue to primarily guess at words. As well, they say, teachers are never trained in systematic phonics at faculties of education, which are still packed with pro-whole-language researchers.
"We want whatever works available," Kennedy told me about his plan. "We're interested in anybody who has put forward programs with demonstrated success. If somebody says they have programs that have even better success, okay."
Jo-Anne Gross is one person who may like to take the education minister up on his word. Gross has a son (boys are disproportionately part of the poor reader group) who did not learn to read despite the efforts of private and public schools in Toronto. Eventually, Gross sent him at age 12 to a private school in the U.S. He learned to read in five months.
Researched American system
His mother was so shaken by the experience she researched the American school's system and eventually produced and field-tested her own program, based on research by Anna Gillingham and Dr. Samuel Orton on how children with learning disabilities could be helped.
Her program, called Remediation Plus, which uses only phonics, is on an approved list of the International Dyslexia Association and has been bought by school boards in Ottawa, Waterloo, Niagara and private schools in Toronto and elsewhere.
But her marketing experiences have sometimes taken her aback. "It's so political," she tells me.
She has met special education teachers anxious to buy her products to try with students for whom no other approach has worked, but who have been held back by senior school bureaucrats wedded to other methods - like the expensive Reading Recovery, favoured by Toronto's public school board, among others.
"I was astounded on how people could turn their backs on these children," says Gross.
Reading Recovery, which claims an 80% success rate but is intended for first-graders, uses some phonics but also significantly relies on students picking up their mistakes through context. It's likely to play a prominent role in the government's reading remediation efforts.
Kennedy says based on his conversations with teachers, the phonics vs. whole language debate "is a moot debate. Phonics is in there now."
If so, let's hope students learn how to sound out "success" instead of "expensive failure."
Reach Moira MacDonald at: moiramac@canoemail.com Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
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