Month: August 2019

Written by Christine Braid | 23 August 2019

Christine Braid is a Professional Learning and Development Facilitator / Kaitakawaenga at Tātai Angitu e3 @ Massey University specialising in supporting literacy across the primary school years. She was part of the Massey research team Enhancing Literacy Learning Outcomes for Beginning Readers and is currently applying the findings into practice, making the outcomes accessible for teachers and children.

Christine Braid | Photo: © Tātai Angitu 2019

I have been involved in education for more than 30 years, including 12 years teaching in a primary school classroom, training as a reading recovery teacher, lecturing in the initial teacher education programmes, and working as an in-service adviser to schools. In my time as an educator, I specialized in the area of literacy. Using my knowledge from my Diploma of Children’s Literature, I focused my M.Ed thesis on using picture books for developing children’s comprehension and critical thinking. I have worked extensively with teachers on classroom practices such as guided reading, teaching comprehension, and developing children’s writing expertise.

With my specific literacy training, I thought I had the answers for effective literacy teaching. However, I was missing knowledge about how children learn to read. I had been taught that children learned to read by using the meaning and syntax of the sentence (including help from the picture), and as much of the printed code as necessary. I had been taught that children would deduce knowledge about the code from exposure to words within text and that it was too overwhelming for young learners to be explicitly taught. I thought that this method of learning to read was suitable for most children and that those it did not suit needed specialist teaching. I was taught that meaning was the most important outcome of reading, which is true, and that a focus on teaching the code denied the importance of meaning, which is false.

My PhD study has given me the opportunity to examine the extensive research in the studies of the science of reading. At first, I was unsure about this different view of how to best teach reading. However, examining the studies has widened my understanding of why some children struggled to learn to read. I learned about the importance of ensuring children had the chance to learn the connections between letter sounds and letter shapes and formation. I discovered studies revealing how the brain processes letters in a word to build word knowledge or orthographic maps. I learned that this happens in a progression from simple combinations (e.g., am, hot, fit, frog, jump) through to more complex vowel team combinations (goat, beach, light, thought) and onto multi-syllable words (e.g., table, computer, surface). The studies explained that good readers can automatically decode words, giving them fluency in reading, and ease of comprehending. Good readers do not need to rely on the meaning and structure of the sentence as I had been taught to promote. On the other hand, struggling readers will overly rely on meaning and sentence structure as compensation for poorer decoding skill. This view reversed what I had been taught to be true about learning to read.

When a family friend’s son, Jack* presented as one of the children who struggled to read, much of the research literature became real. Jack had been read to right through his early childhood years, had an extensive vocabulary, and could recite a number of favourite books. He entered school with the skills known to be foundational to reading success. He began to learn the letters of the alphabet and their associated sounds reasonably well, but after one year at school, he could not recall any words and was not able to read texts at the expected level for his age. The only way he could read a page of a text was from memory. He had to compensate for his lack of knowledge of the printed code by using his knowledge of the context of the story and syntax of the sentences.

Trying to teach Jack whole words was futile (and we did try). Even small words like ‘at’ and ‘on’ were not recognised out of a sentence or after any time span. So instead, I taught him how to sound the letters and blend them together to read words. I had to show him how ‘at’ was made up of /a/ and /t/ and you blend them together to get the word ‘at’. Finally, he began to learn some words and was quickly able to recognise them in and out of a connected text. Jack’s struggle gives an insight into what the cognitive process of reading entails. Many children work out the cognitive puzzle for themselves (that ‘at’ is made of /a/ and /t/) but Jack, and many children like him, needed the process much more explicitly shown. Teaching him to read by using the sentence meaning and structure was simply not effective. As soon as he realised what learning the code entailed, he started to make progress. At nine years old, Jack had become the best reader and speller in the class.

It is unfortunate that researchers and practitioners who declare the importance of explicit and systematic teaching of the code are criticised for focusing on “just phonics” and are accused of not focusing on meaning. But this is not the case. A focus on teaching the code includes getting children to read the sentence using their decoding skills, and then check it makes sense with the story. The books have stories with characters that the children engage with. In addition, the Massey project emphasised the use of teachers reading aloud from quality picture books, for opportunities to develop understanding of story and expand children’s vocabulary. The idea of understanding what they read is paramount. However, the means of getting to that meaning is through strong foundation skills that enable them to be proficient at decoding so they can access the meaning. While knowledge of the code is not sufficient for effective reading, it is absolutely necessary.

The main implication from the Massey research project is that teachers need to be equipped with the knowledge and teaching methods that consider what happens in the brain as children learn to read. Teachers need knowledge about the complexity of the written code of English and how it can be taught. The Project results suggest that when teachers have the knowledge and resources for teaching the code explicitly and systematically, children’s reading outcomes improve. Teachers who are using an explicit and systematic approach are reporting that they feel empowered to teach all children to read. They report that children are excited and engaged because they have the skills they need to make progress in reading. Some schools are reporting that after years of having a large proportion of children underachieving, after a systematic approach, the results show that most children are experiencing success in reading.

I count myself lucky to have worked with many exemplary educators during my career and to continue to do so. I am in awe of the work teachers do on a day to day basis to ensure successful outcomes for their learners. Understanding more about how children learn to read and having the resources to teach explicitly and systematically has provided teachers and learners with a pathway of success. Teachers are totally committed to their students’ success. Seeing children, who had been struggling, finally learning to read is the joy of teaching.