Submission No. 19
VAS Research Pty Ltd.
46 Murray St.
Hobart
Tasmania
Australia 7000
Ph: (03) 62 29 6417 Fx: (03) 62 29 1124
www.theharrisontest.com
Sections
1. About VAS Research
2. Byron Harrison
3. Jean Clyde
4. The background to reading failure
5. The data
6. The column headings
7. Discussion
8. Phonic skill summary
9. The misuse of slogans
10. VAS Theory
11. Low VAS children
12. High VAS children
13. Boys are different to girls
14. Guessing inaccuracy
15. Reporting to parents
16. The future
17. Summary
18. Recommendations
1. About VAS Research
VAS Research is one part of a group consisting of an optometric wing (Byron Harrison), a reading research/lecturing/ assessment wing (VAS Research Pty Ltd) and a software development wing (VAS Systems Pty Ltd). Because of its access to large numbers of children and its freedom from any association with education departments, it is one of the few independent sources of data on literacy levels in Australia.
Lecturing is carried out by Byron Harrison FSMC and Jean Clyde B.Ed., M.Ed.Studs. These two co-developed VAS Theory, described by Britain's Martin Turner as 'The most exciting development in literacy in a decade'.
2. Byron Harrison F.S.M.C. developed the largest pediatric optometric practice in Tasmania during the 1970s and 1990s.
In the 1980s he designed the Harrison-Winter Reading & Spelling diagnostic and remedial software and began to accumulate data on literacy performance.
In 1985 he initiated 'The Minor Impairments Study' in which 26 optometrists, 26 psychologists and the Research Branch of the Tasmanian Education Department explored the link between reading performance and visual performance in infants across Tasmania.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he lectured to teachers in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and throughout Australia, established a telephone hot-line to teachers throughout Australia and conducted telephone workshops for teachers in remote regions of Australia.
In 2002 he formed VAS Research Pty. Ltd. and is the current Managing Director. He is also a director of the educational software development company VAS Systems Pty Ltd and is currently designing a Principals' basic skills literacy management system and a suite of remedial software.
He is the co-author of 'Reading Failure: Dogma v Data' (due for publication early in 2005) which deals with VAS Theory and the science behind learning to read and is currently preparing a second book 'Reading Failure: Rhetoric & Rage' which deals with the politics and philosophies behind reading failure.
3. Jean Clyde (nee Zollner) B.Ed (1985), M.Ed.Studs (1994) is a teacher with a special focus on the neuroanatomy of memory.
She was the co-founder of 'Basic Concern', formerly Tasmania's leading remedial centre. The teachers that she trained in that centre now form the core of remedial tutors in Hobart.
She has given lectures and workshops to teachers throughout Australia and New Zealand and is regarded by many researchers and teachers as one of Australia's most gifted teachers.
She is the co-author of VAS Theory and of the book 'Reading Failure: Dogma v Data' and is currently designing software for teachers and parents. Some of her work can be found at www.diyreadingtutor.com.
4. The background to reading failure.
Before the inquiry hands down its findings Harrison & Clyde will have published
'Reading Failure: Dogma v Data' (later named 'Reading Through Tears') .
This book details clear evidence of alarming levels of reading failure, some of which is replicated in this submission. It will also explain why such failure was inevitable and points
out that the error patterns observed today and reported in this submission are precisely
as we predicted in papers fifteen years ago.
For fifteen years we have quietly made submissions to governments both federal and state, lectured nationally and internationally, warning bureaucrats that Whole Language, 'the current approach to literacy learning in Australian Schools' contained a massive flaw.
Our first warning to Australians occurred:
* one year before British educational psychologists led by Martin Turner published
evidence of the greatest decline in British literacy standards since records were kept
and dated the decline back to the introduction of Whole Language philosophy into
infant schools.
* twenty years before California also found evidence of alarming declines in literacy standards and dismissed Whole Language teaching strategies as unscientific.
We were not alone. Many other research teams were also issuing warnings but we were all ignored. Truth however has a history of emerging regardless of the level of resistance and inquiries into Whole Language are now taking place not only in the USA but also in Australia and Britain.
One reason why it has taken the English-speaking world so long to acknowledge that they have a problem is their lack of hard data. That is the direct consequence of failing to properly test literacy outcomes for more than two decades. That failure to properly test outcomes can also be traced back to the philosophic tenets of Whole Language.
In stark terms educators put in place a system of teaching which had no basis in science and then failed to properly evaluate the outcomes. That is scientifically unacceptable.
The failure to properly test outcomes was created by a number of factors that will be detailed in a second book 'Reading Failure: Rhetoric & Rage' (in preparation) the publication of which will now be delayed in order to include the conclusions of the British and Australian Inquiries. In that book we will show how politics, social-engineering and educational philosophy have come to determine literacy policy-making...in other words how dogma has replaced data in education.
To illustrate the domination of dogma over data let me summarise the debate I had on national television with one of the senior officials in the Australian Teachers Federation more than ten years ago. He offered no data in his presentation and, in our off-camera discussions, agreed both with my conclusions of falling literacy standards and the need for testing. He stated however that his responsibility was to attack literacy testing because that was 'union policy'. Political dogma to him was clearly more important than research data. The fact that, as a consequence of union opposition to testing, the literacy problems of hundreds of thousands of Australian children have gone undiagnosed, was not this unionist's concern.
The general rhetoric of Whole Language and the specific opposition to testing has come to dominate even those organisations that should be most concerned about literacy standards: the professional organisations of English teachers' and even some Parent & Citizens' groups.
This infiltration of educational organisations should not be regarded as being serendipitous. Geoffrey Partington's book 'Teacher Education in England and Wales' reveals the deliberate targeting of policy-making education bodies in England & Wales by those with covert political and social agendas.
Partington's revelations are not isolated. Melanie Phillips in her book 'All Must Have Prizes' outlines the deliberate use of 'creative mischief' by a few key British educators and public servants in order to sabotage literacy reform demanded by a government elected by the people.
Dogma has also overwhelmed data at the university teacher training centres. Political philosophies formed in different eras and in different cultures today give rise to data-free, child-centred beliefs, antagonism to direct teaching and testing and the decline of teachers' authority.
There are three groups involved in the formulation of education policy:
* the policy-makers in education departments *the teacher trainers * the teacher unions.
In 1988, when we first offered evidence of widespread reading failure and described 'The Hole in Whole Language' to senior Tasmanian Department policy-makers, they agreed with my concerns but stated that that their department was obliged to follow the teachings of the education faculty.
The message received from the teacher trainers however was that it was obliged to prepare teachers to apply education department policy in the classroom.
The teachers' union simply opposed testing for reasons that had everything to do with socialist philosophy and protection of teachers and nothing to do with literacy research and the well-being of the children.
The result of the buck-passing and covert agendas is an across-the-board opposition to proper testing of literacy outcomes at every level of teacher training and control.
Without data it becomes difficult to understand:
how the universities and department officials can carry out objective research to determine best practice and guide graduate training,
how principals can manage literacy programs in their schools,
The extent of this opposition to testing can be gauged from the findings only twelve years ago by The House of Reps. Inquiry 'The Literacy Challenge' which stated that
'We were appalled that during the inquiry State, Territory and Commonwealth education authorities were unable to tell the committee, with any degree of accuracy, the extent of the problem as it exists in primary schools because most systems do not test basic skills on a systematic basis. It appears, however, that the numbers could be as high as 25% of students and may represent the majority of the school population in some education districts.'
In other words twelve years ago the House of Reps committee found that Australian educators already suspected that between 25% and 50% of children were failing and yet had STILL failed to carry out research to find out why. Many researchers regard such inaction as unprofessional.
The committee might also take note of the fact that these 'appalling' revelations were not screamed in headlines in the report; they were submerged within the minority Dissenting Report.
That 1992 Inquiry swept the evidence of widespread reading failure under the carpet and allowed Whole Language to continue in our teacher training centres and education departments. As a result, here we are again, holding a second inquiry but, instead of our having a twelve-year lead on the rest of the world, we are now having to play catch-up to the reforms now taking place in the USA and the inquiry in Britain.
If we rely on dogma and foreswear data we undermine the very fabric of debate and progress. In our first book 'Reading Failure: Dogma v Data' we illustrate this point in a true story.
One of the Whole Language leading advocates appearing as the keynote speaker at a meeting of adult literacy tutors at the Tasmanian University. At the end of his address a teacher, whose job required her to submit applications for funds, asked him a question. Her question was that, given the philosophic antagonism to testing and the resultant lack of data, how could she prepare applications for funding? The answer given by the Professor was ' You increase the rhetoric'.
This is the face of dogma.
These are not isolated incidents. Teachers who resisted Whole Language have been intimidated and degraded by their superiors. Phonics, the traditional means of teaching children to read was initially denigrated almost to extinction in order to remove any opposition to Whole Language doctrine.
Those attitudes have not changed in some teacher training centres. Indeed the -----------------------------------------------------only recently described the traditional teaching of phonics in isolation as 'an interesting party trick'. And yet later in this submission we will show why a massive error in Whole Language philosophy demands our return to traditional phonic methods in infant grades.
We provide evidence that massive numbers of infants have insufficient visual memory for the word-guessing strategies that lie at the heart of Whole Language dogma. We have now released the software that will allow any parent, any teacher to detect this flaw.
Our legal advice from those who recently drafted our Disability Discrimination Act is that teaching guessing strategies, to children who lack the memory level necessary for such processing, is a clear breach of the Act. It was my reluctant intention to publish these legal opinions in the second book 'Reading Failure: Rhetoric & Rage'; the Minister's calling for this Inquiry has put that decision on hold.
The word 'Rage' in that title accurately reflects the feelings being expressed by the increasing numbers of teachers, parents, journalists, lawyers and politicians that we meet as they begin to understand that reading policy has been driven by flawed philosophy, union power and political agendas, rather than on empirical literacy research.
I believe this inquiry is the last chance to reform infant teacher training from within the profession. My own feeling is that it is already too late, that no amount of data will sway Whole Language advocates and, given the degree of control that they now exercise in every layer of teacher training and administration, a very public fight between researchers and educators is now inevitable. The signs include:
The public criticism by 26 researchers and academics,
the Federal Minister's immediate response in calling for an inquiry and his criticisms of past practices.
the British Inquiry,
the reforms and funding changes being made in the USA,
the increasing number of books by researchers,
the increasing release of research-based software and phonic-based resources
the imminent involvement of the law
These are all harbingers of the conflict ahead.
The rest of this submission will largely confine itself to the data but I thought it important that, all members of the committee understand the political and philosophical factors that brought us to this sad state. With that understanding they may anticipate the defensive strategies that Whole Language advocates will undoubtedly employ to resist reform.
For those committee members who do not want to repeat the mistakes of history, I recommend that they read 'All Must Have Prizes' by Melanie Phillips. She sets out how small numbers of influential British educators and unionists deliberately thwarted government policy directives with 'creative mischief'.
For those who doubt the political agendas flowing through the debate I recommend that they read 'Teacher Education In England & Wales' by Geoffrey Partington in which he sets out the manner in which he and his colleagues' set out to implant their social views and agendas initially upon teacher training centres and subsequently on classroom practices.
For those who would like to contrast the rhetoric of Whole Language with the actual research evidence, I recommend Dr. Bonnie Macmillan's excellent booklet 'Why Schoolchildren Can't Read'.
For those who want an up-to-date picture of Australian education practices I recommend 'Why Our Schools Are Failing' released in 2004 by Dr. Kevin Donnelly. He rightly questions how Australian Grade 3 children improved from a 73% pass rate to a 92.5% pass rate in just 4 years 1996-2000 without any major national campaign to retrain teachers.
To understand the frustrations of teachers experienced in traditional phonic teaching and calling for science-based training, I recommend the web-site of the Reading Reform Foundation www.rrf.org.uk.
The 1992 evidence of 25-50% low literacy levels should be contrasted with Whole Language rhetoric claiming high literacy standards. A procession of Tasmanian education ministers, have variously claimed over the years that the state is 'at the forefront of literacy teaching', in the 'middle' and 'near the top' of Australia's literacy performance league; the last two estimates occurring within a three week period! Our data supports the 'appalling' estimates of the 1992 inquiry.
This rhetoric flourishes wherever Whole Language exists. For example, a superficial reading of the submission by the Office of Standards in Education (OFSTED) to the British Inquiry would have you believe that all was well in Britain, that standards were improving, that phonics were being taught and that Britain had climbed from mid-league to top of the league in a few short years.
The OFSTED submission of course provides no information about the nature and standard of testing that produced the claimed 'improvement' and we already know from the Australian experience how easy it is to dumb down testing in order to produce any politically acceptable pass rate.
Numeracy standards for example are relatively easy to standardise and yet even here O'Connor reports that the Australian draft benchmarks performance standards ...'have probably been set at a low level relative to standards in use in other countries'.
The literacy benchmarks attract the same criticism. Forster reported that in almost all instances, expectations at Grade 3 level in the nine overseas countries studied are higher than the expectations described in the Year 3 Australian standards.
The committee should reflect on the fact that this evidence of 'dumbing down' by educators came seven years after the House of Reps Inquiry found out that no education faculty or department had data on literacy because they had not been testing. The educators had not changed teaching methods to achieve higher standards, they had hidden the failure by dumbing down the tests.
If you lack hard data you inevitably must rely on slogans and dogma-based statements. The British OFSTED submission for example asserts that 'The exclusive teaching of phonics precludes the teaching of hypothesising, problem solving, predicting or inferring'. It offers no supporting evidence and it is difficult to understand how one would prove such an assertion.
The imprecision of the language used by Whole Language advocates also leads to contradictions. The British Inquiry for example variously reports that ' Phonics should be taught as a separate set of skills and knowledge...it should not be taught through texts or text reading'. Yet, only a few lines further, we read that 'phonics should be taught via texts in shared reading and using texts which exemplify particular phonemic structures and that 'phonics should not be taught or learned in isolation'.
These are typical bureaucratic assertions, designed to appeal to and appease both sides of the reading debate. Committee members should be immediately suspicious of any submission not supported by data for this too is the face of dogma.
Let us now look at some data.
5. The data.
The tables attached to this submission are part of an analysis of the basic skills of the last 3000 children that we have examined. The tests themselves, together with the theoretic underpinnings, can be found at www.theharrisontest.com.
The fact that this kind of data has not already been routinely gathered by researchers and bureaucrats is a scandal in itself but accurately reflects the antagonism to formal diagnostic testing that has been the signature of Whole Language.
Following interviews with both child and parent, the 3000 children were separated into four categories:
• Those who thought that they were BELOW AVERAGE readers
• Those who thought they were AVERAGE readers.
• Those who thought they were SUPERIOR readers
• Those who DIDN’T KNOW.
The tables relate to the first three groups (N= 2205)
Children were drawn from the state of Tasmania, which historically claims mid-nation literacy levels in Australia. Most children lived within 20 kilometers of the centre of the capital city, HOBART.
One assumes that self-assessment is informed on the basis of parental observation, end of school reports and teacher interviews. These self-assessment levels appeared to be relatively reliable in so far as average readers being found to perform better than those assessed as poor readers but worse than those assessed as superior readers.
These were not uninterested parents. The fact that they had all voluntarily brought their children for reading assessment and had paid for that service places them at the 'caring' end of the scale. If it is true that uncaring and impoverished parents produce a disproportionate number of failing children, then the data reported here will probably be understating the overall levels of literacy problems in the community.
The fact that 22% of parents interviewed did not know if their child was average, above average or below average in reading skills, says something about the inadequacy of end-of-term reports..
In the tables I have added comments to draw attention to some of the more troublesome findings.
Please keep in mind when examining this first table that this data describes the performance of AVERAGE READERS. The plight of FAILING READERS appears later in this submission.
6. The column headings.
It is essential that we be clear about the meaning of the headings. I will use the data on the 7 year-olds row to demonstrate.
I therefore direct your attention to the left hand column marked AGE and ask you to trace down to the age of 7. Reading across that row from left-to-right you will find the numbers 7, 87, 41, 29, 36 etc. Those figures convey the following information:
AGE: (7) All children reported on this row were aged between 7.0 & 7.99 years of age.
NUMBER TESTED (87) 87 seven-year-old children were tested.
SOUNDS %FAIL(41) The children were asked the sounds of isolated letters. Some letters have multiple sounds. We therefore only counted the children who made 4 or more errors.
'41' therefore indicates that 41% of these seven-year-olds made more than 4 errors.
VAS % <3: (29) VAS Theory is explained in the following pages but briefly VAS indicates that 29% of average readers had not developed sufficient visual memory storage for reliable whole word processing. Few teachers have been told about this limitation.
Reading 3 letter words (% making errors) The first three columns relate to simple three letter, c-v-c words (bib, net etc),.
The last two columns report on words that contain two or more syllables and include both familiar and unfamiliar words (picnic, yunta, consonant, eromanga etc). All words were phonetically regular and the child was given unlimited time to read them aloud. Single errors were not counted; only children making multiple errors appear in this table.
bdp (29) 29% of seven-year-olds confused the sounds of b,d or p when reading familiar 3 letter words (e.g. 'big' misread as 'dig').
N/S (19) 19% of 7 year-olds showed evidence of confusion between names and sounds of letters (e.g. 'net' misread as 'neat', 'get' as 'jet', 'hid' as 'hide')
1 SYL (76) 76% of seven-year-olds repeatedly made some kind of error on simple three-letter words (due to bdp or name/sound confusions, misguessing etc)
2 SYL (54) 54% of seven-year-olds repeatedly misread regular 2 syllabic words (e.g. picnic, yunta etc).
3 SYL (100) Every one (100%) of the AVERAGE seven-year-old readers failed to read phonetically simple 3 syllabic words (consonant, Eromanga etc).
GUESS (77) 77% of seven-year-old AVERAGE READERS misread words by paying attention to some letters and guessing the rest (e.g. big misguessed as bag, picnic as picture, consonant as computer etc).
BLEND 3 SOUNDS (46) 46% made repeated errors when blending the sounds of three letters together into a nonsense word (e.g. the individual letters y + e + g blended as weej).
PROOF READING (37) 37% of average readers demonstrated significant difficulties in detecting which was the correct spelling in a series of 6 word arrays (laod, leid, laid, lued, liod, loed)
7. DISCUSSION:
In the initial days of Whole Language, the teaching of traditional phonic skills was attacked. Traditional Phonics employs 'Bottom-Up' principles...you teach the most basic skills: letter sounds and the blending of sounds and syllables and then use those skills to build up more sophisticated skills.
Whole Language is the opposite. It believes that if you employ the higher order skills of reliance on comprehension, the use of pictures, word shape and the meaning of other words, the more basic skills will eventually be derived from those higher order skills and the child will be able to read.
Guessing requires an infant to look at a word and then try to make a match with a similarly shaped or sounded word stored in memory. If the word is unfamiliar, the infant has no such word stored and therefore cannot make a match. Children therefore cannot read unfamiliar words by guessing and often picture cues and sufficient context are insufficient to support a guess.
The committee will doubtless be assured that 'teachers teach phonics' . What must be understood however is that many teachers are teaching Analytic Phonics not bottom-up traditional phonics. Analytic Phonics was introduced because it presented words in context and thus better fitted within the rhetoric of Whole Language. As a result Whole Language advocates today have come to believe and claim that 'we teach everything'.
All Australian teachers have been taught analytic, in-context phonics but from the data that we next present you can see the massive phonic deficits that result.
If you consult the AVERAGE READER table and track down the column headed SOUNDS % FAIL, you can see that at the age of twelve, after 8 years of compulsory education, 46% of children made 4 or more errors when asked to provide the sounds of the letters of the alphabet. This kind of data is eschewed by Whole Language advocates because it arises from reading isolated letters but we demonstrate next that the same patterns appear when reading words.
This column headed N/S reports the percentage of AVERAGE READERS who demonstrated multiple confusions between letter names and letter sounds when reading simple 3 letter c-v-c words ('rod' misread as 'road', 'mad' as 'maid' etc). Here you will see that, after five years of Whole Language and Analytic Phonics, 29% of nine-year-olds leaving infant school still hadn't automated the sounds of the alphabet. If the follow the N/S column down you will see that these inaccuracies clearly persist throughout primary school and high school. I remind you that these are 'average' not 'failing' readers.
In other words, the very basis of phonic processing, knowledge of the sounds of letters, is not being cemented in memory by current teaching strategies.
If a child doesn't know the sounds of letters, they are obviously going to struggle when asked to blend those sounds into a syllable. Let us therefore next turn to the column headed BLEND 3 SOUNDS. It features those letters most prone to name/sound confusions (c,g,w,y,a,e,i,o,u) and looked at children's capacity to blend three such sounds (e.g. y+a+t) into a nonsense syllable ('yat').
Here we find that 37% of twelve-year-old AVERAGE READERS entering high school made repeated errors on this basic phonic task. Most of the errors were due to name/sound confusions.
Obviously if a child struggles to blend three sounds into a syllable, they are going to find the blending of syllables even more difficult. Let us therefore look at the column heading 3 SYL. Here you see that 71% of average twelve year-old readers were leaving primary school unable to blend 3 or more syllables together. That undermines their capacity to read long words, particularly if unfamiliar. If you follow the column down you will see that between 49% and 71% of the children tested were unable to read long words throughout their high school years.
8. Phonic skill summary
We therefore have a clear picture that Analytic Phonics fails at every level of testing: knowledge of letter sounds and the blending together of sounds and syllables. We also see that once the confusions between names and sounds become established during the critical infant years, the echoes of those problems continue through high school.
9. The misuse of slogans.
Dogma has led to education departments producing a never-ending stream of slogans. Prominent among these were 'Life-Long Learning' and 'We Teach Everything'.
The 'Life-long Learning' slogan lulled everyone to assuming that children would somehow, sometime grow out of their problems. From the data already presented we can see that is clearly not the case; once bad habits are established in the infant grades they are hard to shake off later.
The 'We Teach Everything' slogan merely reassured teachers that they must be doing the right thing because they were teaching children to guess words, to predict words from pictures and word shape as well as from the meaning of other words and to use their (analytic) phonic skills. Unfortunately teacher trainers don't seem to have contemplated the possibility that phonics and whole word guessing are not COOPERATIVE strategies in the infant years; they are COMPETITIVE strategies. That realisation changes the face of infant teaching.
If you 'teach everything', many children will therefore simply chose one strategy and that choice is almost certainly going to be guessing,
Children will choose guessing for a range of reasons:
it is faster (but less accurate) than phonics at the Learning-To-Read stages,
teachers have been better trained in the provision of a guessing emphasis than for a structured phonic approach and
because, in many parts of the world, in their zeal to overthrow phonics and substitute Whole Language, advocates destroyed many of the phonic resources.
We conclude that if you encourage guessing as well as Analytic Phonics in the infant grades, you are guaranteed to produce large numbers of guess-dependent, inaccurate guessers.
VAS Theory predicts the following consequences.
Phonic skills should remain unreliable (see our earlier figures).
You should create an upper limit of about 2 syllabic words beyond which level word guessing becomes unstable (see the data under the 3 SYL heading)
You will fail to provide those infants with low visual memory with the means of catching up at a later stage (mainly boys...see VAS Theory)
You will undermine the capacity to remediate using phonic strategies because of the difficulty in undoing the habituated, fast but inaccurate guessing.
If you teach traditional phonic skills first, children will usually develop skills that are both more accurate and will establish the phonic basis for reading long and unfamiliar words and spelling. There is a risk of inducing phonic dependence but
this is a relatively easier hurdle to overcome later and
the numbers of phonic-dependent children are far outweighed by the numbers of guess-dependent children.
Whole Language rhetoric promised us that children would grow out of their problems. VAS Theory disagrees; it predicts that habits, once established, should largely persist. We were therefore not surprised to find that 41% of SUPERIOR READERS were similarly unable to read three or more syllables on leaving primary school.
If you want to begin to understand WHY, look at the column marked GUESS. There you will find that over 70% of average readers show signs of guessing inaccuracy, by which I mean they are paying attention to some letters and then attempting to guess the rest: ('picnic' misguessed at 'picture' for example). Such word-guessing strategies have been central to Whole Language and the basis of teacher training for over two decades.
VAS Theory predicted all of these problems seventeen years ago.
VAS Theory predicts therefore that, once guessing is habituated, the children should experience:
ongoing guessing inaccuracy in the middle of small words
ongoing difficulty in recognizing spelling errors that occur mid-word (proof reading)
ongoing difficulty in reading simple but long words,
ongoing difficulties with most unfamiliar words
If you look at the comments on the following FAILING READERS table you will see that each of those predictions are confirmed.
SOUNDS% FAIL: sounds should all be known by the age of 7 and yet we see that 49% of
seven year olds still make repeated errors.
VAS %<3: At the age of 8, almost 32% still had a visual memory below the minimum level
necessary for whole word guessing.
3 LETTER WORDS:
bdp confusions: 56% of simple 3 letter words contain at least one of the confusing
letters b,d or p. The figures in this column indicate that at the end of
primary school, these problems have not been remediated for almost
one in three failing readers. They haven't 'grown out of their
problems' as promised by Whole Language.
name/sound confusions: The figures indicate that at the age of 11, when
contemplating high school, 40% still have ongoing confusions
between names and sounds of letters, the very basis of phonics.
1 syllable: 56% of FAILING READERS entering high school are still
making repeated errors on simple 3 letter words (exactly as VAS
Theory predicted).
2 SYLLABLE WORDS: You may notice that children routinely make less errors
on 2 syllable words than on either one or three syllabic words. In fact
that too is precisely what VAS Theory predicted should happen.
3+SYLLABLES: Here is the predicted evidence of the struggle with long words. Even
at the age of 14 almost 74% of FAILING READERS struggle with
long
words.
GUESSING ERRORS: Here we see the evidence that, once inaccurate word guessing
becomes habituated, it is difficult to undo. At almost every age, right into high school, most failing readers continued to misguess words.
BLENDING 3 SOUNDS: If a child has confusions between names and sounds you would
expect errors when attempting to blend three sounds together. Here you will see that 57% of FAILING READERS still struggle to blend 3 sounds together when they approaching high school. Educators cannot claim effective teaching of phonics in the face of data like this!
PROOF READING: Spelling is always going to be a problem if the child cannot even
detect when a word's spelling looks right or wrong. Here we see evidence that proofreading is a problem for the majority of failing children at primary school. This is precisely what should be expected whenever a child with low visual memory (see column marked VAS %<3) is taught whole word guessing strategies in the infant grades.
10. VAS Theory.
Our research was originally centred on understanding the factors that drove visual attention. We wanted to understand, what attracts a readers attention when he opens a newspaper, where does an experienced driver look when cornering and how does that differ in a novice driver?
Our early work in the 1980s used eye-tracking technology to look at line drawings. It revealed that both children and adults scan their environment by paying attention to what we have called High Visibility Areas. These are areas where visual information is concentrated, usually the areas where contours change or where objects intrude into surrounding space
Pasted Graphic 2
When we used this technology for looking at words, we found similar patterns in many
children; they paid more attention to the end letters and to those lower case letters with limbs that intrude into the space above or below the word outline.
Take the word 'magnet' as an example
Pasted Graphic 3
When infants are guessing words they are pre-programmed by past experience to process words as though they were pictures, paying most attention to the High Visibility Letters and guessing the rest. Reading from left-to-right and converting letters into sounds is therefore a LEARNED process rather than something that will automatically be absorbed by mere exposure.
Vowels are particularly vulnerable
because they are limbless (low visibility letters) and
because vowels are usually located mid-word.
(This is why guess-dependent children frequently misread words like 'hut' as hit, hot or hat).
The high visibility letters in the word 'magnet' are therefore ‘m_g__t’.
Guess-dependent children look at that pattern and then search in visual and auditory memory for a word that matches that pattern.
Unfortunately when they search in memory for words that match this 'm_g__t' pattern, they find not one but four words share that pattern (maggot, magnet, margaret or midget).
They may sometimes then be able to use other words in order to determine which one best fits but, particularly in a beginner reader, if the context cues are inadequate for this purpose, the child may misguess. The sentence 'The house was old' for example may therefore be misread as 'The horse was old'.
The problem does not stop there however.
11. Low VAS children
We observed that some children were basing their word guessing on just one letter whilst others were clearly basing their word guess on 2,3 or 4 letters.
The one-letter-guessing infant would therefore process a word like 'magnet' as 'm_____' and misguess the word as mother, measles (there are over 400 words that fit this pattern). Because many other words in the sentence are similarly misguessed, the child cannot use context cues.
The four-letter-guessing infant however was basing his guess on four letters and would therefore process 'magnet' as 'mag__t' and the chances of guessing the word correctly are much enhanced because there are now only two words that could fit this patter (magnet and maggot). The child can also use context cues because he can also guess many other words in the sentence.
We have called this visual memory capacity 'Visual Attention Span' (abbreviated to VAS hereafter). Think of it as being the number of letters that a child can process at a glance and understand that the VAS level directly controls a child's capacity to whole word guess.
We have now released on the Internet the simple tools for measuring VAS. Measurement takes less than a minute per child.
Clearly, the greater the number of letters that are processed, the richer the basis for guessing. The second and third columns of the following table demonstrate the link between VAS levels and guessing capacity.
VAS level
Visual Pattern
Possible matches
Common guesses
Accuracy
VAS 1
m_____
400
mother, meat
Nil
VAS 2
m____t
40
meat, mist
Poor
VAS 3
m_g__t
4
maggot, midget
Fair
VAS 4
mag__t
2
magnet,maggot
Good
VAS 5
magn-t
1
magnet
Excellent
Let us therefore now examine the VAS levels in the school population.
If you turn back to the three table and locate the heading VAS %<3, you will see that, between the ages of 7 and 7.99 years, the following percentages of children had a VAS level too low for effective whole word guessing.
49% of FAILING READERS
29% of the AVERAGE READERS
5% of SUPERIOR READERS
Encouraging guessing in children with low VAS levels may therefore succeed for 95% of good readers but it will fail almost one in three average readers and half of the poor readers. Guessing is therefore a recipe for guaranteed reading failure for significant numbers of infants.
Teachers in training have been advised that they should use context cues to form meaning. Such advice may satisfy the tenets of Whole Language philosophy but according to USA expert Reid Lyon it ignores two facts.
In only about 25% of words can a key unknown word be predicted from the meaning of other words. For example the word 'Eromanga' cannot be predicted from the meaning of the other words in the sentence 'The settlement was established near Eromanga'.
If you are reliant upon guessing from prediction, the other words (like settlement and established) also need to be predicted and this is only possible in one sentence in 8.
Our data now adds a third caution for we find:
that even in these cases where words theoretically might be guessed from other words, at the age of seven, when children are establishing basic reading skills, VAS memory is too low for guessing in about 49% of seven-year-old FAILING READERS, 29% of AVERAGE READERS and 5% of SUPERIOR READERS.
The committee must understand that if, in addition to having a low VAS, these infants are ALSO deficient in phonic skills because of inadequate phonic teaching, the children will then have NO reliable means of word recognition at all as a direct consequence of teaching methods.
It is therefore sobering to read evidence that 'Some proponents of the (Whole Language) approach have actively discouraged teachers from using any phonic instruction techniques'.
We see a procession of such children every week: children who cannot guess (because of their low VAS) and cannot decode (because they have not mastered Traditional Phonics).
These children fail as readers as a direct result of encouraging children to word-guess whilst simultaneously failing to provide adequate Traditional Phonic skills.
12. High VAS children
We would not want to give the impression that the seven-year-olds who have a high VAS are without problems.
HIGH VAS children typically perform near the top of the class in their early infant years, because their high VAS makes them good guessers, but if they do not acquire good phonic skills by the age of eight, they rapidly become guess-dependent.
As a rule of thumb we find that whole word guessing reliability follows the formula
VAS + 2 = guessable word length.
That means for example that a child with a VAS level of 2 can be expected to struggle with words longer than (VAS = 2) +2 = 4 letter words.
Most adults have a VAS level approaching 5. If you apply the above formula you will see that guess-dependency imposes a whole word guessing accuracy ceiling at about the 5+2 = seven-letter-word mark. Such high VAS, guess-dependent children therefore succeed initially but begin to struggle at about the age of ten when word length increasingly exceeds their 7-letter ceiling.
In our lectures we call these 'The Brick-wall kids', potentially the best of the best, but handicapped by being taught guessing strategies in the infant years instead of Traditional Phonic skills.
If you want to understand the consequences of combining guessing strategies with a high VAS turn now to the table on SUPERIOR READERS and follow the column headed 'GUESS'.
You will see that at the age of seven, 81% of SUPERIOR READERS showed, evidence of guessing inaccuracy (horse/house) etc and that, on leaving primary school, 18% of SUPERIOR READERS are still making inaccurate guesses.
13. Boys are different to girls.
It has long been clear that males are relatively immature in a whole range of developmental skills during infant years. VAS memory is merely another aspect of this relative immaturity.
Males on average develop VAS levels almost a year later than girls. Males are therefore less able to utilise whole word guessing strategies. This means that a teaching emphasis on whole word guessing discriminates against males.
The following table demonstrates the numbers of children brought to our centre. It can be seen that the patterns are fairly homogenous with the notable exception of failing males (described as 'Low Males' in the chart's legend).
Any child, be they male or female, will fail if they combine a low VAS level with whole word guessing. However we should expect to see more failing males simply because the slower rate of VAS development in males ensures that, throughout the 'Learning-to-Read' stage, there will be MORE low VAS males than low VAS females.
If the children were taught Traditional Phonics instead of word guessing strategies, a gender difference may still be present but it should be less marked (proof-reading and sight-word development should still be a little slower to develop). But one of the major advantages of giving infants a good initial phonic grounding is that the Traditional Phonics approach would then provide the males with a reliable strategy on which they could build and, as happened prior to the dominance of Whole Language teaching strategies, later catch up to the females.
That is no longer happening. By emphasising inappropriate whole word guessing strategies during the critical infant years whilst simultaneously failing to provide the children with adequate phonic skills, we habituate the males to inaccurate guessing whilst simultaneously depriving them of the means of catching up later.
14. Guessing inaccuracy
Teachers have been assured that inaccuracy in word guessing is either unimportant or temporary. Neither assumption is correct.
We find that children, encouraged into whole word guessing during the ages 6-9, tend to habituate the over-attention to high visibility letters by the age of 9. This explains why many students with an infant school background of word guessing continue to display the signature error patterns of guessing inaccuracy on entry into high school and beyond. The typical error patterns of a whole word guesser include 'house' misread as 'horse', 'cormorant' misread as 'computer', 'sinister' as 'sister' etc.
To illustrate this point I draw the committee's attention to the column headed 'GUESS' in the second table marked AVERAGE READERS.
You will note that at the age of nine, 71% of AVERAGE READERS were displaying the signature 'house/horse' guessing error patterns. Whole Language assured us that the guessing inaccuracy was just a temporary phase but if you follow the column down you should be alarmed to see that, on entry into high school, 41% of AVERAGE READERS were still repeatedly misguessing words.
But if you now turn back to the table on FAILING READERS you will see that 85% of failing nine year-olds children repeatedly display these error patterns and that, on entry into high school, 75% of failing readers are still making the same errors. The signature of failing readers is inaccurate guessing and that strategy was deliberately encouraged by Whole Language philosophy during teacher training.
There are therefore clear links between VAS, guessing and reading inaccuracy.
Our first take-home message is therefore in two parts:
that the teaching of whole word guessing without measuring and understanding each child's VAS level is playing Russian Roulette with children's lives.
That we must teach Traditional Phonics to all infants
in order to provide a reliable INITIAL strategy for low VAS infants
to prevent later failure in high VAS ten year-olds.
To avoid discrimination against males.
Returning for a moment to the reading of the word 'Eromanga'. This is near-impossible for a guess-dependent child who is unfamiliar with Australian geography but would be simple for a child with phonic skills.
It is near-impossible to guess because Eromanga
is longer than the seven letter word ceiling-of-reliability imposed by the whole word guessing formula;
is unfamiliar.
We therefore predicted in 1988, given the dominance of whole word guessing in our state, that about 75% of children should theoretically still be struggling to read simple 3 syllabic (9 letter) words on entry into high school. In 1996 we confirmed this prediction.
If you now turn to the column headed '3 SYL' you will indeed see that 41% of twelve year old AVERAGE READERS were unable to read phonetically simple 3 and 4 syllabic words. The equivalent figure for the FAILING READER was 86%. We are not surprised to find that 38% of SUPERIOR READERS made similar errors. Our 1988 and 1996 predictions, that 75% of all children entering high school experiencing difficulty with phonetically regular but unfamiliar long words, were within 2%.
Whole Language is producing a nation of children struggling to read long words, particularly if unfamiliar. That has consequences for reading newspapers, it undermines their willingness to undertake tertiary education, it undermines their confidence in carrying out any paid employment and it makes a nonsense of society's demanding compliance with written instructions in business, taxation, dole forms etc.
When the federal government discovered that testing was not taking place they insisted on imposing federal standards. Unfortunately they failed to demand independent control of those standards, a lesson which should not be lost on those of you now attempting to reform teaching.
In his book 'Why our schools are failing' Kevin Donnelly draws attention to the way in which tests can be dumbed down to create the illusion of high literacy standards. He points out that in 1996, 27% of year 3 children failed the very basic literacy national benchmarks but in 1999, only three years later, the literacy failure rate was reported as being about 10%. To produce an improvement of that magnitude over a three-year period without massive changes in teaching practices is frankly unbelievable. Donnelly claims that the tests were dumbed down to achieve a better pass rate.
As I look through the list of committee members and the Reference Group I confess to some misgivings. Much of the research data that we have presented here could have been identified at any time in the last 20 years by the universities and educational research groups. and they either failed to do so or else failed to publicise their findings. I see in the Reference Group the names of the professional organisations and unions that have been at the heart of the Whole Language scandal.
After the 1992 inquiry, which whitewashed Whole Language, some of us vowed never to submit research to inquiries again and are moving our work into the Internet and publishing in order to bypass the obstructions.
For me to now appeal to those same people to introduce self-reforms appears to be an act of futility.
But I do it this one last time,
partly because it was a member of the ACER Dr. M. DeLemos who lead the group of Australian researchers and academics to proclaim that Whole Language had no basis in science;
partly because there is now mounting recognition of the failure of Whole Language right around the world and it is going to be embarrassing if Australia alone remains in denial;
partly because I still, perhaps naively, hope that there will be at least one member of the committee man enough to admit, as did the Governor of California, that we had made a mistake and vow to take on the suicidal task of weeding out the Whole Language advocates.
Hope however is one thing, expectation is another.
At this point I therefore believe that if we allow the design of the tests or control of the testing to remain in the hands of the same academics, bureaucrats and teacher trainers who failed to detect and reform education in the past, we must abandon any expectation of self-reform and prepare to escalate the conflict into the public and legal arena.
15. Reporting to parents
Politicians on both sides of the politics are now demanding Plain English reporting. What has not been acknowledged is that precise reporting will never take place whilst teaching remains tied to the amorphous rhetoric of Whole Language, including its opposition to testing the kind of discreet sub-skills reported in this submission.
Reports in Britain and Australia are almost universally based on overgeneralised observations of teachers. The result is that, as in Britain, the terms used in reporting to parents are vague and overly optimistic. As a result parents are not alerted to the urgency of their child’s remedial needs and the resultant delay then allows bad habits and attitudes to consolidate. At the moment the children and parents are paying the price for this. I believe compensation is appropriate and overdue.
The problem centres on the infant grades. Habits both good and bad are usually laid down between the ages of 6 and 9. Our experience is that the bad habits thereafter become increasingly difficult to remediate even when remediation is in the hands of a specialist tutor working one-on-one. In a busy classroom with a teacher of limited remedial experience, particularly if trained in Whole Language, such delay therefore often produces life-long literacy difficulties.
In plain speech the public will be denied understandable reports as long as Whole Language remains in play in the infant grades.
16.The future:
Two new concerns now arise out of our research.
1. Internet technology has now improved to the stage whereby for the first time parents
are going to be able to test literacy skills on line. We have in fact already released our Stage 1
diagnostic programs at www.theharrisontest.com and these programs already generate very
detailed written reports and recommend resources and appropriate teaching strategies.
They are delivered free on-line as our contribution to international reform.
Significantly these tests will investigate and report on the very sub-skills studiously avoided by Whole Language advocates: the confusions between names and sounds, the difficulty in blending sounds and syllables, the confusions between b,d and p, proof-reading skills and, most certainly, VAS levels.
Parents are therefore increasingly going to be exposed to conflicting end of term reports and that threatens to bring teachers into open conflict with parents and researchers.
2. There are also alarming legal implications of our finding a tight link between VAS
memory development and a child’s capacity to process whole words. Let me explain.
Children with a lower memory capacity have a reduced capacity to process whole words by guessing. About 50% of all children in grade 2 fall into this category, most
of them boys. These children therefore are less equipped to use Whole Language guessing strategies. In legal terms they therefore ‘learn in different ways’.
Any child who ‘learns in different ways’ falls under the protection of our Disability Discrimination Laws which grant those people with disabilities the right to:
a detailed diagnosis,
the design of remedial programs appropriate to their disability,
the identification of short-term remedial goals and
the passage of that information to their parents or carers.
By failing to properly test VAS and phonic skills, we fail to provide appropriate diagnosis and remediation. Parents are already dismissing school reports as being inadequate. Whole Language practices therefore fail every one of these four legal requirements.
When calculating the cost of damages in an increasingly litigious society, we should remember that we are talking about 50% of children in grade 2 suffering the life-long financial and psychological consequences of inappropriate infant teaching practices at odds with research.
We simply cannot afford to expose our teachers to such risks. They must be able to demonstrate that they have tested phonic skills and VAS levels or else be vulnerable at law.
17. Summary:
The data submitted reflects outcomes in a typical 'teach everything' teacher training environment. All teachers believe that they competently teach phonics as well whole word guessing, predictive cueing and the complete panoply of Whole Language practices.
The evidence however identifies serious deficits. We find:
Poor knowledge of letter sounds
Confusions between letter names and sounds suggesting inadequate teaching of letter sounds at the start of the infant grades.
Poor capacity to blend sounds into syllables with consequent widespread difficulties in reading long words, particularly if unfamiliar.
VAS memory levels that preclude the use of whole word guessing strategies in infant grades.
Different but nevertheless dangerous consequences of promoting whole word guessing in infant grades for most readers be they poor or superior readers.
Evidence that guessing habits and poor phonic skills tend to become locked in by the age of nine.
We find that many of the assurances embedded in Whole Language are false. We also conclude that Analytic Phonics is not providing the phonic skill level necessary for mastery.
We therefore recommend a return to the traditional phonics-first emphasis during infant grades, the rigorous testing of VAS and other subskills at least once a year and the development and retraining of infant remedial teachers.
Our first book 'Reading Failure: Dogma v Data' sets out VAS Theory in more detail and also publishes the grade-by-grade goals that should be met at the end of each of the infant grades in order to produce a competent 9-year-old reader. The diagnostic tests that produced these data are available without charge at www.theharrisontest.com.
18. Recommendations:
The first and essential step is to honestly and unequivocally condemn Whole Language practices. More weasel words will be taken as a clear sign that there is no willingness to reform.
The transmission of that condemnation must not be left in the hands of those who oppose reform and that includes most state education departments and teacher training centres.
If literacy is to become science-based it necessarily follows that teachers need to know what researchers are saying. Most professions mandate a minimum amount of post-graduate training (subscriptions to publications, attendance at seminars, training CDs etc). In anticipation of state-led intransigence, a federal newsletter directly and regularly delivered to every teacher, would provide teachers with information about current research and foster science-based debate at the chalk-face. That might perhaps be usefully linked to a points system rewarding teachers who demonstrate comprehension of the information via a magazine/internet questionnaire. The central body determines the worth of any courses and allocates more or less points accordingly. Australia could become the international standard if we acted quickly.
We must give our initial attention to the infant grades because our emphasis must be on prevention. The sad reality is that massive remedial efforts are necessary with increasingly disappointing returns once the child has passed the age of 9 and has habituated poor reading habits.
Britain's Inspectorate found that literacy levels dramatically improved when principals were actively involved in the management of literacy programmes but principals simply can't properly MANAGE anything without scientifically valid data reporting progress and diagnosing impediments. Principals must therefore be provided with standardised and diagnostic testing tools. We should already be trialing just such a system by the time the committee's report is handed down.
Teachers are busy people. They don't want to spend all their time testing but we must have reliable data to form the basis of management and policy. For decades our team has been screening all basic skills (including VAS levels) in less that 4 minutes per child. Children who reveal major deficits have been undergoing more complete testing in another 20 minutes. The tests require no teaching skills. We offer our group's technical cooperation in the development of such a world-first system.
Given the history of dogma, fudging of tests and intransigent behavior, we cannot trust the schools, regions or states to self-evaluate. Whilst testing itself should be left in the hands of the teachers, that information can be aggregated throughout a school to allow management by principals. That same data can flow through to any region, any state, nation-wide and policy can then be developed to address deficits revealed by the data.
National analysis of the data should be the responsibility of a federal inspectorate funded to carry out independent research, provide teacher training and develop resources. The inspectorate shall be empowered to inspect schools and obligated to annually report directly to the federal parliament not the state education departments. The information contained therein must then be made available to the public and researchers at public libraries and on-line.
The choice of leader of this inspectorate should be limited to those with a proven commitment to science-based literacy reform to offset the danger of yet another Whole Language advocate gaining control of a national bureaucracy.
We must retrain our infant teachers as a matter of urgency. If we can get teaching right in the infant years, Whole Language, word-guessing, VAS levels then all become of less concern.
Consideration should therefore be given to creating a special national infant teaching certificate within two years with a deadline of no more than five years set for this certification to become mandatory for infant teachers.
Given the 'creative subversion' that characterised educators resistance to reform in the UK. And their historic opposition to traditional phonics, independent organisations with proven records such as the Spalding Foundation should be employed to retrain infant teachers in phonic-based strategies.
Finale:
Finally please forgive me if my language has sometimes been blunt. Such language is born out frustration arising from decades of possessing data and insights which whilst accepted by teachers, parents and researchers around the world is ignored without any understanding by Australian administrators.
Basing policy on dogma and political philosophy eliminates the possibility of rational debate; policy then becomes merely a reflection of control and bureaucratic power. However dependence on power eventually engenders the kind of resistance now beginning to surface around the world.
Yours faithfully,
Byron Harrison
Research Director
VAS Research
February 5th. 2005
TABLES:
