Page 1 Submission by Jean Clyde
Submission No. 47
Submission Summary National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy 2005
* Complex adult definitions of literacy do not apply at infant level.
* Literacy failure is established at infant levels.
* 70% of children brought to our remedial centre had no significant learning difficulty: they had been inappropriately taught.
* Children do not 'grow-out' of problems. Prolonged failure scars children for life.
* Lack of training in diagnostic and standardised testing disempowers teachers.
* Teachers are burdoned by cumbersome, ambiguous and jargon ridden reporting.
* Reporting systems based on moderation meetings are clearly inadequate.
* Over-optimistic and over-generalised reporting to parents leads to dangerous delays in remediation during critical learning stages.
* Analytic (lip service) phonics is ineffective.
* Synthetic (traditional) phonics 'wins' every comparative study.
* Eclectic ("We teach everything.") approach is inappropriate at infant level.
* The majority of infants are not developmentally ready for the whole word guessing and prediction cueing taught in the Whole Language classroom.
* 'Guessing' is not a reading strategy, it is an error pattern. Good readers don't 'guess'.
* Teacher training at both pre-training and in- service levels is at the very heart of the Literacy crisis. It is selective & withholds contrary research data from trainee teachers.
* In-depth courses in cognitive development do not attract promotional opportunities, top level Ed. officials are therefore lacking in knowledge of how children learn.
* Whole Language (WL) applied to infant grades is a flawed and failed experiment.
* Due to WL antipathy to testing no base or post-tests were conducted.
* Favourable 'outcomes' of OECD 'testing' is meaningless as most OECD countries are experiencing the same under-performing levels of literacy(exception - Scotland),
* Resistance to change is a serious problem.
* High-ranking Ed officials (Ed. Depts & in-service training groups e.g. PETA) are WL promotors. The impetus for change can not be placed in their hands.
* Teachers, due to flawed training, are not equipped for the changes required of them.
* Retraining must be independently monitored to avoid the reform agenda being recaptured by Whole Language/'We teach everything' advocates.
Jean Clyde
Submission to the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy 2005
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My name is Jean Clyde (formerly Zollner). I am a teacher.
I graduated from the Uni of Tas - B.Ed. (1985) - M Ed. Studs. (1994). The focus of my masters degree was the cognition of learning, particularly the neuroanatomy of memory.
In the late 198os I co-founded 'Basic Concern' which, in the next 14 years, expanded into Tasmania's leading remedial centre. I therefore have extensive experience of teaching failing readers.
During this period I co-developed VAS Theory to explain the mounting evidence of widespread reading failure. The new insights into causes of reading problems became the basis of remedial software and led to my lecturing throughout Australia and New Zealand.
I have since developed a reading, spelling and writing web site, suitable for use by parents, tutors, teachers & other related professionals. This web site offers 400 free work sheets and can be found at www.diyreadingtutor.com. I am currently producing
complementary software.
Together with other collaborators I have published in "The Australian Journal of Remedial Education", "Educational Journal", "Education Monitor" "Kappa Delta Pi" and we have just completed writing a book, "Reading through Tears", scheduled for publication in the next few months.
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Other members of our team will explain VAS Theory and will also provide the committee with data. I want to write simply as a teacher, who had vital research data withheld from her during teacher training. I was not told that data in comparative studies of a traditional phonic approach to learning to read and spell is a clear winner. This data would have directly challenged what I was being taught at the time.
The committee is charged with recommending reform in teacher training and teaching practices. The 1992 House of Reps. Inquiry into literacy appeared to accept our
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proposition that we must start reforms at the infant level and recognise that every adult, teenager and primary aged child with a literacy problem was once an infant with a literacy problem. The 1992 committee accepted that proposition, teachers accepted that proposition; the industry ignored it. Twelve years later I see no evidence that the necessary reforms were implemented by those charged with training and administering teaching.
Instead we read the same academic rhetoric redefining literacy with no recognition that the complex adult definitions of literacy do not apply at infant level.
Teachers in Prep and grades 1, 2 & 3 must first establish the basics. Failing infants do not have access to many of the higher order concepts promoted by academic definitions. Infants must first be able to read and spell words with confidence before they can develop comprehension, predictive cueing from context and syntax.
There is a perception that current infant practices are working well for most children and that only the children with learning difficulties require a different approach. The data developed by our team (see the submission by Byron Harrison) clearly demonstrates that this is quite untrue.
My experience in running a remedial learning centre made it clearly evident that 70% of the children passing through the learning centre had no significant learning difficulty. They rapidly responded to a different approach; their struggle and prior daily misery was caused by inappropriate teaching.
Dealing each and every day a procession of failing readers informs me that prolonged failure scars many of these children for life. Teachers likewise inform me that inadequate training can similarly scar a teacher for life. Imagine if you will that you have a class of 30 grade 3 children. Almost one third have skill levels so low that they struggle to participate in the grade 3 work suggested in the benchmarks. As a teacher you know that these children are failing but don't exactly
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know why. The little testing that you have available to you is in context. Whilst this form of testing may confirm your suspicions, it will not diagnose the cause. Your training as a teacher failed to equip you with effective diagnostic testing and you are discouraged from using any form of standardised testing. As a result you neither know the cause of the failure nor exactly how wide the learning gap is. As there is no sequenced programme running in the class it becomes impossible to find a suitable starting point from which you can assist the failing students. Your only option is to pass the problem on to the remedial teacher (if there is one). Even with diagnostic results you are not equipped to rectify the problem as nothing in your teacher training prepared you for this type of work. How professional do you feel? Meanwhile you have a group of failing students whose inappropriate behaviour is disruptive and challenging. You begin to pat yourself on the back simply forhaving survived another day.
Reports:
Among the many teachers' burdens in schools today is the report system, which is viewed with contempt both by teachers and by parents. The teachers recognise that these time consuming school reports are designed to fit in with Whole Language philosophy, which is opposed to formal testing. The reports appear to be designed to assuage parental concerns and give the impression of progress. Any report, that
requires 'moderation meetings' to determine by consensus what it might mean, is a bad joke and clearly unworkable. It isn't just that the parents simply cannot understand the jargon in reports, the platitudes are often misleading; decoding and encoding skills (required for accurate reading and writing) are neither tested nor reported. Teachers are urged to find some aspect of behavior or performance that shows some degree of progress but this leads to delays in advising parents of the need for urgent remedial intervention. By the time the
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child's problems become obvious, the basic skill deficits are compounded by poor attitudes and inappropriate reading habits that have to be undone before progress can be resumed. Sometimes the habits and attitudes overwhelm the child's capacity to accept remediation. It inevitably made my job as a remedial teacher more difficult, more prolonged and therefore more expensive. Instead of reforms, the public and the teachers are merely assured that an 'eclectic' approach is being used and that includes the assurance that "Children are being taught phonics.". The evidence contained in Harrison's submission refute that claim.
My studies and experience inform me that many infants at the Learning-to-read stage are incapable of absorbing more than one strategy. If you teach both guessing, predicting from pictures, from the meaning of other words and phonics, the child will develop a preference. Given the clear bias towards Whole Language in teacher training and the resultant dearth of phonic resources, it should not be surprising that many
infants choose the faster guessing strategies.
Our work clearly shows (see the Harrison data) that in the same way that we applied adult concepts to defining literacy, whole word guessing assumes a level of visual memory store capacity that simply has not developed in 50% of failing seven year olds and 32% of failing 8 year-olds. Whole Language is therefore a dangerous and inappropriate strategy for large numbers of infants. It directly leads to wide-spread reading failure.
Analytic Phonics:
The pseudo phonics (Analytic Phonics) that lies at the heart of current teacher training is not supported by research. It is clearly promoted only because it meshes with what turns out to be a flawed philosophy. Our team's data clearly demonstrates the failure of Analytic Phonics. Despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, everything that is essential to an effective phonic approach is missing, that is:
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- direct teaching (facilitation and discovery are inappropriate at infant levels).
- sequence (from 'easy' to 'more complex').
- structure (presented in a way that makes learning easy).
- practice (we learn best by 'doing' at the time of learning).
- consolidation (we require ongoing practice to firmly establish new learning).
Harrison's submission shows how low visual memory development undermines word-guessing capacity. Such developmental delay in infants however does not undermine development of phonic skills; low memory children do not need to fail, they only fail if encouraged into guessing strategies. This is why infants who are taught traditional phonics experience a relatively low rate of reading failure.
We also point out that in common with a raft of developmental delays, visual processing development in infant boys is some 8 months behind that of girls of the same age. Teaching Whole Language guessing strategies to infants therefore produces more failing boys than girls.
The time for debate about comparative studies is long past. Researchers accepted more than a decade ago that early phonics produces much better results than WholeLanguage.
The error in the Whole Language approach was in its insistence on applying adult, sophisticated learning strategies to the infant sector, where they were clearly unsuitable. This approach was implemented with no base testing and no post testing to establish its worth. It is plainly an experiment that hasn't worked. Despite this the education establishment continues to defend clearly unsound practices by disregarding all of the scientific evidence placed before it.
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I am at a loss as to understand why this is so. This action, or should I say inaction, has created an escalating 'us-and-them' situation, which now increasingly brings our professionalism into question. Should traditional phonics be introduced as the most appropriate approach at infant level, I would hope that we do not dismiss out of hand the value in some of the Whole Language approach in the later, post-infant primary sector. It is at this level that an eclectic approach is more appropriate. But I would also hope that we learned from our past flirtation with dogma and rhetoric. This time I hope that we honestly test the before and after results and refrain from the selective testing that has been the hallmark
of Whole Language.
A good reader who has learned the code can read text quickly and accurately. To a phonic-savvy reader, sight words are simply fast automatic recognition and not 'guessing' at all. These 'icing on the cake' skills of 'prediction-from-meaning' can then be used to speed up the reading process and in turn, fluency and comprehension.
It boils down to a matter of timing. The recipe that works is a Phonics First approach, followed by the more sophisticated skills based on meaning and context. NEVER should 'guessing' and 'prediction' be used as a means of word recognition.
I repeat, NEVER should 'guessing' and 'prediction' be used as a means of word recognition. This message alone can prevent the misery of reading failure. While Whole Language advocates may consider 'guessing' and 'predicting' as word recognition skills, those of us who have to sort out the mess of reading failure, recognise these guessing strategies as 'bad reading habits'. We are faced with the onerous task of breaking habituated, inaccurate, whole word guessing before we can
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even start teaching more appropriate and helpful skills. This dramatically slows recovery.
Teacher training:
The most critical factor working against any positive change lies in the area of teacher training. At one glorious time in the past universities were considered to be free of political or bureaucratic input; the training provided was based on best practice according to research data. The view now has deteriorated to a concept by Ed. Dept officials that graduates should be trained to meet the needs of the school when they hit
the classroom. In other words that teachers are trained to carry out the Ed Dept directives - regardless of the contrary research.
My experience in education circles makes me believe that it is almost inevitable that reform of my profession will once again be thwarted by an intransigent bureaucracy. I have therefore now turned to developing web site resources that will put learning to read, spell and write directly into the hands of parents and teachers. That way at least some children will be spared the misery that is their current lot.
This does however make a mockery of the ideal of public education as a means of equality of opportunity. Children with parents who have no access to computers or, parents who themselves cannot read will not receive this 'outside of school' opportunity to learn. Only caring parents will take the time to work at home on reading or alternatively take their child to a tutor.
The fact that tutors 'outside the system' use a phonic approach is no surprise. Paid tutors are expected to produce results. I would be rich if I had 5c from every student, who having just learned a bit of the code, said; "Why didn't someone tell me that before?"
Teaching at its best has got to be one of the most emotionally satisfying experiences a person can hope for. To recollect all the students with once down-turned eyes and
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glum expressions and see them, seemingly miraculously, turn into confident individuals offering full eye contact and beaming smiles to the world is a mega reward. It is indeed wonderful what simple mastery of skills can accomplish in a person's life. Of course to experience this you need to be fully competent as both a teacher and a learner. As new data is produced we need to adjust or modify our views. If our teachers are denied information and the data that supports it, they are diminished in their professional ability to provide best practice and their rewards are thereby diminished.
I can state very candidly that the teacher training I undertook in the 80's did NOT teach me how to teach reading or spelling. Sure, there were classroom 'activities' that were supposedly designed to 'facilitate' participation by the students and we were told such strategies as having a 'quiet reading time', where the teacher also read a book to herself thus demonstrating reading as a 'pleasurable experience', would encourage children to read, presumably by osmosis. But this is not what teaching is about. Even our lecturers became disillusioned. Two of them, beginning to doubt the validity of Dept of Ed policy, took themselves out into the local primary schools and into the Psychology Department and discovered the shortcomings of such 'non-strategies'. For a while some sense then entered our lecture rooms but not for long because these two lecturers were 'shifted' sideways into 'English as a Second Language' areas.
Being brought up in Scotland and having received a very fine and structured education, I was always critical of the 'new child-centred' approach. It was not however, until I began studying outside of the Faculty of Education (in the Faculty of Psychology) that I came across the data that refuted all that I was being taught in my own faculty.
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- Why, you may ask, did I seek courses outside of my faculty? The simple answer isthat no 'cognitive' based courses were available within the Education Faculty.
- Why, you may well ask were there no cognitive courses available? I was informed that there was no student demand for the courses.
- Why? It was explained that there was no incentive to take such courses because only courses in administration and curriculum would get you promotion once working for the Dept of Education.
The committee might quietly consider how a curriculum can be formed without reference to the cognition of learning. How can one know what is appropriate without first understanding the developmental limitations of the student? How do we understand the manner in which children focus, absorb and recall the information that is presented? I recall meeting a teacher who, having read in a psychologist's report that the child had poor short-term memory (STM), continued to give the child long complex instructions. She explained that she had only a vague idea of what the STM reference was about.
The Education Departments and their national support groups, such as teacher unions and groups like PETA have denied for the past two decades that there is a serious and significant problem resulting from inappropriate teaching at the infant level. According to their spokespeople, there is nothing seriously amiss in the teaching of literacy. In my opinion, the people who were causing the problem dominated the 1992 Inquiry. The result was a whitewash, which hid criticism and lead to deliverance of more funding into those same hands that caused the problems in the first place.
The public is repeatedly assured that we compete favourably with other western nations. Well so we should, as the literacy crisis is a worldwide phenomena. Britain and the USA are also under-performing. At least the USA is acknowledging that they
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have a problem...we are still in denial. The results of the British enquiry into literacyare eagerly awaited, though the process appears at this stage to be somewhat biased.
Let me now address the list agreed to by the ministers.
* Assessment of all students by their teachers as early as possible in the initial years of schooling.
If assessment is to be effective and relevant, it needs to include VAS testing, nonsense words, out of context words and the direct testing of phonic skills at the end of years 1, 2 & 3. A child who is dependent on context is a handicapped reader and obviously must be detected by assessment that excludes context cues.
*Early intervention strategies for those students identified as having difficulty: The TYPE of intervention is critical to recovery. The much publicised 'Reading Recovery' programme (RR) has been discredited so many times one wonders why it just keeps on coming back. It does of course support Whole Language Philosophy and therein lies its attraction to educators. But in practical terms it provides more of the same processes that have already failed the child in the classroom. Obviously ANY additional one-on-one attention will result in some improvement. The major criticisms of RR have been:
It is extremely expensive.
It does not provide the student with independent reading skills.
It does not provide long term, lasting results.
We must employ better intervention strategies than 'Reading Recovery'.
* The development of agreed benchmarks for years 3, 4, 5 and 7, against which all children's achievement in these years can be measured.
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the measurement of students' progress against these benchmarks using rigorous assessment procedures. national reporting of student achievement against the benchmarks.
Given the evidence of tests being dumbed down to produce politically acceptable pass rates, we need to watch these benchmarks very carefully and ensure that:
- the testing protocols are standardised; (not changed from year to year).
- the test results are not credited as being 'partly right' when they were in fact incorrect; (the spelling of the word 'kick' as 'kik' is not 3/4 correct).
- the questions and protocols be made available for public scrutiny immediately following the tests.
* Professional development for teachers to support the key elements of the Plan.
That decision sounds fine until you ask yourself, 'Who will be the provider of the professional development'?
If it is the same organisations that have been the providers in the past then, failing the total sweep of a new broom regarding staffing, you can expect little more than lip service to reform.
A true story:
I remember asking Jenny, a new remedial student, my favourite diagnostic question;
"How do you work out the words you don't know?"
Jenny's response was predictable but her vehemence was not. She almost spat back at me,
"I read on all the time and then guess... but I hate guessing. I want to know what the word is."
- Are children entitled to know with surety that what they have just read is indeed accurate?
- Are they entitled to mastery of a code that will make them independent and confident readers and writers?
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If it is beyond the capacity of teacher trainers to produce infant teachers who can give Jenny what she is entitled to, then they should resign and make way for teacher trainers who CAN; teachers who know how to teach not merely 'facilitate'. Facilitation belongs to secondary and tertiary education.
Our language is based on an alphabetic principal. If you know the code you can both read and write.
To fail to teach that code not only flies in the face of common sense, it is appallingly negligent.
I find that using the terms 'analytic' & 'synthetic' is confusing to the public.
a) 'analytic phonics' (the one that doesn't work and may exacerbate existing reading failure)
b) 'synthetic phonics' (the one that works for both prevention and recovery of reading failure)
I prefer to name them more appropriately 'pseudo phonics' and 'traditional phonics' respectively.
All that is being asked of those who accept the research data rather than the eduspeak or dogma is:
1. that common letter sounds are directly taught
2. that blending of these sounds into words (m-a-t = mat) is directly taught
3. that letter combinations are taught 'ch' / 'ai' / 'ow' alternatives (cow low) etc. are directly taught
4. that the blending of syllables 'dis-or-gan-ise = 'disorganise' is directly taught
5. that common spelling rules (mat+e = mate) are directly taught
6. that common points of grammar ( he was / they were) are directly taught.
Is this too much to ask? If the answer is 'yes', then we need ask WHY, for this was never a problem for our earlier teachers.
Finally may I express the hope that all submissions to the inquiry be made available, at least to those of us who made submissions, BEFORE the committee hands down its findings. That will give the committee the opportunity of hearing the rebuttal of rhetoric and the substitution of data for dogma.
Jean Clyde