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“Do we have a literacy crisis?”
by Byron Harrison

In Australia this question has been almost impossible to answer because we have no independent national inspectorate. Whole Language, ‘Top-Down’ philosophy thereby controls both the training of teachers and the testing of literacy outcomes that result from that training.
Australian tests are designed to fit within Top-Down philosophic limitations and are largely limited to higher order, context-driven processing such as cloze procedures and comprehension.
Such tests do not reveal subskill deficits such as:
• knowledge of sounds,
• confusions between names and sounds,
• capacity to blend sounds into syllables,
• capacity to read 1,2 and 3 syllabic words,
• capacity to proof read,
• confusions between the shapes and sounds of the letters b, d, p etc.

Survey population.
The raw data in this paper was therefore drawn from an independent source, an optometric practice conducting literacy research. This paper is part of a larger study of 3000 consecutive children. The children were mainly resident in or around Hobart, the beautiful capital of Tasmania in Australia.
A decade ago, when Whole Language reigned supreme, Tasmania claimed to be at the leading edge of Australian education. Since that time there has been a gradual retreat in Tasmania from an open antagonism to phonics to the current ‘but-we-teach-everything’ public relations position. However the Department still employs teachers who believe phonics is a four-letter word, infant teachers have received no additional Synthetic Phonic training and the bureaucrats and teacher training institutions, responsible for more than 20 years of Top-Down teaching, are still drawing salary, still training teachers.

The study
The full 3000 child study reports on 25 different aspects of literacy, ranging from the child’s capacity to simply point to matching letters, to examining a child’s responses when reading at speed, through to a child’s capacity to detect when a word’s spelling looks correct.
This interim paper only reports on those aspects that involve the children’s capacity to read phonetically-regular 1,2 and 3 syllabic words.

Protocol
The children were first asked to categorise themselves as:
1. ‘average’ readers or
2. ‘below average’ readers or
3. ‘above average’ readers.
That self-assessment was then independently confirmed or denied by their parents acting on the basis of teacher interviews, school reports and often by parental observation in the classroom. In the few cases where there was disagreement the data was excluded from the study.
• Selected words appeared on the computer screen.
• The child was given unlimited time to read the words.
• The words appeared without pictures or context.
• If the child misread a word, a second and similarly structured word was immediately displayed to
confirm the error pattern.
• The response was only recorded as an error if both words were misread.
Results:
UNLIMITED TIME WAS ALLOWED on most tests.

The practice sees a disproportionate number of struggling children but let us first look at the performance of 487 children who had been lead to believe that they were ‘average’ readers.

1: Confusions between names and sounds of letters. The three letters c, g and y have multiple sounds. This paper therefore only reports on the percentage of children who made four or more errors. If a child confused the name and sound of a vowel, they were told ‘Yes that is the name but what sound does it make?’ This data only records children, who despite that prompting, were still unable to provide the most common letter sound.
The fact that many 6 year olds do not know the common sounds of the alphabet is perhaps inevitable in a situation where infant teacher training fails to advise preschool parents and teachers to teach sounds before they teach letter names.
What is of more concern is the finding that at the age of 9, after three years of compulsory education, 44% of children still hadn’t mastered letter sounds, the most basic phonic skill.
Given that children’s reading habits, both good and bad, have usually been habituated by the age of 9, it is alarming but not surprising to find evidence of confusions between names and sounds in 29% of children entering high school.

2: Misreading 1 syllabic words.
The four most common causes of misreading 3 letter words were:

a) guessing errors (paying attention to some letters but misguessing others. e.g. ‘pet’ misread as ‘pot’). 71% of nine year-olds showed evidence of inaccurate word guessing on simple 3 letter words.

b) name/sound confusions (‘net/neat’) 29% of 9 year-olds repeatedly confused the names and sounds letters in simple 3 letter words. The problem occurs particularly on vowels (e.g. ‘net’ misread as ‘neat’) . These problems undermine both reading and spelling and often persist into high school and beyond

b/d/p confusions (e.g. ‘big’ misread as ‘dig’) was still being repeatedly demonstrated in 10% of 9 year-olds and can persist into adulthood undermining both self-confidence and phonic skills. More than half of the failing 13 year-old readers examined exhibited b/d/p confusions.

Word reversals (‘was/saw’) usually disappear by the age of 10 in average readers.

The reading of 2 syllabic words (e.g. ‘picnic’ misread as ‘picture’) is interesting because readers make fewer errors on two syllabic words than when reading one or three syllabic words. Whilst that may seem to be an odd finding, in fact it is precisely what we predicted should happen whenever whole word guessing becomes the dominant mode of word attack.
Widespread difficulty in reading 3 syllabic words (e.g. ‘cormorant’ misread as ‘computer’) was predicted by our team in papers and lectures as far back as 1988 when we explained why dependence on whole-word-guessing should theoretically create a fall-off in accuracy for words longer than 7 letters. We predicted that about ¾ of children should in theory have difficulty with long words unfamiliar, phonetically regular words such as ‘Eromanga’ or ‘continent’ if they entered a high school from a primary school with a whole word emphasis. That prediction was confirmed when we subsequently found that 71% of ‘average’ readers experienced precisely these difficulties.
The figures for poor readers are of course even worse. Not only that, the same word length limitation, particularly on unfamiliar words, is even observed in some readers who believed they were ‘above average’ readers.
Contrast those figures with official figures. Recently the Australian public was reassured that ‘only’ about 19% of grade 3 (age 9) children failed to meet the national standards. Such a finding is patently incompatible with the above data showing that 38% of average nine year olds misread simple 3 letter words, 10% misread 2 syllabic words and 88% were unable to read longer words. Whole Language philosophy asserts that such habits should disappear but VAS Theory (see later) predicts that once guessing habits are established, they should tend to persist. The data supports VAS Theory for we find that at the age of twelve, 41% of errors on simple 3 letter words were due to misguessing.
We do not believe that these Australian results are unusual; indeed these are the same error patterns that we observed during our lecture tours in the UK and New Zealand. By testing within context, these underlying subskill problems go undetected and official figures thereby grossly overestimate the skill levels of children.

We conclude that:
a) basic phonic skills are still not being effectively taught in infant grades;

b) if good phonic skills are not established in the infant schools, the resultant guess-induced error patterns often persist right into high school;

c) this population is unlikely to receive scarce remedial resources because, as a result of dumbing down the tests, these struggling children are now judged to be ‘average’ readers.

All of these outcomes (and more) were predicted by Visual Attention Span (VAS) Theory back in 1988. Teachers wishing to access the diagnostic methods are referred to our team’s website www.theharrisontest.com. Eight years after publishing VAS Theory we were saddened to find our predictions confirmed.

VAS Theory tells as that a child learning to read using Synthetic Phonics is learning to pay attention to every letter, to process letters in a left-to-right direction and to connect each letter to its sound.
The whole word processor however is learning to select those letters that attract most attention. The infant then tries to make a match with a word that they know. There is no necessary left-to-right processing going on; they are learning to process words like pictures. It is fast, inherently inaccurate and weak in sequencing. The letters that attract most attention are called High Visibility Letters and they are the two end letters and any letters with limbs that intrude into the space above and below the word.
Consider the word ‘magnet’ as an example: The word ‘magnet’ has three High Visibility Letters, m_g__t , which attract visual attention. If the word-guessing child can simultaneously hold all three of these high visibility letters in memory, then m_g__t becomes the basis of their guess. Unfortunately that m_g__t pattern fits two other words, maggot and midget (which is why whole word processing is inherently inaccurate).
But some immature infants have not yet developed the capacity to hold all three High Visibility Letters in working memory. Their guess may in fact be now based on two, not three, letters m____t and there are now over forty words that fit that pattern. There is thus an intimate relationship between the number of letters that a child can hold in working memory and their capacity to accurately word guess.
The number of letters that a child can hold in memory is called their Visual Attention Span level (hereafter abbreviated to VAS). Teachers can determine a child’s VAS level (and thereby their capacity to word-guess) in a few seconds simply by flashing symbols on screen and asking the infant what they saw. VAS level 3 appears to be the minimum level of VAS consistent with some success in whole word guessing. Infant teachers should be horrified to learn that our testing of thousands children demonstrates that, at the age of 7 years 7 months, 50% of infants had still not developed level 3 VAS and were therefore deemed inappropriate candidates for the whole word guessing and predictive cueing strategies taught in their schools.
The consequences however are not limited to infancy, nor are the problems confined to children with low VAS:
The high VAS child develops visual memory very early, in fact they may have developed level 3 VAS memory (the level necessary for whole word guessing) even before they can read. Guessing success therefore comes easy and early. Such children are often held up as proof that whole word processing works but a very different picture emerges if the progress of many of these children is followed in subsequent years.
Their high VAS level leads to initial success in recognising words This child therefore adopts the fast word-guessing strategy. They have little need to learn a slower phonic approach and thereby become guess-dependent.
In our lectures we have called these high VAS/low phonic children, the ‘Brick Wall Kids’ because their initial guess-based success hits a brick wall and begins to falter about the age of nine or ten. The ‘Brick Wall’ is caused by the fact that:
a) with each year more and more words exceeds the 7 letter word limit imposed by their VAS and
b) they have never developed the phonic strategies necessary to break long words down into their sounds and syllables.
At the ‘learning to read’ stage, phonics and whole word guessing strategies should therefore be viewed as competitive rather than cooperative strategies. If teachers attempt to teach both strategies, they should expect to find that many children will still choose the faster but inaccurate, unsequenced, context-dependent, whole word guessing alternative. This is one reason why, around the world, massive phonic deficits are showing up in schools that protest that they do teach phonics. Another reason is that many of these schools will be teaching Analytic Phonics, a poorly sequenced version of Synthetic Phonics.
Consider the graph below: