Gloria Sty, bud Iyam riting this coz I wanna mayk sum poynts bowt reeding and fonnix…
You probably read that first sentence more slowly than usual and some of you will have just ignored it, but your probably able to read it, if you read it allowed.
Of course, you probably read that second sentence much more quickly and only some of you will notice that it used the wrong homonym. It should have read: You’re probably able to read that just fine if you read it aloud.
More importantly, you were able to read the first sentence because you were able to use phonics to decode the sentence. For most people that made it much, much slower than the way they read most things.
To use an imperfect analogy, think of reading like learning to drive: It’s very important to learn how to use the brakes. And the steering wheel and the accelerator. Once you’ve learned where all those things are, then it’s time to start concentrating on where you’re going and what’s around you. You may still be a poor driver and have no sense of direction, but only a small number will need a refresher course on where the brakes are. In this analogy, think of knowing how to use letters to sound out a word as the breaks and knowledge as the accelerator. Sometimes you’ll neither be able to use either of those things to make meaning, so you might swerve around them with the steering wheel and continue in the hope that what you avoided isn’t a problem later.
Ok, it’s an imperfect analogy. I admitted as much myself. Of course, just like with driving, it’s a lot more than knowing where the brakes, accelerator and steering wheel are. You have to know where you’re going and – even though you’ve been driven to Grandma’s house hundreds of times – when you’re driving you may suddenly become aware that you don’t actually know which road to turn down and you need someone to direct you, or else you need to put on the brakes and look up the route… (Yes, I’m ignoring the possibility of using a GPS because it doesn’t fit the analogy…)
Reading is not simply a matter of decoding words with phonics any more than driving is a matter of knowing where the brakes are. In both cases, if you have to use them every few seconds, you’ll never get anywhere. Reading requires knowledge which Daniel Wllingham explains rather succinctly in this article: “School time, knowledge and reading comprehension”.
When I say knowledge, I’d don’t just mean a knowledge of vocabulary. While a rich vocabulary is extremely important in understanding what one reads, one needs a wide general knowledge to pick up the inferences in what one reads.
A sentence such as: “Albanese took the wind out of Dutton’s sails by agreeing with him!” requires not just a knowledge of Australian politics to appreciate the implications of the sentence, but unless one is familiar with the phrase “wind out his sails” then one might be left confused. Similarly the following paragraph needs the reader to make a number of inferences that aren’t present in a literal reading:
She thanked David for the lift and asked him if I’d like to come in for a coffee. “Won’t your husband mind if we wake him up?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “he’s away at the moment, so we really don’t have to worry about him at all!”
A literal reading would have the reader believing that David was concerned about the sleep patterns of the husband, whereas most people would suspect that there was a subtext to the question as well as the answer.
When the Grattan Institute’s report was publicised last week, I couldn’t help but notice that the media used the failure to success anecdote by talking about an individual school who had made a dramatic improvement after adopting the recommended strategy. The trouble with the failure to success model is that it doesn’t tell you what’s going on elsewhere and, in this case, I’d suggest that most primary schools do have a structured approach to teaching kids how to sound out words. There may be room for improvement but when you are talking about the failure to success model, you aren’t looking at what’s happening in most places.
To explain what I mean as simply as I can, I’ll move away from education and use healthcare to illustrate by way of a fictional example:
Jonestown Hospital had one of the worst fatality rates in the state, then a new chief of staff, Dr Smith, instituted a policy of sterilisation. Dr Smith insisted that instruments were sterilised after each use and mandated the washing of hands between surgical procedures. “Surgeons had been instructed to save soap and water by only washing their hands at the start of the day but once we washed before every operation, the infection rate went down dramatically!”
If only other hospitals were to adopt these simple measures then we may be able to reduce fatalities to zero.
Yes, the reason that Jonestown hospital was able to improve was that it wasn’t doing what nearly every other hospital does. That’s why it had such a high fatality rate.
Now to drag that back to education, it’s obvious that if one poorly performing school isn’t doing something that most other schools are doing and they start doing it, then they’ll likely improve but that’s not an indication that all the schools who were doing better than the previously poorly performing school has something to teach them. In fact, it may be the opposite.
Every time the media report on education they have a tendency to report on the failures within the system and present some solution as though it’s the panacea for everything, while overlooking the fact that some of the reasons for poor performance are known to everyone and ignored. For example, why does NAPLAN compare like schools? Well, everyone knows if we compared all schools with all schools and didn’t take into account socio-economic factors, we’d find that socio-economic factors were the biggest element in the difference in ranking.
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