Reading and education
Brendan Nelson who was the right-wing Minister for Education in Australia, stumbled on the most surprising fact : not all students learn to read well. Brenden Nelson is no longer the Minister for Education. He is the Opposition leader in the parliament.
Having been in the education and literacy field all my life, I am totally appalled by this man’s ignorance and spin. I heard him on the radio being very arrogant saying something like “I’ve met students who don’t know that it is the black part on the page that you read” Yes, very amusing.
Australia and the rest of the English speaking world has been switching from the whole word approach to reading to the phonic method for 40 years or more. Nothing new there. What I found as a remedial English teacher was that there were all sorts of different reasons students fail to learn to read, which have nothing to do with the teaching or the method used.
How to remediate here? One on one for intensive periods. Each student can be diagnosed as to what they are missing in the reading process. There are many tests to do this. Some will be dyslexic, some will be deaf, some will have learned at a time when they were not literate in their first language, some will be able to read but not comprehend, some have blanks about a particular process in reading and so on, but all of them will be desperate to be able to read.
They will not admit this until they have your trust.
I have improved the reading of many students with the appropriate testing materials and the then appropriate teaching method. No one student learns reading in the same way. Sometimes the whole word reading method will pass one student by completely and sometimes the phonic method flies over the head.
It is a mixture of the two which has proven to work best, not one or the other. One or the other assumes that one has 30 students which will all be taught in the same way at the same time.
With reading and literacy in general, we need to put far more resources into schools.
But all Nelson does rather cynically, is make it sound like he knows something about education, a fact that is clearly incorrect.
