Thank goodness we have been able to build on the work of others internationally - in terms of their research on reading, their scrutiny of research and its findings, and their tireless efforts to inform people widely and clearly about the research and its findings.
People in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and other countries have benefited from the internet providing access to the international debate, indeed battle, regarding what works best and what potentially can damage learners on their route to becoming readers and writers.
So, we are able to capitalise on a shared expertise and scrutiny of developments over the years.
In Kerry Hempenstall's great speech (link above), however, he is not entirely accurate about one detail. Paragraph 7 begins with this statement:
Later in his speech, Kempenstall describes 'moribund strategies' and gives as an example guidance to parents in a newsletter which he says is 'poor advice' (see the words in red below):In Great Britain, similar concerns have produced a National Literacy Strategy (Department for Education and Employment, 1998) that mandates practice based upon research findings.
Now note the statement above (I have emboldened the blue statement).Are there examples in education in which practices based solely upon belief, unfettered by research support, have been shown to be incorrect, and have lead to unhelpful teaching?
• Learning to read is as natural as learning to speak (National Council of Teachers of English, 1999).
• Children do not learn to read in order to be able to read a book, they learn to read by reading books (NZ Ministry of Education, as cited in Mooney, 1988).
• Parents reading to children is sufficient to evoke reading (Fox, 2005).
• Good readers skim over words rather than attending to detail (Goodman, 1985).
• Fluent readers identify words as ideograms (Smith, 1973).
• Skilled reading involves prediction from context (Emmitt, 1996).
• English is too irregular for phonics to be helpful (Smith, 1999).
• Accuracy is not necessary for effective reading (Goodman, 1974).
• Good spelling derives simply from the act of writing (Goodman, 1989).
These assertions have influenced educational practice for the last 20 years, yet they have each been shown by research to be incorrect (Hempenstall, 1999). The consequence has been an unnecessary burden upon struggling students to manage the task of learning to read. Not only have they been denied helpful strategies, but they have been encouraged to employ moribund strategies. Consider this poor advice from a newsletter to parents at a local school:
If your child has difficulty with a word: Ask your child to look for clues in the pictures. Ask your child to read on or reread the passage and try to fit in a word that makes sense. Ask your child to look at the first letter to help guess what the word might be.
When unsupported belief guides practice, we risk inconsistency at the individual teacher level and disaster at the education system level.
What Hempenstall did not appreciate - and perhaps many more people taking part in the ongoing debate about reading instruction and the lack of accountability of those who perpetuate these 'moribund strategies' - is that the National Literacy Strategy rolled out in 1998 - 99 in England promoted this very range of reading strategies and entitled them the 'Searchlights' model.
Thus, the NLS was not evidence-based at all - but close scrutiny suggests that its influences were very much the famous 'First Steps' and 'Reading Recovery' programmes which DO promote a range of 'multi-cueing reading strategies' warned about in the conclusions of research on reading as Hempenstall describes.
I know this in very great detail because I was a practising primary teacher in England when the National Literacy Strategy was rolled out quite forcibly as Hempenstall noted - and I was most shocked to be told to teach my children to 'read' by guessing from the picture clues and to 'read on' and 'guess the word that makes sense' and to 'check the word you guessed with the first letter of the word'.
I knew from experience that it was my very weakest readers (inherited from previous teachers) who were desperately trying to 'read' the words by such strategies - in fact, they did not study the printed words at all because they were so busy exploring the picture and trying to work out what the words might be - often giving wild guesses which further muddled up what the print was actually about.
When I queried the training I was receiving, the advisors who were delivering the guidance of the National Literacy Strategy just did not know how to deal with this.
I asked them for the research to support the 'Searchlights' model and they never, ever could come up with any - although eventually I was told about a report written with apparent evidence to support the NLS written by Roger Beard and it very much pointed to the type of teaching in Australia at that time - for example, 'First Steps' and the Holdaway 'Big Books' work plus an emphasis on the multi-cueing model and 'guided reading'.
Thus began my journey into the reading debate in a very, very serious way. I looked into the research and it confirmed my experiences that the multi-cueing guessing strategies damaged many children's long-term reading profiles and that the most effective teaching was systematic phonics teaching. My investigations into hands-on leading-edge teaching (studies) also showed great commonality of success with the systematic synthetic phonics teaching approach in particular.