Abstract
Combat in the ‘Reading Wars’ has escalated with the recent publication of Lyn Stone’s volume, Reading for Life: High Quality Reading Instruction for All. The book is an efficient read – critical for its time-poor audience – organised into very short chapters based around single concepts. The Big Six of literacy are the central theme and the openly professed faction from which this salvo is launched.
The first section of the book (nine chapters) explains the need for structured literacy instruction in the process of learning to read. An overview of the Big Six of structured literacy ensues: these include oral language development, phonological (including phonemic) awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The author emphasises that comprehension is the destination while use of the other five strategies forms the journey towards literacy. The section concludes with a description of the underlying processes needed for reading – rapid automatized naming, working memory and processing speed – and the potential consequences of low literacy.
The second section of the book (five chapters) concentrates on the ‘Reading Wars’. Chapter 10 contains a list of contributors to the literacy research literature curated via the author’s own engagement with this literature. The following three chapters provide an overview of select policies, inquiries, reports and interventions in the United States, Britain and Australia. The final chapter of the section presents details of non-profit and commercial organisations that provide support and advocacy for literacy and/or a range of learning difficulties.
The third section of the book (six chapters) attempts to explain why ‘bad ideas persist in education’ via a range of psychological and sociological concepts: teachers’ openness (or resistance) to ideas; cults and catchphrases; logical fallacy and a range of other thinking and critical-thinking errors. The final chapter of this section provides a detailed explanation of dyslexia.
The fourth and final section of the book (eight chapters) presents a selection of teaching ideas, strategies and tools from the author’s own consultancy practice. These include a focus on four elements of the Big Six: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency and vocabulary. Oral language development is integrated somewhat into other examples but not addressed explicitly and, while there is a chapter on comprehension, the author struggles to suggest more than two resources, stating that if the other Big Five are covered, comprehension should develop ‘in the majority of cases’ (p. 191).
The strengths of the book clearly lie in in the overview of the Big Six in the first section and the teaching ideas covered in the fourth section. It is difficult, however, to ignore the sweeping and derogatory generalisations about progressive education, the misunderstandings of inquiry-based and child-centred learning, the condescending attitude towards teachers, and the casual assumptions about what happens in Australian classrooms that are scattered throughout the book. For example, the author claims that child-centeredness means no-discipline (p. 71) and is the reason children are not allowed to point at words (p. 173), and summarily blames constructivism and inquiry for dampening the positive effects of some aspects of the Big Six (p. 70); she claims openly that ‘Australian schools are steeped in outdated practice’ (p. 76). These comments declare cause and effect for quite disparate occurrences, without providing a shred of evidence. The author reassures teachers that they are not intentionally bad, they just have bad tools or false information (p. 90) and categorically states that ‘…at school there is very little explicit teaching of each separate letter’ (p. 151). The fact that the author finds opposition to a formalised Year 1 phonics check in Australia ‘bewildering’ (p. 74) implies a clear lack of familiarity with the demanding logistical realities of a classroom with up-to-30 students. 1
In addition to unsupported opinion, the book includes a number of contradictions that are neither acknowledged nor resolved. For example, it is stated that ‘guessing’, ‘predicting’ and ‘using context’ is a ‘dead-end street’ (p. 37), but the author later promotes the Reading Pathways program, which asks students to consciously make predictions from context about what they are reading (p. 190). The author declares that reading cannot increase one’s vocabulary if the reader is using a guessing method (pp. 32–33) but proceeds to give the example of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky where most readers, ‘know exactly what happened in the poem and, furthermore, can talk to others about the poem using [their] newly learned words’ because the readers ‘were sufficiently bolstered by words in general usage’ (p. 40). 2 The book appears to conflate uninformed ‘guessing’ (an ineffective reading method) with ‘inferring from context’ (effective method) that perhaps could be better delineated in future editions.
Concerningly, the author states that a 20% failure rate in an educational program is unacceptable (p. 97), yet actively promotes the Direct Instruction method, which, based on the calculations on pp. 75–76, has a failure rate of at least 66%. Contradictions of this type are cherry-picked at best, and at worst push teachers and policy makers down a path that is unhelpful for encouraging literacy.
Readers can gain multiple insights from this book. The Big Six comprise a group of excellent methods and checkpoints for helping children learn to decode and read words, leading to comprehension and broader literacy. The Big Six are applicable to whole-class teaching, and the methods exemplified in the book are particularly useful for one-on-one and small-group teaching situations. It is clear that every language teacher should have knowledge of, and the ability to use, the Big Six.
However, the assertion that the Big Six are all teachers need to ensure every child becomes literate ignores the complexity of the classroom, the complexity of children’s lives and the complex mix of skills and experiences children bring to the classroom. Unsubstantiated denigration of non-Big Six methods coupled with summary dismissal of complementary curriculum design – without explanation or cited evidence – contributes to the author’s arguments failing to meet the book’s own validity and reliability standards detailed throughout Section Three.
When language teachers enter a classroom, they require an entire toolkit – a utility belt, perhaps – of literacy teaching strategies, not just the Big Six. To suggest otherwise does our teachers, and our students, a disservice. Perhaps if agreement could be reached even on this small concession, the Reading Wars would be a step closer to an end.