New Zealand's literacy rates have been declining for over a decade. Now a growing group of parents, educators and academics believe they have the solution. It's called structured literacy, and they say it's backed by scientific research into how the brain learns to read. But is it really the cure-all
Reading Block: The war over teaching reading - structured literacy and phonics or whole language?
Developments in neuroscience and psychology now appear to point towards taking an explicit, systematic approach that emphasises the basic rules of how written language works - particularly an understanding of the links between letters and sounds, known as phonemic awareness.
Advocates say that knowledge allows children to decode words, which - when combined with strong oral language and vocabulary - allows them to increasingly build their reading comprehension until they become fluent.
But most New Zealand schools are still following "balanced literacy" with an emphasis on using different approaches depending on individual children. Phonics is part of this approach, but it's usually not taught systematically. And often children are encouraged to make sense of texts using all sources of information, especially when identifying an unknown word. That includes using "cues" like sentence context and pictures - potentially only decoding the letters as a last resort.
James Chapman, Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology at Massey University, said while most children in New Zealand who were taught balanced literacy did learn to read, it wasn't working for about a quarter of all learners.
They were more likely to be Māori, Pasifika, from lower socioeconomic groups or to have a learning disability - a fact acknowledged by the Education Ministry which says our current system "is not working for all children".
Chapman has been lobbying for three decades for a move to a more explicit, systematic approach to teaching children to read with a focus on phonics and phonemic awareness. National and international studies were converging on a consensus that "science of reading-type approaches to literacy instruction" - often termed structured literacy - were most effective for the largest number of young children.
The science of reading - how it works
Developments in cognitive science are unlocking the mysterious process by which marks on the page become words in our mind. While the human brain has evolved to become highly skilled in oral language, writing has only been around for 5000 years, so our brains aren't prewired to read. Instead, reading and writing are skills that must be learned.
Through brain scans, scientists have found that the brains of humans across the globe all do something very similar when they read. According to neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, reading involves two key areas of the brain - the part that's evolved to recognise objects, which he calls the letterbox, and the "language circuit" which the child already uses for oral language. As the child learns to read these two parts become connected.
Neuroscience has also found literate brains break words down into phonemes - letters or groups of letters that make sounds. They then piece them back together to make a word that we recognise. Dehaene says in his book "Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read" that this means all children must learn to decode words into their components and link them to the sounds of speech in order to become fluent readers.
"Studies ... have found this discovery is not automatic," he says. "It requires explicit teaching of an alphabetic code." Dehaene warns against neuroscientists telling people what to do in the classroom - but says it's crucial for teachers to use the science when they're deciding how to teach.
Non-profit group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa is lobbying for all New Zealand schools to adopt a science of reading approach.
The group includes many parents of children with dyslexia, who they say have been poorly served by balanced literacy. Instead of pulling struggling kids out of class for remedial work or paying for a tutor, those parents say structured literacy should be the default approach across New Zealand classrooms.
Lifting Literacy chair Alice Wilson said New Zealand schools that had adopted a structured literacy approach were finding it benefited everyone, not just the kids that had been behind.
"The kids that are struggling are learning to read, write and spell much better. But it's also the kids that were doing well - they're doing better under this way," she said.
The best readers had intuited the rules of language but they still benefited from having them explained explicitly, as did the others who found it harder, "so it's not going to hold [anyone] back".
Wilson said about 15 per cent of schools were now claiming to use some form of structured literacy. That didn't include those adopting the Better Start Literacy Approach, a new Ministry-funded programme which also follows science of reading principles and is based on research from the University of Canterbury.
Some early adopters of the structured approach are now claiming amazing results, and are particularly seeing an acceleration in literacy among their Māori and Pasifika learners.
Among them is Central Normal School in Palmerston North, which has made headlines for completely closing the literacy gap between Māori and Pākeha students; and Kaiapoi North School, which has also seen children's learning accelerated after bringing in the approach four years ago.
More recently, Robertson Road School in Māngere began rolling out the programme in 2020 after years of trying and failing to accelerate the learning of a large group of students who were falling behind.
Deputy principal Carol Elson said it had taken some courage for the school to make the leap but the payoff was clear.
When she joined the school in 2018, many children couldn't decode unknown words.
"They would stop or jump over or keep on reading, or just look around like a deer in the headlights." There was lots of teacher prompting as well, she said.
But now wherever she goes she hears "beautiful reading".
The vast majority were decoding fluently and their vocabulary was building at the same time, Elson said.
Other schools are dipping their toes in the structured literacy pond. Robertson Road featured in a recent report from the NZ Initiative think tank on structured literacy, and has since been inundated by requests from schools keen to see how it works, said principal Ravi Naidoo.
Massey University's Dr Christine Braid works in schools across New Zealand that are adopting the approach.
She said teachers worked incredibly hard and did the best they could for the children in their care, but many had not been trained in the latest science behind how we read.
"It's nobody's fault, but that one year of [initial] teacher training is just not enough. We are working with teachers, who within half an hour of talking about this they go 'Why weren't we trained in this?' "
Braid - like every structured literacy expert the Herald spoke to - emphasised how important it was that schools retain a strong focus on reading rich texts and surrounding children with rich language to develop their vocabulary, literary skills and love of reading.
Braid wasn't always a structured literacy fan. Until 10 years ago, she followed a whole language philosophy and was a tutor in the remedial Reading Recovery programme developed by renowned New Zealand educator Marie Clay.
She said it was a difficult wake-up call when she realised she was not teaching children through a best-evidence approach.
"I feel uncomfortable to think these children in my class may have hated coming to school and 'felt dumb'," Braid wrote in a paper for Massey University. "But my discomfort is nothing compared to the broken mana of the child and the heartbreak of the family who has to watch."
As with every aspect of education, there's disagreement from some quarters. Education figures have warned against any solution that claims to be a silver bullet - especially those with big money behind them.
Auckland University associate professor in literacy education Dr Rebecca Jesson was wary of a one-size-fits-all approach that applied a single way of teaching to a whole class, rather than adapting it to individual children.
"Teachers are professionals who should be planning based on the children they've got in front of them. And the idea that everybody learns the same, or at the same pace, or needs the same thing, doesn't align with my thinking about teaching as a craft," she said.
She also said while most public debate was focusing on the early years of schooling, that wasn't the only place where New Zealand had literacy issues.
"It's true that kids need a good start, and if you get in early that stops them falling behind, you want to prevent anybody falling behind," Jesson said.
But there was also research showing there was a plateau in upper primary around reading comprehension, while at high school different literacy skills were required depending on the subject matter, such as science or English.
Jesson said there was "absolutely no doubt" that children needed to know things like letter sounds, but "it's not a matter of what they need to learn, it's about how you might go about teaching it. Designing interesting and responsive and motivational and tailored lessons that really engage your kids ... rather than a paint-by-numbers programme".
She did not believe there was only one way to learn. "I've been a part of schools where we had Reading Recovery and we had structured packages and it was about what worked for the particular child."
Jesson is a trustee of the Marie Clay Literacy Trust, and is working on overhauling Reading Recovery. The remedial reading programme is funded $30 million per year by the Ministry of Education with the money topped up by schools.
She was sceptical of the claims of "structured literacy salespeople" who aggressively marketed their commercial programmes to schools - though she acknowledged Reading Recovery could be accused of having vested interests as well. But she was much more open to approaches like the government-funded Better Start Literacy Approach which is based on research from the University of Canterbury and is subject to ongoing evaluation.
Commercial packages were only as effective as the schools they were in, Jesson said. Evaluation and ongoing checks were key to see if a programme was working.
"I'd be wanting to see whether children are enjoying it. Whether they're developing reader identity, whether they're having lots of books read for them, and engaging in the love of literature," she said.
"I'd be really interested to see what they're doing in writing and how they're learning to express themselves ... I'd be really interested to see the fluency outcomes and the comprehension outcomes. And then I'd be convinced that what that school is doing is providing a good, solid literacy start for their kids."
They told me 'I'm dumb Miss, I can't do this'
Robertson Road School in Māngere has embarked on a revolution in the way it teaches reading and writing, after a 2018 ERO report said the decile 1 school wasn't achieving equitable outcomes for all students, of whom 75 per cent are Pasifika and 18 per cent are Māori.
Teacher Gemma Maddocks interviewed students, their families, and teachers to find out what was going wrong. The stories were heartbreaking, Maddocks says. "They told me 'I'm dumb Miss', or 'I can't do this', or 'I can't read and I'm going to high school next year'."
With 60 per cent of children below the expected literacy level, "you have to look at what's happening in the classroom", Maddocks said. "We were getting children in Year 7 and 8 that [were] still learning to read, not reading to learn - that's a huge red flag."
While each teacher was doing what they felt worked best for their children, there was no consistency between year levels. Despite numerous intervention programmes, the gaps weren't closing.
The school decided to move to a structured literacy approach - a whole-school programme of explicit, systematic teaching of letters and sounds, starting simple and moving to more complex letter groups. They chose the Little Learners Love Literacy programme, which laid out a "scope" (letters/graphemes and sounds/phonemes to be taught) and "sequence" (the order they would be taught in).
The programme launched in 2020. Robertson Road has spent more than $100,000 on resources and teacher training but principal Ravi Naidoo is adamant it's been worth it. The difference in students is clear, with many now having a "lightbulb moment" within days of starting school. Behaviour and attendance have also improved across the school, which he attributes to children finding success for the first time.
The school is taking it slowly to avoid overloading teachers, Maddocks says. Reading content is adapted where possible so it's linked to children's lived experiences, and teachers still read sophisticated picture books with rich texts. But they don't put difficult books in front of kids who don't yet have the skills to read them.
When the Herald visited Year 3 teacher Rush Naidoo's class, groups of students were poring over their decodable books.
One group of girls took turns reading a decodable reader, as Naidoo listened in. Words like "constructed" posed no problems; one girl paused for a second on the word "cactus" then sounded it out, "C-ac-tus", and continued. Another read "jam tarts" as "jam tart"; she was gently directed back and got it right the second time. Then Naidoo checked their comprehension, asking questions about the story's content - "What is the name of Pip and Tim's school? Why do you think the art party is at night?"
Maddocks said the key was for children to keep their eyes on the letters and decipher words using decoding skills, rather than looking around for cues like pictures.
At times adults might find a decodable book boring, but the children enjoyed them, she said. "It makes sense to them, because you've taught them the sounds explicitly, ...it's all connected, it all fits."
TOMORROW: The Government has launched a five-year strategy to turn New Zealand's appalling literacy statistics around. What's in it - and does it go far enough?