down and out in New Zealand

The present study was carried out in New Zealand, which follows a predominantly constructivist, whole language approach to reading instruction and intervention in which literacy learning is largely seen as the natural by-product of active mental engagement (Wilkinson, Freebody, & Elkins, 2000). As Stanovich (1994) noted, this instructional approach assumes ‘‘that self-discovery is the most efficacious mode of learning, that most learning can be characterized as ‘natural’ and that cognitive components should never be isolated/fractionated during the learning process’’ (p. 264).

From the assumption that the ability to read evolves naturally and spontaneously out of children’s prereading experiences with ‘‘environmental print’’ (commonly occurring environmental labels accompanied by context or logos, such as the word stop appearing on an octagonally-shaped sign), whole language theorists concluded that literacy teaching should be modelled on first-language acquisition, where the focus is on meaning construction, not the abstract structural units that provide the basis for mapping print onto spoken language. If children are immersed in a print rich environment in which the focus is on the meaning of print, they will readily acquire reading skills, according to this view. Children can be taught what they need to know to learn to read ‘‘as the need arises’’ [ed.: when the child starts school possibly?] through frequent encounters with absorbing reading materials. The focus of this approach, then, is on learning to read by reading....

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Another key aspect of the constructivist approach to literacy education is the assumption that reading acquisition is primarily a process in which children learn to use multiple cues (syntactic, semantic, visual, graphophonic) to predict [ed.: guess] the next words in text (Snow & Juel, 2005; Tracey & Morrow, 2006; Tunmer & Chapman, 2002). The latest handbook for beginning reading teachers in New Zealand, Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1–4 (Ministry of Education, 2003a), recommends teaching children to identify unfamiliar words in text by encouraging them to use all sources of information (knowledge and experience, semantic sources of information, syntactic sources of information, and visual and graphophonic sources of information) simultaneously in predicting, cross-checking, confirming, and self correcting as they read text (pp. 28–31, 130). [ed.: that sounds efficient]

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New Zealand has a unified national education system in which almost everything relating to literacy education is controlled centrally by the Ministry of Education, including the setting and monitoring of the national curriculum, the production of beginning reading materials and instructional guides for beginning reading teachers, and the development and implementation of nationwide professional development programs for literacy teachers. Consequently, compared with other countries like the United States, there is considerably less variation in the reading methods and instructional strategies used in New Zealand classrooms.

Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms Janice F. Ryder1, William E. Tunmer1 and Keith T. Greaney1
Reading and Writing
Volume 21, Number 4 / June, 2008

When kids have trouble learning to read in New Zealand, they are put in Reading Recovery, a one-on one tutoring program that also uses whole language.

Reading Recovery sounds like the approach Michelle Weiner Davis says married people take to dealing with marital problems: if something isn't working, do it again & louder.

today's factoid: Reading Recovery was invented in New Zealand (pdf file).


less is more

In Reading Recovery a teacher teaches one student 30 minutes a day for approximately 12 weeks: 60 lessons in all. Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of Benefits and Costs (pdf file)

In the Ryder study, struggling readers were put in groups of 3s and taught 56 scripted lessons by a teacher's aide:

The intervention programme comprised 56 highly sequenced, semi-scripted lessons in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding strategies delivered to the 12 intervention group children by a teacher aide over a period of 24 weeks during the first three terms of a four-term school year. The children in the intervention group were divided into four groups of three. Each group received four lessons per week that varied between 20 and 30 min in duration, but typically lasted about 25 min.

results:

[T]he intervention group significantly outperformed the control group on measures of phonemic awareness, pseudoword decoding, and context free word recognition ability...

[snip]

The difference in mean reading age between the intervention group children and their matched controls was 9 months for the Burt Test and 14 months for Neale accuracy.

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Although the intervention group children performed somewhat below average in reading, their scores were clearly within the normal range after two years following the completion of the intervention program.

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Two-year follow-up data showed that the positive effects of the intervention program were not only maintained but had generalized to word recognition accuracy in text.

All this from groups of 3 taught by teacher's aides.

Of course, it probably would have been even more cost effective just to teach them phonics from the get-go.


Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of Benefits and Costs (pdf file)