Moving past the reading wars

Opinion

In a recent piece on this page (Empire of illiteracy, Think Tank, Sept. 9) Natalie Riediger assailed Reading Recovery as something of a plot by educators to profit from keeping kids illiterate.

I’m sure that her concern for children and their development is sincere, but she fails to understand that the thousands of teachers in Manitoba are also sincere in their desire to teach all their students to read and to read well.

Riediger is firmly on one side of what we might term the “reading wars” advocating an approach that emphasizes direct instruction in phonics as opposed to a “balanced literacy” approach which, in addition to just sounding out a word, can ask students to figure out a new word by asking them what would make sense here or to use the cues in an illustration.

All kids need to know how letters correspond to sounds.

All teachers teach this and all kids should know it. It’s basic.

But it is not all there is to reading. Reading is so much more than sounding out words. It is about drawing meaning from print. It is about learning new things. It’s about getting lost in a story. It is about using your imagination to “see” what you are reading.

Knowing how letters correspond to sound is necessary but it is not sufficient. “Tomb” and “womb” are spelled similarly and sound alike. Put a “b” in front and “bomb” sounds completely different. Start with a “c” and “comb” is different again. “Poem” is closer to “comb” and is different yet again. I could go on and on with examples.

English is not strictly a phonetic language. And while understanding sounds and letters is basic, it’s simply not enough.

We are better off thinking of phonics like we think of training wheels on a bike. It’s a great way to start but it’s not our end goal.

We should call a truce in the “reading wars” and stop making grand claims.

There is value in the approaches of Reading Recovery. It was used as an intervention strategy for the past 30 years in Manitoba and has helped thousands of struggling readers become confident skilled readers, but it was an intensive one-on-one approach that pulled kids out of class and has given over to less intensive, in class support that accomplishes the same thing.

We should ensure that every child has the foundational skills to sound out words but that is far from enough.

One of the most important goals in reading instruction has to be to produce kids who read for pleasure and who read lots. To accomplish that goal, we have to introduce all students to rich literacy experiences. My son had no problem sounding out words but didn’t really become a reader until he discovered Harry Potter, books he simply could not put down. We have to help every child find their Harry Potter.

Instead of thinking that one approach is all wrong and another is completely right, we should all continue to focus on getting better.

Our goal in education is always to succeed with each and every student. We inevitably fall short of that goal but we can’t have a lesser one so we must always strive for that lofty goal.

I’m inspired by our colleagues in medicine and their relentless efforts to be better. We haven’t found a cure for for cancer, but we have seen tremendous gains in cure rates and in life expectancy.

Those gains come from being better at prevention, better at detection and better at treatment. They come from doing lots of little things well, and those little things add up to substantial gains. There is no magic bullet, just continuous, steady progress.

Grand claims and outlandish accusations get in the way of that progress.

Brian O’Leary was recently deputy minister of Education and Early Childhood Learning and before that was the long time superintendent of the Seven Oaks School Division.