Read or rite

Manawatu Standard

The lack of adult literacy is becoming endemic throughout New Zealand, says one of our most eminent learning disability professionals, even after millions of dollars have been channelled into adult literacy initiatives.

He believes it is the old ambulance at the bottom of the cliff syndrome, and is not working. Emma Goodwin finds out why.

The Ministry of Education recently announced increased focus on the core basics of reading, writing and numeracy in primary schools, and reduced resources and assistance in other areas of the curriculum.

This has led many education professionals to lament the fact that these subject areas will take a back seat and could result in losing highly trained and qualified teaching professionals in the areas of science, sport and art.

But there also seems to be a concern that throwing money at literacy is not the cure-all that it is being touted to be.

One of the less-than-impressed education professionals is Pro Vice-Chancellor of Massey University College of Education Professor James Chapman.

He believes the New Zealand Government has already proved that financial investment into promoting literacy over the past 10 years has had less-than-favourable results.

Prof Chapman says results from a 2006 international adult literacy survey that focused on adults in the workplace showed minimal improvements over a similar 1996 survey.

"In fact, the results are worse for young adults who were most recently in school, with considerably more adults aged 16 to 24 years featuring in the lowest two levels of literacy in 2006 than in the 1996 survey," says Prof Chapman.

Last month, at a conference presentation on adult literacy, Prof Chapman describes current policies designed to improve adult literacy levels in New Zealand as woefully inadequate.

"Considering the huge resources that have gone into literacy instruction in schools over the last 20 years, together with programmes such as Reading Recovery, the results should have been much better, rather than worse," he says.

"Adult literacy programmes may have led to some small improvement in literacy scores among older adults. But the younger adults who have most recently left school, and who were in school during the introduction of Reading Recovery and the intense whole-language approach to reading instruction, have performed poorly."

Prof Chapman is also the president of the Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities and has investigated both surveys' findings as part of his ongoing research.

He believes that the results show that half of the young adults tested were not performing at the minimum level needed to function properly in all aspects of life – work, family, and community.

He says New Zealand's experiment with the whole-language approach to literacy instruction and early intervention has now flowed through into adulthood.

"We need to be very concerned about this as it is going to be an enormous problem. Employees need to be able to read and comprehend basic instructional manuals in the workplace."

After the 1996 international survey, the Ministry of Education said the problem of poor adult literacy had to be addressed urgently. But Prof Chapman believes the initial results of the 1996 survey would have come as a complete surprise to the Labour government of the day.

"I don't think they were expecting the results they got and would be taken completely aback by them. New Zealand had always performed well in rankings up to that time. In a literacy survey in 1970, we were ranked first in the world."

New policies to enhance adult literacy programmes were announced in 2001 to improve performance on the next international survey.

"The Ministry [of Education] confidently, or possibly naively, predicted that the results would be better next time because of the new policies and because of the initiatives aimed at improving literacy teaching in schools.

"This didn't happen, especially for young adults."

It also appears that Maori and Pacific Island adults are, once again, coming up with the wooden spoon.

"The results for Maori and Pasifika adults are especially disturbing. Nearly two-thirds of Maori adults and three-quarters of Pasifika adults are scoring below the minimum literacy levels.

"The attempts to improve the functional literacy skills of Maori and Pasifika, promised after the 1996 survey, have been patently unsuccessful.

"How can you develop an inclusive, multicultural democracy when such large numbers of our citizens don't have the necessary literacy skills?"

Another of his concerns is that many of the subjects of the 2006 survey had received remedial reading recovery instruction while they were at school.

Prof Chapman and his Massey colleagues have also looked at the effects of remedial reading in school on adult literacy levels.

In the 2006 survey, 79 per cent of adults aged 16 to 20 who had received remedial reading in school were performing below the minimum literacy level for reading ordinary prose.

"Despite millions and millions of dollars being put into this programme every year since the mid-1980s, the Reading Recovery programme simply hasn't achieved its main goals."

Prof Chapman believes that a key skill in learning to read is learning the links between sounds in spoken language and the letters of the alphabet that represent those sounds.

"Kids who can't figure out words when they're reading get bogged down. They miss the meaning of what they're reading.

"Many eventually give up and avoid reading as much as possible. If you don't learn to read, it's very hard to read to learn.

"This eventually flows through into adulthood unless some very strong and effective remedial intervention is provided."

In 1999, a Ministry of Education-appointed literacy experts group unanimously recommended that more attention be given to helping children understand the connections between sounds in language and letters in the alphabet for general reading instruction and in the Reading Recovery programme.

"This advice was ignored," says Prof Chapman.

"Then in 2001, the parliamentary select committee on education and science unanimously recommended that a re-emphasis must be made on the importance of the development of phonetic, word-level decoding skills in a balanced teaching of reading programme."

He says this recommendation was also ignored.

Prof Chapman and his colleagues say that a major change in the approach to literacy instruction in New Zealand schools, based on overwhelming scientific evidence, is long overdue.

"Without such a change, poor levels of adult literacy skills in New Zealand will persist, with the economic and social effects being borne in the workplace and in communities throughout the country.

"The latest adult literacy policy, from the Tertiary Education Commission, has a price tag of $168 million. It might have some effect, but it is like an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The real problem of literacy instruction in schools has again been overlooked."