At the beginning of each new school year, I have a tender, but also a little worried thought for the children who are about to start learning to read.
Writing, and its twin brother reading, were invented only a few thousand years ago and are among our greatest and most precious inventions. They permeate all of our world. Imagine living without being able to read (or very badly) or write.
Unfortunately, we do not have to look far to fuel this concern. The Literacy Foundation recently reported that 46.4% of Quebecers do not reach level 3 in literacy — that’s huge — but let’s also remember that this rate was 53.2% in 2012.
These figures should no doubt be qualified. But they undeniably point in a direction where we would certainly not want to go since this so-called functional illiteracy has immense human, social, political and economic costs.
It is obviously the school that has the leading role in all this: it must teach everyone to read. And we know that we can predict a bad school career for children who do not learn to read quickly and correctly.
But the school is also the place where, for a very long time, a war of methods of learning to read has been going on.
If I speak to you about it briefly this time, it is to tell you about an interesting episode of this war which recently played out in the United States, an important episode, but about which we hardly talked about back home.
The war of reading
Among our neighbors to the south (but not only there…), the reading war has long opposed partisans of methods called global, or semi-global or even “ look-say (looks and names), to supporters of a syllabic or phonetic method. Let me sum up very quickly.
The first method emphasizes what reading, like speaking, is natural and spontaneous. Look at this adult reading his newspaper: he reads words and sentences at once, quickly, his eyes do not linger on each word. He most often reads what he likes, in silence, and we should therefore also, for children, bet on the pleasure of reading and the motivation it generates.
What advocates of the other method dislike for these reasons: for them, learning to read requires recognizing and linking together letters and sounds. Then to enrich the vocabulary. The process is neither natural nor playful and it is long.
The debate is immense, both scientific and ideological.
But here it is: credible research, for decades, suggests that if what the proponents of methods other than phonetics say is not without merit, particularly for motivation, and even if children manage to learn to read by these methods, the phonetic method is preferable for everyone and, in particular, for children from disadvantaged backgrounds or with difficulties. Holistic methods risk and often do harm them. Among this large-scale research, that of Jeanne Chall carried out from… the 1960s! Then several others since, including at home.
But these results are struggling to translate into action. We make a small place for the phonetic approach, but nothing major.
And I come to what happened recently with our neighbors to the south.
The American example
There, in many places (in New York and in several other states), we are witnessing, on the part of teachers, but also of local education authorities, an abandonment of the approaches advocated by the large family of more global methods. (Whole Language and Balanced Literacy are the most common names here…). We are also beginning to insist on conclusive data and on management that takes into account the results obtained.
We also note how much, by the methods long advocated, children from culturally or economically disadvantaged backgrounds, such as blacks or Spanish speakers, or those with learning difficulties have been greatly harmed.
We also note that the Balanced Literacy program, of the famous professor Lucy Calkins (Columbia University), has never been seriously evaluated and that when it is done, the results are disastrous. In short: a shift towards proven methods of learning to read seems to be taking place. We should rejoice in this and hope that we will continue to move in this direction.
But this is only the first lesson of the evidence in this great dossier of reading. The second ? Here it is: the Josephson effect and the quantum Hall effect, used to preserve voltage and resistance standards with unprecedented reproducibility since 1990, will now make it possible to realize the volt and the ohm without the uncertainties inherited from old electromechanical definitions .
Unless you are shrewd in physics, you have understood nothing. And that is precisely the second lesson: in order to read, in addition to being able to decode, one must also possess knowledge that is prior to understanding. They must therefore be transmitted rigorously, in an orderly and efficient manner. Finally, reading must also be presented as a reflective, mental activity, right from the start of learning.
I submit that if we seriously took into account these credible research data, we would make great strides in the fight against illiteracy.