Reading Recovery deemed a failure

READING Recovery has been blamed for a lack of improvement in skills in New Zealand, where the program was created.

READING Recovery, used to help thousands of young Australians struggling to learn to read at a cost of millions of dollars a year, has been blamed for a lack of improvement in skills in New Zealand, where the program was created.

A study by the Massey University Institute of Education concludes the nation's literacy strategy has failed and that Reading Recovery has had "little or no impact" on reducing the large gap between the best and poorest readers.

The problems in literacy facing New Zealand mirror those in Australia, where Reading Recovery is the most widely used remedial reading program.

Both countries are dealing with a "long tail" of underachievement in literacy and a lack of improvement in reading skills over the past decade.

Australian educators were shocked late last year by the results in an international reading test of Year 4 students -- the first time Australia had participated -- that found Australian children scored the lowest of any English-speaking nation, and lower than New Zealand.

The Massey University study found that Reading Recovery "is of limited benefit to those students who need help the most", especially Maori and Pacific Island students, and those from low-income families. "New Zealand has followed a predominantly constructivist approach to literacy education for the past 25 years. In this approach, literacy learning is largely seen as the by-product of active mental engagement," it says. "There is little or no explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness (the ability to reflect on and manipulate the phonemic segments of spoken words) and alphabetic coding skills (the ability to translate letters and letter patterns into phonological forms).

"Yet both phonemic awareness and alphabetic coding skills are essential for learning to read successfully."

Instead, children are taught the "multiple cues" theory of reading, which also forms the basis of Reading Recovery, to look at things such as the shape of the word, the place of the word in the sentence, the meaning of the preceding text and the picture on the page to predict, rather than read, the word. The same strategies are commonly used in Australia to teach reading.

Reading Recovery, developed in the 1980s in New Zealand, has been used in Australia and around the world for more than 20 years. The Queensland government ceased using Reading Recovery in 2008 after an evaluation report by Griffith University, but in NSW more than 10,000 students in more than 1000 schools are expected to take part in the program this year. In 2011 in Victoria more than 4000 students in almost half of government schools participated in Reading Recovery.