Approaches To Teaching Literacy Skills in our NZ Schools

I’m currently in the process of finding a school for my soon-to-be-5-year-old to attend and it’s got me wondering how many of you have considered a school’s approach to teaching literacy in your research?

There are loads of considerations to take into account when choosing a school, and a school’s literacy teaching approach is just one of them. I also suspect it’s one that isn’t on many parents’ radars. 

We all want our children to develop strong foundational skills in reading, spelling and writing in those first couple of years at school and we can assume that every NZ school will provide this… right?  

Well, you’ll be interested to hear that there are different approaches that NZ schools take to teaching literacy skills and not all of them are soundly based on the Science of Reading and the most evidence-based research.

So what do you need to know?

Most NZ primary schools use a Balanced Literacy approach to teaching reading which originally stemmed from the Whole Language approach that became popular in countries such as the UK, US, Australia and NZ in the early to mid-1980s. Balanced literacy aimed to strike a happy-medium between a whole language approach (which focuses on gaining meaning from the text) and phonics (which focuses on letter and sound links). 

This Balanced Literacy approach sounds good in theory, but in most classrooms, students have been encouraged to guess a word from the picture or sentence context or try to memorise the way it looks. Children are taught the links between letters and their sounds, but it does not necessarily happen daily and may not follow a sequential approach that builds on a child’s previous learning in a cumulative manner. NZ’s steady decline in academic results and literacy ratings world-wide is testament to the fact that our current Balanced Literacy approach is not working for many of our children. 

For the last 30 years, evidence and research has advocated for all students to be taught through explicit teaching of how sounds match to letters and phonological awareness skills taught in a systematic and sequential manner, with plenty of revision. This more evidence-based approach to literacy instruction is coined ‘Structured Literacy’. 

I came across this diagram from ‘The Measured Mom’ recently that I think portrays the key differences between the Balanced and Structured literacy approaches nicely and you may find it useful to refer to when visiting schools and finding out more about their literacy programs. 

The one vital component of a good structured literacy approach that this table leaves out is Phonological awareness which (combined with good phonics instruction) is one of the strongest predictors of a child’s success with reading and spelling. Phonological awareness refers to a child’s awareness of the sound structure of spoken words and includes the ability to manipulate and ‘play’ with sounds without reference to letters. Skills like identifying and generating rhyming words, segmenting syllables, identifying first and last sounds in words, blending and segmenting sounds in words and swapping sounds to make a new word all fall under the umbrella of ‘phonological awareness’.

Now, some of you may wonder if a focus on phonological awareness and explicit phonics instruction neglects all the wonderful strategies that develop children’s comprehension skills and enjoyment of reading through NZ’s current literacy approach?

The answer to this is that structured Literacy still encompasses all of the necessary components for effective reading instruction illustrated below in the famous ‘Reading Rope’, but with the added advantage of building independent reading skills by teaching children how to decode unfamiliar words through direct letter-sound relationships. Children experience success with decodable texts where the majority of words are high frequency words and letter-sound patterns that they are already familiar with.  

You may also be wondering if all students can benefit from the same approach? To this, I refer you to Nancy Young’s (2012, updated 2020) Ladder of Reading which provides a clear illustration of how Structured Literacy can work for all students including those with dyslexia and additional learning needs. 

In the last few years, Structured Literacy has become the ‘buzz’ word following a world-wide movement for schools to adopt this more evidence-based approach to teaching reading. New Zealand has been slow to jump on board the band wagon, probably due to the fact that our national curriculum and current practices are entrenched in balanced literacy philosophy and changing things would mean changing the whole structure of the NZ curriculum.

The good news is that the Ministry of Education is beginning to make changes to introduce more of a phonics component to the curriculum by promoting more explicit instruction of letter-sound correspondences and provision of the Better Start program and phonic-based decodable readers. However, there is still limited room in the current curriculum for the level of explicit code-based, systematic and sequential instruction that is needed to benefit ALL students including struggling readers and students with diagnosed dyslexia.

There are a growing number of schools popping up around NZ that have been privately trained in a Structured Literacy approach through organisations like Learning Matters and SpELD through great cost to themselves. And so far, it looks positive, that in those schools using it, literacy achievement rates have improved significantly.

So, will I be looking at schools using structured literacy for my daughter? You bet I will! You may or may not be lucky enough to be in zone for a school that offers this, but I hope this blog has inspired some questions that you can ask potential schools about their literacy approach as you undergo your research.

Donna Jaynes

Speech Language Therapist