Literacy instruction fails young New Zealanders

Policies designed to improve adult literacy levels in New Zealand are “woefully inadequate” according to a leading literacy researcher who heads the University’s College of Education.

In a conference presentation in Wellington this week on Gender, Ethnicity and Education in New Zealand, Professor James Chapman said results from an international adult literacy survey conducted five years ago show minimal improvements over a similar survey a decade earlier.

On average half of all young adults surveyed lack the essential reading and writing skills to succeed in modern life and work. Well over 65 per cent have poor problem solving skills. The survey also showed many more Maori and Pasifika adults had low literacy levels.

“The results are in fact worse for young adults who were most recently in school,” Professor Chapman says. “Around half of these young adults aren’t performing at the minimum level needed to function properly in all aspects of life—work, family, and community.

“Considering the huge resources that have gone into literacy instruction in schools during the past 25 years, together with programmes like Reading Recovery, the results should have been much better rather than worse”, he says.

Professor Chapman says adult literacy programmes have led to some small improvement in literacy scores among older adults, but 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.

“After the 1996 international survey the Ministry of Education said the problem of poor adult literacy had to be addressed urgently. Policies announced in 2001 were designed to improve literacy performance in the next international survey. This didn’t happen, especially for young adults.”

The youngest adults in the survey, those aged 16-24 years, actually declined in literacy levels compared to 1996. “These adults were most recently in the school system,” Professor Chapman says. “They would have been in school when the whole language approach to reading instruction and Reading Recovery were introduced from the mid-1980s. If anything, this group should have shown higher literacy levels.”

He says poor as the results for the 2006 survey are, they shouldn’t have come as a surprise. “Our approach to literacy instruction simply hasn’t provided enough children in our schools with the foundation skills needed to develop competence in reading, and for them to remain competent.”

“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 and 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 the 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. Professor Chapman says this advice was ignored.

He 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”.

“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,” Professor Chapman says.

“The real problem of literacy instruction in schools has again been overlooked and literacy instruction in adult literacy programmes probably needs looking at as well. It is totally unacceptable that so many should be let down by the system.

“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.”