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Source: The Unz Review
The Uses of Literacy
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England is basking in the good news that children can read. Formerly, that was not the case, but now a new technique has been deployed, and British Brats are up there with Finnish sprogs and Singapore nippers, revelling in new-found literacy. Rarely has a new King got off to such a good start. A Carolean Age dawns.
This will lift the spirits of benighted teachers, who have always been cast as well-meaning losers, child-minding for brighter sisters living corporate lives and doing interesting and clever things while the pedagogues struggle with their surly offspring, attempting to interest them in literature and preventing them from stabbing each other.
Let’s give some background on literacy. It is not very difficult to teach children to read. You teach them the alphabet, until they can recognise, write and recite all the letters in alphabetical order. Chanting them in alphabetical order is a good way for children to learn this. Then you teach kids that each letter is associated with (“makes”) a sound. Then you teach them that by putting the letters together you make a word. Then you pick some regularly written words to illustrate the principle, and teach them how to blend sounds to make a word.
The cat sat on the mat.
For decades, reading was taught that way. (Numbers, and “times-tables” were also taught by rote learning). Kids learnt to read. The process was repetitive but effective. Perhaps teachers were bored by it so in 1926 US educationalists proposed that the boring old method be dropped in favour of “look and say” in which students were taught to recognise the look of a whole word, and recognise and say it. As you may have already worked out, when the student comes to a new word, then they are stuck. They do not know how to blend the letters into the spoken word. A case of “look and don’t say”.
Since the UK is heavily influenced by anything new coming out of the US, British teachers fell in with this new fashion (or most of them did). Reading became difficult, and dyslexia became common, and very fashionable. Being unable to read was presented almost as a guarantee of high creativity, super-normal perceptiveness, and eventual billionaire status.
Some teachers, mostly in private schools, held out, as did cramming schools and private tutors, who relied on the old methods. Eventually, after much resistance from the educational establishment, controlled studies showed that the “phonics/blended phonics/synthetic phonics” method was easily superior, and has now made a comeback. England finally won the phonics war. This is good news.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-we-won-the-phonics-war-and-got-england-reading-fblxm89lk
So, let us bask in the good news. All the main media outlets covered the story, but without linking to the original research. Why don’t they do that? Are they lazy, conceited, or just incapable of understanding scholarship? Perhaps journalists have limited literacy, and simply regurgitate the press pack provided for them.
Here is a useful explanatory link which gives more detail:
https://www.iea.nl/studies/iea/pirls
They are studying children in their 4th year of education, when they are about 9 years of age. This might seem a bit late, since children should be reading from age 7 onwards, but the exam can be more testing at this later age. They should have learned to read and now be reading to learn.
Anyway, the study was done in 2021, and also 2022, because of the pandemic. This makes comparison with previous years and between nations a little difficult, but not impossible. The results are presented in the way which I have come to expect from educational authorities: ponderously, and with little in the way of statistical analysis. It is infuriating to see a well-resourced group get access to such a large sample and report their results in such a dull way. For example, what is the correlation between reading fluency and reading comprehension? The section which apparently deals with this gives no statistical answer.
However, even restricting one’s self to diagrams, some interesting material can be found. The authors realize that people will wish to know what the scores mean, so they spell out what would constitute the main levels, including the advanced level of understanding of informational texts, which a country needs to get anywhere.
Finally, some results that make sense. Singapore is light years ahead of the pack. An astounding 35% of their students reach advanced level. Singapore has a bright future. Hong Kong and Russia have 21% at that advanced level, England has 18%, and then the percentages slide slowly down to single figures. This is the “smart fraction” and many countries have a very small smart fraction. Indeed, by the time they are old enough to emigrate, the number left in those countries will be very small. Minorities are attracted to the few places where they meet their soul mates, in this case, their brain mates. They will go to international company headquarters, to research institutes and perhaps even to some universities, but few will stay at home.
Do the authors plot these results against country IQs? Of course not. What would that have to do with anything?
Anyway, has England done well?
The results for England were looked at by the UK Department for Education (and they do some actual statistics, which is a relief):
England’s overall score is 558, which is not significantly different to previous scores in the 5 year cycle of testing. So, not too much of a story here. Also, to be blunt about it, if you look at the first table, the English results are 10 standard errors of the mean below the Singapore level. Rankings show England in 4th place, the statistics show it is a low place compared to the front runner.
England may be higher in the ranking, but England’s score has not improved. It might be that the other countries were tested during Covid, and did less well. The apparent English improvement may be due to poor readers improving somewhat. The better readers are at the same level.
Is phonics worth it?
There is a positive correlation between performance in the year 1 phonics screening check and performance in PIRLS 2021. The overall correlation between year 1 phonics check and PIRLS 2021 was 0.46, indicating a moderate, statistically significant relationship between performance in the 2 assessments. This is similar to the relationship seen between PIRLS and phonics scores in 2016.
Several pupil characteristics significantly predict PIRLS 2021 performance in England based on a multiple linear regression analysis. The strongest predictor of PIRLS performance was the year 1 phonics check mark, for which a 1-point increase was associated with nearly a 4-point gain in PIRLS 2021 overall reading performance. Number of books at home was the second most powerful predictor of overall reading score, with higher numbers of books associated with higher PIRLS scores. This was followed by eligibility for free school meals (FSM).
The authors don’t mention it, but numbers of books at home is a proxy indicator of parental IQ, as is free school meal requirements.
They conclude that the phonetics test does useful work, and I would assume that it is worth teaching reading by using the phonics method at the national level.
Why did teachers ever drop phonics? There was a long phase in which it was denounced as being old-fashioned, and the new cool way to learn to read was to recognise the entire word without spelling out the letters. So, “synthetic phonics” is not a new technique, it is merely a return to traditional teaching methods.
To summarise:
The English pay attention to rankings, rather than absolute scores, thus hiding significant differences.
England appears to have risen in the rankings because it adopted phonics. Phonics is the best method for teaching reading. The PIRLS international study in fact shows that England did roughly as well as in previous years, but apparently rose in the rankings because other countries may have fallen back a little because they were tested during the Covid pandemic.
The PIRLS study is not an easy read, and if there is more good stuff in it, it is well hidden away. Their techniques are not bad, but their treatment of the results is dull.
Educationalists never mention intelligence, cognitive ability, or mental ability. Despite that, they keep finding evidence that intelligence is heritable, and that children of brighter parents learn faster, but instead tacitly imply that ability is caused by having books in the house and being rich.
Teaching kids may be a dull task, but, done properly, it can be rewarding.
So, all together:
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