New Zealand Switches to Science of Reading Instruction

by Alarice McPark, age 13
New Zealand has mandated a new approach to literacy education to combat years of plummeting reading scores. The approach is called “structured literacy,” and it could provide a model for the U.S. and other countries dealing with similarly low reading scores.
Researchers and professors say New Zealand’s reading crisis stems from relying on the more visual and guess-based whole language approach and not including instruction in phonics or phonemic awareness through structured literacy. Both methods have been used to teach children how to read in English-speaking countries, but have major differences.
The whole language approach was a reading instruction method invented by Dame Marie Clay in New Zealand in the 1970s, and it gained popularity in other countries by the late ‘90s. In this approach, children were taught to use contextual cues, such as the idea of the story, or use pictures to figure out the meaning of a word they didn’t recognize. [Read More]