Literacy News

This week, as highlighted in media reports, the Grattan Institute unveiled a report attributing the failure of one third of Australian students to attain proficient reading skills to a teaching method known as 'whole language.' 

Some media outlets have called for a push for teachers to adopt old school fundamentals. At Sacred Heart we like to look at this as, 'moving forward to evidence'. 

The whole language approach centers on fostering meaning and literacy in children. It is grounded in the notion that children acquire reading skills in a manner similar to how they learn to speak. The belief is that exposure to high-quality materials will naturally lead to the development of reading abilities.

On the contrary, the structured language perspective, backed by substantial scientific research, acknowledges that learning to read differs significantly from learning to speak. A structured language approach recognizes and emphasizes that the majority of children need explicit instruction to attain proficiency in reading skills.

English written language primarily functions as a code for sound, rather than a code for meaning and visual cues. At Sacred Heart, we adopt an explicit teaching approach, teaching this language code to our students. This knowledge equips them with the ability to independently decipher and read words.

Our structured literacy model is based upon research from the National Reading Panel findings in 2000. It identified the five key pillars of reading as phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. 

Research has shown that reading is the product (x) of these pillars. It is not the sum (+) of one or two components. We are very proud to acknowledge that at Sacred Heart we use research based approaches and that our children are explicitly taught the five key components that are at the core of effective reading instruction. 

Kate Stroud

Literacy Leader