What evidence is there to show that code-first teaching is more effective than meaning-first approaches?

I think here we need to triangulate from multiple sources.

If we go back to, well, I mean, we can go back to, I was going to say go back to the National Reading Panel report in the year 2000, but we can go back to the work of Jean Choll.

in the 1960s when I was at primary school and, you know, her writings are very clear about what makes for robust reading instruction, what all teachers should be doing in all classrooms.

So we've known for a long time, I think, that because children are having to master something that we now have describe as being biologically secondary, thanks to the work of David Geary, the University of Missouri.

I think that's a very helpful framework for thinking about the distinction between oral language, which is biologically primary.

So children come to school with five years of talking and listening under their belts.

Given that the weight of evidence in favour of systematic synthetic phonics is so strong, why do you think that whole language balanced literacy approach has persisted?

And this is Professor Pam Snow, who's the co-founder of the Science of Language and Reading Lab at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

We've had in Australia much more than you in the UK or in England.

And this is changing gradually, but we have been more of the choose your own adventure ilk when it comes to reading instruction.

And ironically, what that's done is allowed us to see what happens when schools do decide to transform their reading instruction and go down a robust evidence-based path and that in spite of their postcodes and their level of socioeconomic disadvantage and the complexity of the community that they're located in and the number of languages spoken, we see amazing results.

And for me, that's probably the most powerful, compelling data.

It aligns obviously with decades of research that tells us that this is a biologically secondary act.

In English, we have some particular challenges because of the depth of our orthography that need to be taken into account.

what happens when you're 13 years old and you still can't decode properly? My

Here's Pam Snow, who you heard at the end of the last episode.

I am pretty sure there's a small group of children, and by small, I'm going to say probably less than 2%.

who have some kind of underlying neurobiological difficulty that makes it difficult for them, even in the context of high-quality, robust instruction, to master the ways in which speech and print map to each other in their particular language and their orthography.

But when we've got situations as we do in many contexts in Australia where we've got 30% of children struggling to learn to read, to me that's an instruction problem, not a reading problem.

Could it be something to do with what happens inside the classroom? For me, it

always starts with teacher knowledge because teaching is the workforce that is responsible for children learning how to read.

There are some people who claim that parents read to their children more, we wouldn't have literacy problems and so forth.

And we have a famous author here in Australia who likes to make that argument every so often.

And there was a lot there that we know about how kids read, how kids learn, that we just not thought.

Researchers and academics.

None of us like being asked to do things day in, day out that we're not good at and that make us feel like failures.

Unfortunately, in many cases we've manufactured that failure.

Teachers who've changed children's lives.

We shouldn't be

having assumptions of failure.

If we were manufacturing chocolate or cars, we wouldn't be assuming that 10, 20% of our products are going to be faulty.