WONDERFUL NEWS ABOUT READING RECOVERY

 

I was a Reading Recovery teacher for 9 years in Northern and South-Eastern suburban schools in Adelaide. I was fortunate that the principal in the northern school selected me, for a year’s Reading Recovery training after which ‘continuing contact’ with a group of Reading Recovery teachers and Reading Recovery tutor, maintained quality teaching. I believed that because I taught in a northern school, I learnt so much about teaching. This is true but certainly, training as a Reading Recovery was the catalyst for effective teaching, outcomes and consulting.

It was hard to convince people in the Education Department, who in turn, could have convinced the politicians of the value of such training. Both a Labor and a Liberal politician met with certain staff members at my northern school; I demonstrated a RR lesson. They were impressed but nothing eventuated, the explanation given was that it was too expensive, requiring daily individual tuition, 4 students, for 12–16 weeks. Since then, we have fiddled with inept programmes, including the latest being, synthetic phonics - learning for young students.

What has prompted me to write this piece has been the article I have just read from the British Educational Research Journal, 2021: Reading intervention at age 6: Long-term effects of Reading Recovery in the UK on qualifications and support at age 16. Jane Hurry*, Lisa Fridkin and Andrew J. Holliman, University College London, UK.

My experience:

Beginning with the northern school, one-to-one tutoring happened as did the constant training of classroom teachers. Marie Clay always believed that Reading Recovery should not be isolated but needed to involve all in the school. After each Reading Recovery session, I also trained, after school, 3 teachers (2 from other schools).

After three years operating 1-on-1 with the lowest level groups, I could see that a lot of the children I worked with were special education children and needed to learn at a slower pace. Reading Recovery requires that 4 children per term had to reach, at least, level 25 by the end of the term.

The system was altered, in that the very lowest readers were worked with as a group. Also, there were older readers who had missed the initiative, so these were catered for through Guided Reading which another Reading Recovery teacher and I read about and experimented with. Both scenarios, Reading Recovery strategies were the guiding light.

After 4 years at the northern school, I worked in London and there I met a Reading Recovery Tutor who was training teachers in various parts of UK in Guided Reading. I learnt from her and brought that knowledge and practice back to Adelaide, eventually working in a south-eastern school and giving lots of workshops.

Returning from USA, I worked as a lectutor (my term) at Flinders University, with students who aimed to teach upper-level grades 6-12. I learnt that from grade 3, children were reading more abstract material - less spoken-like structures and the vocabulary was more unfamiliar.

The 10-year study, by Jane Hurry et al, of children who were part of Reading Recovery early intervention, showed better GCSE (ages 14-16) outcomes than ‘Comparison School’ pupil outcomes. The value of Reading Recovery is how children learn to monitor (through asking themselves problem-solving questions) their comprehension (semantics), grammatical structures (syntactics) and phonemic awareness - word sounds and visual. Not mentioned in the article is the writing which reinforces the strategies learnt during reading and the shared discussions about the content.

Reading this paper from UK, Long-term effects of Reading Recovery in the UK on qualifications and support at age 16, delighted me. Because what has always been uppermost in my mind, “Does Reading Recovery make a difference when children move to the higher grades?”

In politician’s minds the, the Australian status quo has not been maintained in high-order tests. If they had accepted Reading Recovery in the nineties, better results may have been the wonderful outcome. Furthermore, if teachers had been trained in the use of Reading Recovery teaching strategies there would be far more children in the High Achievement bracket.

Liz Simon

British Educational Research Journal
Vol. , No. , 2021, pp. –
DOI: 10.1002/berj.3752