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Does Reading Recovery work?

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A boy with a book in hand
Recent reports have thrown the efficacy of Reading Recovery into doubt.()
A boy with a book in hand
Recent reports have thrown the efficacy of Reading Recovery into doubt.()
An early intervention program targeted at children struggling to read may not be delivering the results its advocates promise. Reading Recovery has been around since the 1970s, but its effectiveness is increasingly being called into doubt. Tiger Webb takes a look.

If you have a child who develops reading difficulties within their first year of school, the chances are pretty good they have been involved in an intervention program called Reading Recovery.

And they wouldn't be alone: a 2015 government report found over half of NSW government schools offer Reading Recovery, a 10-12 week program focusing on daily 30 minute lessons for struggling readers in their first year of education.

Reading Recovery was not introduced on the basis of sound, empirical research. The scientific advances of the last 30 years have been ignored.

The website of the US arm of Reading Recovery tells of 'more than 25 years of documented success' teaching reading outcomes to more than 2 million children.

There's just one problem: Reading Recovery doesn’t deliver on its promises, says James Chapman, a professor of educational psychology at New Zealand's Massey University.

'We've heard Reading Recovery teachers tell the child, "Get your mouth ready to sound the word [you're struggling with],"' Chapman says.

'You can't actually do that. Linguistically, physiologically—it's impossible. It is the height of stupidity.'

Chapman recently co-authored a paper examining the post-intervention performance of Reading Recovery students in New Zealand.

The paper, delivered at the 2015 Conference of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities, found that Reading Recovery's claims to effectiveness are not backed up New Zealand's national monitoring report data, or by any independent studies.

Despite this, Reading Recovery in New Zealand is characterised on its website as an 'insurance against low literacy levels'.

The historical context of Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery—like Phar Lap, or Les Mills fitness classes—began in New Zealand before going on to conquer the world.

It was founded by psychologist Marie Clay in the 1970s, and was adopted by all New Zealand schools by 1983.

'Clay exported it to the world on the basis that she could bring struggling readers up to the average level of their peers,' Chapman says.

Today, the proprietary program operates across various state and governmental offices in the USA, England, Australia and Canada.

Why Reading Recovery may not work as well as intended

Chapman claims that in a general sense, the Reading Recovery program was designed to complement existing literacy instruction in normal New Zealand classrooms in the 1970s.

The approach dominant at the time, he says, was one of 'whole language learning'. Whole language learning—also referred to as whole word learning—aims for children to encounter words in their context as much as possible. They should guess at unknown words, eventually internalising through context the many sound and letter incongruencies that characterise the English language (the two pronunciations of 'read', for example, or what to do about 'knight').

There is an alternative to whole language learning: phonics, where children are taught a range of individual letter/sound correspondences. Phonics begins by teaching simpler, more regular letter/sound correspondences—the 'm' at the beginning of 'mat', say—before moving on to more complicated sounds and letters, such as the 'ous' seen in 'mouse' and 'dangerous'.

According to Chapman, Reading Recovery overly favours whole language and ignores the phonics-based approach.

'My hunch is that [Reading Recovery] caught on as a reaction to what some people thought was too much skill-and-drill.

'I don't think it was [Marie] Clay's intention, but the program has ossified, has frozen in time, in that 1970s reactionary approach.

'It was not introduced on the basis of sound, empirical research,' Chapman says. 'Most of the scientific advances of the last 30 years have been ignored.'

If this is true, then why would the program continue? In the New Zealand context, Chapman says, 'Reading Recovery is political, there's just no doubt about it.'

There are parallels in the Australian education system. In 2011, an advisory group set up to provide advice on NSW's 10-year education plan stated that they were 'not convinced' that a sufficient body of evidence existed to justify the 'heavy investment' in Reading Recovery.

One submission highlighted the politicised nature of early literacy programs: initiatives such as Reading Recovery, the report highlighted, would continue to be run 'irrespective of cost-effectiveness, [as] they remain a government priority and include already established staffing arrangements'.

The case for Reading Recovery

Dr Michael Bezzina, director of teaching and learning at the Catholic Education Office in Sydney, offers a compelling reason for Reading Recovery's continued existence.

'We have a success rate of 90 per cent. Kids with English as a second language are doing better than the rest of the cohort.

'We've tracked our ex-Reading Recovery students over 20 years, and by year three those kids who were in the lowest 20 per cent of readers in year one, 20 to 30 per cent are in the top two bands of the NAPLAN test.

'Basically,' Bezzina says, 'It's producing results counter to the ones we've heard about.'

Bezzina dismisses the claim that such encouraging results may be down to socio-economic factors.

A report from the Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation released in late 2015 found 'no evidence' of Reading Recovery's efficacy as a longer-term literacy intervention—prompting a call from former director of the Macquarie University Special Education Centre, Kevin Wheldall, for the state to discontinue the program.

Bezzina says the data collected by the Catholic Education Office of Sydney says otherwise.

'The research being as it may be—without getting into the phonics war—we've got data that is telling us that this [Reading Recovery] is doing good things for our kids.'

The cost of the Reading Recovery program in NSW is $55 million. Fourteen per cent of NSW students had participated in the program.

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Social Policy, Play and Learning, Primary Schools, English