Some 25
years ago now, Keith Stanovich popularised the concept of Matthew effects in
reading. The Matthew Effect takes its name from a passage in the St Matthew
Gospel:
“For unto every one that hath
shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall
be taken away even that which he hath” (Matthew 25:29)
Often translated as “the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer”, this neat analogy clearly struck a chord
with reading specialists. Because if you start off by learning to read well,
you will indeed get richer and richer; certainly metaphorically, but probably
quite literally too.
You will
read far more than your less fortunate peers, you will have greater exposure to
a wider variety of books, you will learn far more new vocabulary words, you
will pass from learning to read to reading to learn much more quickly, and so
on. If, on the other hand, you come to school ill-prepared for learning to
read, with poor language skills as a result of social disadvantage for example,
and you do not latch on to what reading is all about quickly, in that first
year of schooling, you are likely to experience continuing failure throughout
your educational trajectory. Because literacy underpins everything. In other
words the gap between the reading haves and the reading have nots, the literacy
rich and the literacy poor, widens over the years creating social division and
perpetuating social disadvantage from one generation to the next. Teaching
children to read, then, is not just an educational issue; it is a social
justice issue.
And it is
this concern with social justice that has motivated our work in MultiLit from
the outset. Our aim has always been to help those who struggle to learn to read
for whatever reason, but particularly those students from socially
disadvantaged, culturally diverse and Indigenous backgrounds, as well as those
with other special learning needs. Our non-categorical approach to teaching asserts
that what all of these children need is effective scientific evidence-based
instruction.
It is a
source of continuing bewilderment to me, that so many professionals in
education continue to resist the idea of direct, explicit and systematic
instruction in phonics, while at the same time shedding crocodile tears about
the plight of the disadvantaged children struggling in our schools. But they
are often the cause of the problem. To use a medical term, the problem is
iatrogenic; it is the ‘treatment’ the students are receiving, or rather the
lack of effective instruction in schools, that is often the cause of the
reading problem. Low-progress readers are frequently simply ‘instructional
casualties’.
It is a
concern with helping all children to learn to read, regardless of the apparent
reason for their difficulties, that has been the driving force behind our work.
This is why we launched the Making Up Lost Time In Literacy or MultiLit
Initiative in 1995. We were initially concerned with trying to help older
low-progress readers in the final years of primary school so that they could
stand some chance of making a success of high school. The MultiLit Reading
Tutor Program was our solution, a one to one program of direct, explicit and
systematic instruction in the basics of reading comprising a focus on teaching
word attack skills, teaching a bank of frequently occurring sightwords and
providing a supportive context for book reading in which to generalise these
newly acquired skills.
We worked
with older low-progress readers because this is what we knew; this is what we
had been researching for a number of years. But we were always aware that we
were the ambulance picking up the instructional casualties while also lobbying
for more effective initial reading instruction in schools. As we often said,
our aim was to make ourselves redundant! We naively thought that the effort we
put into pressing for the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy might
bring this about. But we all know what happened as a result of the Inquiry … very
little indeed.
Whatever the
case with initial reading instruction, and even if scientific evidence-based
teaching of reading were to be introduced, there will always be a minority of
children who will struggle to learn to read. We currently estimate that we
should target the bottom 25% of students as being in need of additional
remedial support. Consequently, it makes good sense to intervene early with
children who are struggling to learn to read in their first year of schooling,
before the Matthew effect becomes entrenched. Whatever reservations one might
have about aspects of Reading Recovery (and we have certainly not been bashful
about expressing our own reservations), the late Dame Professor Marie Clay
deserves enduring credit for her pioneering work on the importance of
intervening early with children who are seen still to be struggling in the key
skills of learning to read after their first year of schooling.
While we can
admire Marie Clay’s pioneering work, it has to be remembered that Reading
Recovery has remained virtually unchanged in over thirty years now. An awful lot
has happened in that time. We now know far more about how reading works and how
it should best be taught. But we always thought that someone else would come up
with an alternative program that would ideally be at least as effective but
more cost effective than Reading Recovery, predicated as it is on daily one to
one tutoring by a highly trained Reading Recovery Teacher. We waited but
nothing happened and so, over five years ago now, we started to think about how
MultiLit might be adapted to meet the needs of this much younger target group.
The MiniLit Early Literacy Intervention Program is the product of an
ongoing program of research and development carried out by our specialist team
of academic researchers and special educators. A continuing process of
refinement by trial and revision was employed until the program met the
stringent efficacy criteria to justify its release to the wider community. We
do not just write and hope! This final published version of MiniLit entailed a
major revision of previous experimental versions and represents what we believe
to be scientific evidence-based best practice.
MiniLit is
informed by the findings of scientific research, carried out over the past 40
years, into how reading works and how it may best be taught. It is also completely
in accord with the recommendations of the various national reports into
effective reading instruction that have emphasised the five key pillars of
reading instruction (sometimes known as the ‘five big ideas’), namely: phonemic
awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
It consists of 80 carefully structured lessons (sufficient for at least
two terms of instruction) in an easy to hard sequence and is divided into two
levels, Levels 1 and 2, with 40 lessons at each level. There are three main
components of each lesson: Sounds and Words Activities; Text Reading; and Story
Book Reading. It is very important that all
three of these components are taught daily, as specified in the manual.
But does it
work? A recent analysis of the progress of 90 struggling young readers who had
attended MiniLit programs for four days per week for 15 weeks showed that they
had made substantial and statistically significant gains on all of the measures
of reading and related skills with large effect sizes evident. ‘Gold Standard‘ randomised control trials
have also been completed supporting the efficacy of the new MiniLit program.
