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The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing
Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking present a ground-breaking account of teaching phonics, reading and writing. Created from a landmark study, new research, new theory, and cutting-edge teacher professional development, this balanced approach to teaching seeks to improve all children’s learning, and therefore life chances.
The book dismantles polarised debates about the teaching of phonics, and analyses the latest scientific evidence of what really works. It shows, in vivid detail, how phonics, reading and writing should be taught through the creativity of some of the best authors of books for children. By describing lessons inspired by ‘real books’ it showcases why the new approach is more effective than narrow phonics approaches.
The authors call for a paradigm shift in literacy education. The chapters show how and why education policies should be improved on the basis of unique analyses of research evidence from experimental trials, and the new theory and model The Double Helix of Reading and Writing. It is a book of hope for the future in the context of powerful elites influencing narrow curricula, narrow pedagogy and high stakes assessments.
The Balancing Act will be of interest to anyone who is invested in young children’s development. It is essential reading for teachers, trainee teachers, lecturers, researchers, and policy makers world-wide who want to improve the teaching of reading and writing in the English language.
The book dismantles polarised debates about the teaching of phonics, and analyses the latest scientific evidence of what really works. It shows, in vivid detail, how phonics, reading and writing should be taught through the creativity of some of the best authors of books for children. By describing lessons inspired by ‘real books’ it showcases why the new approach is more effective than narrow phonics approaches.
The authors call for a paradigm shift in literacy education. The chapters show how and why education policies should be improved on the basis of unique analyses of research evidence from experimental trials, and the new theory and model The Double Helix of Reading and Writing. It is a book of hope for the future in the context of powerful elites influencing narrow curricula, narrow pedagogy and high stakes assessments.
The Balancing Act will be of interest to anyone who is invested in young children’s development. It is essential reading for teachers, trainee teachers, lecturers, researchers, and policy makers world-wide who want to improve the teaching of reading and writing in the English language.
- GenresEducation
274 pages, Hardcover
Published June 20, 2024
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July 28, 2024
The reading wars are, apparently, over. Systemic, synthetic phonics has won. This is the scientifically proven, evidence-based, one-true-way to teach children, all children, to read. Even the kids that were going to learn anyway. To not teach according to the proven, science of reading is to condemn yet another generation to illiteracy, under-achievement and stunted economic worth. This is the received wisdom across the world today. In England, and for over a decade, teaching synthetic phonics has been mandated. This year in Australia it is also being mandated across a number of states. So, is any of it actually true? Is there one right way to teach reading that is so much better than all other ways that they can be forgotten about? One book I read last year, Language at the Speed of Sight, goes so far as to say that the sooner teachers are replaced by computers, the better – since computers have no false beliefs about how children read and will apply the one-true method with fidelity and consistency.
Has it come to this? This book challenges virtually every statement in that first paragraph. And what is particularly good in how it goes about this, compared to the books I’ve read in support of the use of synthetic phonics, is that it actually does provide significant evidence to not simply make its point, but to provide nuance and an even-handed overview of the best research available on how children learn.
Essentially, the authors provide a clear and highly accessible account of decades of research. They explain the implications of that research, what it says and what it doesn’t say. They walk the reader through this evidence, because those they are up against too often say they are evidence-based, when, in fact, they hardly mention the evidence at all. This is something I was particularly struck by in a book called Reading for Life by Lyn Stone I reviewed a couple of years ago. She spends a lot of time in that book praising the virtues of peer reviewed randomised-controlled trials and explaining why these are so much better than any other form of evidence, and then provides virtually no research evidence to support her claims at all. This book is not at all like that. It does not cherry pick the evidence. It actually presents the evidence and explains the evidence and shows why the evidence does not support a simplified vision of teaching letter to sound correspondences as somehow being equivalent to teaching reading.
Central to the argument of this book is the all too obvious fact that children learn ANYTHING better if it makes sense to them. It surprises me that I need to even argue this fact. But I do need to argue it. You see, one of the supposed benefits of synthetic phonics is that children are asked to read nonsense syllables. This is because reading is decoding letters into sounds – and you should be able to do this as well with real words as you can with nonsense ones. They make a virtue of this – reading occurs outside of context. Context is bad since it might encourage children to ‘guess’ the meanings of words they do not understand, and they need to focus upon the letter to sound correspondence – absolutely not on meaning.
My problem is that humans are meaning making machines. We struggle to pay attention to anything that is not making sense to us. And language is also about as human as it gets too. Language is literally how we go about making sense. The idea that you can learn language (at the speed of sight or otherwise) devoid of meaning seems so self-evidently nonsense to me, I struggle to believe adults can think that is a good idea. At one point in this book the authors discuss two books written by the same children’s author – one produced to meet the strictures of synthetic phonics and the other, well, as a children’s book. Unsurprisingly, the phonics book is meaningless trudge. If your child proved to be interested in this book, you should rush them for specialised treatment. This isn’t the insult you might think it is – boredom is the point. The one-true method requires children be bored out of their minds – how else are they going to learn.
The other thing that those pushing for phonics as the heart of learning to read is that they always compare this with whole language and this is said to either not include phonics at all, or so little that it is ultimately ineffective. And yet, various balanced (a version of which this book is arguing for) approaches to teaching literacy have been central to teaching reading for decades – and these approaches all stress the importance of phonics, just not that this is virtually the be all and end all. And these are, as the early research chapters in this book makes painfully clear, the most effective ways to teach children to read. It is not just that those opposing balanced literacy approaches do not understand the research evidence, they wilfully misrepresent it, ignoring what does not fit their narrative and overstating what looks like it might support their dogmatic beliefs. The dangers of this misrepresentation are being felt in England and will be Australia’s future if education departments and policy makers do not heed the warnings from teacher educators, teachers and researchers. This is no longer a joke – simple-minded dogma is no substitute for professional, child centred, teaching practice.
Unlike the books I’ve read from the research ignorant dogmatists, this book provides teachers in the second half of the book with extensive guides to preparing lessons on how to instruct children in how to read. These are wonderful chapters, providing a learning continuum, where lessons are discussed within the context of instruction, virtually as lesson plans. So, rather than providing teachers with a link to a paywalled site where they can download word lists matched to synthetic phonic instruction – no, I kid you not – the authors here provide teachers with a guide to how to teach. If you are going to criticise their process, you can – it is laid out for all to see, in detail and with all of the supporting evidence explained. This is not something I’ve seen from the dogmatists, who at best, like Lyn Stone, gives one or two cute asides on how to teach the alphabet.
This is a substantial text, presenting a detailed analysis of the research evidence, and providing a worked example of a curriculum for teaching children to read.
I keep saying that, but it does more than this. A large part of the point of this book is that it also seeks to teach children to write. I’m a big believer in literacy being about both reading and writing, but it is remarkable how rarely writing ever gets mentioned. I believe reading is essentially a recognition task – and human brains are designed to be really good at recognising things they have seen before. But learning to write is a recall task – and human brains are really quite bad at recalling things. Our memories are not designed to do that and so no matter how hard it is to learn to read – learning to write is much harder. No one finds it easier to write a word than to read it.
This book suggests learning both at the same time. This has the advantage of being meaningful to the learner – you can see why you need to learn letter sequences and letter to sound correspondences if you can use these to drag words out of your recall memory. It also forces you to notice that the squiggles on the page are meaningful ways of communicating, since reading and writing are both meaningful ways of communicating. You don’t have to learn nonsense words to learn to read, since you are engaged in recreating real words from the various contextual learning you have done in reading and writing. The heart of all of this is meaningful engagement with text – and not nonsense texts, real texts. Texts that kids actually want to read.
This book is so timely – particularly here in Australia. It makes it clear that there is a better way to learn to read that does not involve turning teachers into de-professionalised drones. That knowing your students, engaging them through their interests, providing them with meaningful learning, and real books are not just nice extras, they are what teaching and learning is. When someone tells you learning can be done without context, without meaning – believe what they are telling you and understand that they are a clear and present danger to our children.
Has it come to this? This book challenges virtually every statement in that first paragraph. And what is particularly good in how it goes about this, compared to the books I’ve read in support of the use of synthetic phonics, is that it actually does provide significant evidence to not simply make its point, but to provide nuance and an even-handed overview of the best research available on how children learn.
Essentially, the authors provide a clear and highly accessible account of decades of research. They explain the implications of that research, what it says and what it doesn’t say. They walk the reader through this evidence, because those they are up against too often say they are evidence-based, when, in fact, they hardly mention the evidence at all. This is something I was particularly struck by in a book called Reading for Life by Lyn Stone I reviewed a couple of years ago. She spends a lot of time in that book praising the virtues of peer reviewed randomised-controlled trials and explaining why these are so much better than any other form of evidence, and then provides virtually no research evidence to support her claims at all. This book is not at all like that. It does not cherry pick the evidence. It actually presents the evidence and explains the evidence and shows why the evidence does not support a simplified vision of teaching letter to sound correspondences as somehow being equivalent to teaching reading.
Central to the argument of this book is the all too obvious fact that children learn ANYTHING better if it makes sense to them. It surprises me that I need to even argue this fact. But I do need to argue it. You see, one of the supposed benefits of synthetic phonics is that children are asked to read nonsense syllables. This is because reading is decoding letters into sounds – and you should be able to do this as well with real words as you can with nonsense ones. They make a virtue of this – reading occurs outside of context. Context is bad since it might encourage children to ‘guess’ the meanings of words they do not understand, and they need to focus upon the letter to sound correspondence – absolutely not on meaning.
My problem is that humans are meaning making machines. We struggle to pay attention to anything that is not making sense to us. And language is also about as human as it gets too. Language is literally how we go about making sense. The idea that you can learn language (at the speed of sight or otherwise) devoid of meaning seems so self-evidently nonsense to me, I struggle to believe adults can think that is a good idea. At one point in this book the authors discuss two books written by the same children’s author – one produced to meet the strictures of synthetic phonics and the other, well, as a children’s book. Unsurprisingly, the phonics book is meaningless trudge. If your child proved to be interested in this book, you should rush them for specialised treatment. This isn’t the insult you might think it is – boredom is the point. The one-true method requires children be bored out of their minds – how else are they going to learn.
The other thing that those pushing for phonics as the heart of learning to read is that they always compare this with whole language and this is said to either not include phonics at all, or so little that it is ultimately ineffective. And yet, various balanced (a version of which this book is arguing for) approaches to teaching literacy have been central to teaching reading for decades – and these approaches all stress the importance of phonics, just not that this is virtually the be all and end all. And these are, as the early research chapters in this book makes painfully clear, the most effective ways to teach children to read. It is not just that those opposing balanced literacy approaches do not understand the research evidence, they wilfully misrepresent it, ignoring what does not fit their narrative and overstating what looks like it might support their dogmatic beliefs. The dangers of this misrepresentation are being felt in England and will be Australia’s future if education departments and policy makers do not heed the warnings from teacher educators, teachers and researchers. This is no longer a joke – simple-minded dogma is no substitute for professional, child centred, teaching practice.
Unlike the books I’ve read from the research ignorant dogmatists, this book provides teachers in the second half of the book with extensive guides to preparing lessons on how to instruct children in how to read. These are wonderful chapters, providing a learning continuum, where lessons are discussed within the context of instruction, virtually as lesson plans. So, rather than providing teachers with a link to a paywalled site where they can download word lists matched to synthetic phonic instruction – no, I kid you not – the authors here provide teachers with a guide to how to teach. If you are going to criticise their process, you can – it is laid out for all to see, in detail and with all of the supporting evidence explained. This is not something I’ve seen from the dogmatists, who at best, like Lyn Stone, gives one or two cute asides on how to teach the alphabet.
This is a substantial text, presenting a detailed analysis of the research evidence, and providing a worked example of a curriculum for teaching children to read.
I keep saying that, but it does more than this. A large part of the point of this book is that it also seeks to teach children to write. I’m a big believer in literacy being about both reading and writing, but it is remarkable how rarely writing ever gets mentioned. I believe reading is essentially a recognition task – and human brains are designed to be really good at recognising things they have seen before. But learning to write is a recall task – and human brains are really quite bad at recalling things. Our memories are not designed to do that and so no matter how hard it is to learn to read – learning to write is much harder. No one finds it easier to write a word than to read it.
This book suggests learning both at the same time. This has the advantage of being meaningful to the learner – you can see why you need to learn letter sequences and letter to sound correspondences if you can use these to drag words out of your recall memory. It also forces you to notice that the squiggles on the page are meaningful ways of communicating, since reading and writing are both meaningful ways of communicating. You don’t have to learn nonsense words to learn to read, since you are engaged in recreating real words from the various contextual learning you have done in reading and writing. The heart of all of this is meaningful engagement with text – and not nonsense texts, real texts. Texts that kids actually want to read.
This book is so timely – particularly here in Australia. It makes it clear that there is a better way to learn to read that does not involve turning teachers into de-professionalised drones. That knowing your students, engaging them through their interests, providing them with meaningful learning, and real books are not just nice extras, they are what teaching and learning is. When someone tells you learning can be done without context, without meaning – believe what they are telling you and understand that they are a clear and present danger to our children.
December 9, 2024
Soundly researched and evidence-based, this book is the perfect call to reform from a narrow approach to teaching literacy to our youngest learners. Students and individuals. Teachers are professionals. The act of teaching is a craft. One cannot simply follow a script, as each child has individual strengths and challenges. I highly recommend this book to all Early Years educators.
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