Professor Chapman says urgent change is
needed to improve New Zealand's declining
adult literacy levels.
Image: iStockphoto
Urgent change is needed to address declining adult literacy levels in New Zealand, says College of Education Pro Vice-Chancellor Professor James Chapman.
Recent survey results show little improvement, if any, in adult literacy, Professor Chapman says.
“The 2006 adult literacy survey results show minimal improvements in adult literacy from data gathered 10 years earlier,” he says. “In fact, for young adults aged 16-24, the results are actually worse.
“Considering the huge resources that have gone into literacy instruction in schools over the past 20 years, the results should have been much better,” Professor Chapman says.
At the Literacy Research Symposium in Christchurch, Professor Chapman presented the paper Adult Literacy in New Zealand, 1996-2006: We Reap What We Sow, which has been co-authored with Distinguished Professor Bill Tunmer and Professor Emeritus Richard Harker from the college.
He says the disappointing figures do not come as a surprise. “New Zealand’s approach to literacy instruction hasn’t provided enough children in our schools with the foundation skills needed to develop competence in reading, and for them to remain competent learners.
“A key skill in learning to read is learning the links between sounds in spoken language and the letters of the alphabet that represent those sounds. Children who can’t figure out words when they’re reading get bogged down and many eventually give up.
“If you don’t learn to read, it makes other aspects of learning very difficult and this flows through into adulthood unless some very strong and effective intervention is provided.”
Professor Chapman says adult literacy programmes have led to some small improvements among older adults, but the younger adults who have most recently left school, and who were in school during the introduction of reading recovery and the ’whole language‘ approach to reading instruction have performed poorly.
Among the poor results are more than 60 per cent of Maori adults and 70 per cent of Pasifika adults who scored below the minimum literacy levels, which Professor Chapman says reflects failed attempts to support promised improvements in the functional literacy of those communities.
“You can’t develop an inclusive, multi-cultural democracy when such large numbers of our citizens don’t have the necessary literacy skills,” he says.
“New Zealand’s experiment with the ’whole language‘ approach to literacy instruction and early intervention has now flowed through into adulthood and has failed to achieve its goals.”
Professor Chapman and his colleagues say that a major change in the approach to literacy instruction in schools, based on overwhelming scientific evidence, “is long overdue”.
In 1999 a Ministry of Education-appointed literacy experts group unanimously recommended that more attention be given to helping children understand the connections between sounds in language and letters in the alphabet for general reading instruction and in the Reading Recovery programme. Professor Chapman says the advice was ignored.
“Two years later, a parliamentary select committee on education and science unanimously recommended a re-emphasis be made on the importance of the development of phonetic, word-level decoding skills in a balanced teaching of reading programme. This recommendation was also ignored.
“The latest adult literacy policy, from the Tertiary Education Commission, has a price tag of $168 million. It might have some effect. But it is like an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The real problem of literacy instruction in schools has again been overlooked.
“Without significant change, poor levels of adult literacy skills in New Zealand will persist, with the economic and social effects being borne in the workplace and in communities throughout the country.”
Editor's Note: Original news release can be found here.
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