In 2008 Monash University’s Professor Ilana Snyder wrote a book titled The Literacy Wars: Why Teaching Children to Read and Write is a Battleground in Australia. This book remains strikingly relevant today. Snyder described a history of diverse methods of learning to read beyond merely decoding text using phonics, or a focus on the sounds letters make. Many students who can successfully decode texts may, for example, struggle to understand ideas and to use inference and deduction: reading is much more complex than simply making the correct sounds, even though this is an important component of the process.
In the latest iteration of the literacy wars, the teaching of ‘phonics alone’, through an approach called explicit instruction, is being mandated by governments keen to improve scores on standardised tests of literacy learning. This resurrected narrow strategy replaces ‘balanced literacy’, which was always based on the teaching of phonics but also allowed teachers to draw on and develop a more varied and nuanced range of pedagogical approaches. This ‘balanced’ approach replaced the ‘whole language’ method of learning to read, which foregrounded whole words and sentences rather than sounds. ‘Whole language’, in its turn, replaced a pre-1980s focus on phonics alone, with which teachers became dissatisfied because it did not meet the needs of all students. The pendulum has thus previously swung both ways—towards and away from phonics.
The ‘whole language’ approach has not been used in Australian schools for many decades. Yet somehow, in the recent literacy wars, a false dichotomy has been presented as operating in our schools. This dichotomy pits ‘phonics alone’ against ‘whole language’ and characterises ‘balanced’ approaches as phonics-free and inseparable from the ‘whole language’ movement. A return to focusing solely on phonics, along with forbidding the use of other strategies, has been enforced by governments around Australia in an extraordinary interference in pedagogy. In Victoria, for example, all primary school literacy teachers are now required to spend a minimum of twenty-five minutes a day teaching phonics through explicit instruction.
While Australia has had a national curriculum outlining common learning descriptors for over a decade, its architects have been scrupulous about not mandating pedagogy. Teachers’ capacity to use their expertise to design and select pedagogy is at the core of their professionalism. It enables them to respond to the needs of diverse contexts and students. To mandate uniform pedagogy and even lesson structure and timing is therefore a dangerous precedent. What happens when this generation of teachers finds phonics is not enough to support students’ reading, as happened last century? Teachers are no longer ‘allowed’ to try anything else. Why would the government want to shut down teachers’ agility, responsiveness, problem-solving skills and professional judgement?
Literacy is highly politicised. Since the focus on educational standards emerged in the 1990s, the use of conservative methods of education as a solution to a decline in standards has appealed to politicians. A clinical focus on phonics is presented as a panacea for poor results on international and national aptitude tests (never mind that these tests have been exposed as deeply flawed). Yet the supposed scientific evidence behind the phonics push is inconclusive. In the United Kingdom, experts are currently calling for an evidence-informed shift away from a focus on phonics and explicit teaching. This focus is perceived to have harmed students’ enjoyment of reading and contributed to disengagement from schooling. Perhaps aware of this, Australian ‘phonics alone’ advocates are now saying it will take at least five years for improvements in literacy achievement to be seen. They are already backpedalling and trying to buy time before an inevitable showdown when reading proves to be more complex than they have argued.
The current phonics wars are phoney in a number of ways. Those pushing ‘phonics alone’, including governments and think-tanks with quick-fix agendas, pretend that
- phonics was not already being taught as a central pillar of learning to read, in schools and in preservice teacher programs in universities.
- ‘whole language’ and ‘balanced literacy’ are the same thing.
- the history of literacy teaching, with its pendulum swings towards and away from phonics, and towards and away from explicit instruction, does not exist.
- there is an always-and-forever solution—a ‘what works’, ‘one-size-fits-all’ program to be delivered to solve reading as a problem.
- there is no evidence that a ‘balanced’ approach works, as they prefer to cherry-pick evidence; this has included assuming that approaches that research shows are useful for students with disability should be applied to all students.
- there is no other agenda, when standardising pedagogy has clear benefits for commercial entities in education.
Why all this pretence? Snyder’s account describes how an isolated literacy pedagogy, such as phonics, can become imbued with ideology. And ideology is about power. In this case, the ideology represents beliefs that teacher deficits are at the root of all educational problems, and ventriloquising teachers with ‘phonics alone’ scripts will improve education. The ownership of ‘phonics alone’ as an instrumental, curative pedagogy by particular universities, academics, schools and teachers acts as a fetishising of power over teachers and over students. ‘Phonics alone’, as a stunt, becomes part of branding these educational entities as scientific and superior. This positioning offers power over students, teachers, schools and even governments. It offers financial rewards, promotions, publicity and status. Yet it simultaneously disempowers teachers in particular, whose own lived experience may prove, as vital yet ignored evidence, that ‘phonics alone’ is not enough.
‘Phonics alone’ also shuts down explorations of what else is going on if students struggle to read, for example in relation to race, gender, socioeconomic status, trauma, technology and cultural reading practices. Lucinda has conducted research recently in a Melbourne school in a suburb which has no public library. Within the school, funds were raised to buy shelving from Kmart so teachers and students could build shelves to house books in the school library. It is easier for governments to mandate ‘phonics alone’ as a reading fix than to fund education properly.
The capacity to innovate and address complex situations is central to attracting intelligent and creative people into teaching as a rewarding and challenging profession. In contrast, Snyder draws on an account by Professor Graham Parr of a young teacher having to deliver a scripted ‘direct phonics’ lesson, in which every word the teacher spoke, the timing of the delivery of every word, and every hand gesture were mandated. In effect, the teacher was not required to think at all. Alas, there is no account of how engaging students found this lesson. In an age of rapid colonisation of education by generative AI, it is imperative that teachers and students retain the capacity to think, and to engage critically with all scripts or generated materials. Australian teachers, until the phonics mandate, have been required to engage in reflective practice, conceptualising, trialling, evaluating and re-imagining their teaching. Governments have stripped this rich professional learning and iterative improvement of education from reading classrooms.
As Snyder says, reliance on a single method of learning to read at the expense of all others is ‘doomed to fail at least some children at some point’. What if your child is one of these children that ‘phonics alone’ will fail? Here are some of the ‘balanced literacy’ strategies that the phoney wars mandating ‘phonics alone’ have devalued, and potentially removed from classrooms:
- studying texts in their entirety, for meaning and pleasure.
- engaging with a range of diverse and authentic material that students choose to read (rather than using the bland prescribed and purpose-written booklets of structured literacy programs alone).
- privileging reading across all modalities, including image and sound, not just print text alone, in sensory and language-rich classrooms.
- teaching vocabulary, grammar and comprehension in the context of stories and other real-world texts, rather than as decontextualised and isolated drills (evidence has long shown that such drills are not necessarily useful).
- reading for critical thinking.
- peer and collaborative learning.
- negotiating curriculum and pedagogy with students, to foreground student voices and agency.
It is not difficult to see how experts in the United Kingdom feel that the excising of these more holistic approaches has affected students’ engagement with and enjoyment of school, and their orientation to being lifelong readers. Senior academics such as Dominic Wyse, Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education at University College London, are calling for the abandonment of phonics screening and more agency for children in their education. In contrast, as Australia seeks to control what teachers and children do, researchers find themselves, when doing curriculum development at state level, handed lists of words they are not allowed to use. The phoney wars are censoring educational research and academic freedom. They are not limited to literacy, either, but extend across curricula and learning areas including mathematics and science.
For teaching, as a feminised profession, the interference of governments, think-tanks and allied health professionals such as speech therapists to mandate phonics and direct or explicit pedagogy is a direct threat to authority and autonomy. These outsiders, including purported education experts who have never taught in a school classroom, have succeeded in an extraordinary coup against an enemy that did not exist. Why? Why is Australia so wilfully and apparently ignorantly following a ‘phonics alone’ path that has harmed children in the United Kingdom? Why would the government want to limit teachers’ repertoire of strategies to support students in embracing reading? Snyder suggests that at times of global uncertainty, blunt instruments like ‘phonics alone’ are seized upon as forms of reassurance and comfort, as promises that order can be maintained through the conscription of teachers’ and students’ bodies and voices.
At the deepest level, then, ‘phonics alone’ represents cowardice in the face of rapid change. It is a detaching from the realities of contemporary life, and a retreat into rote learning and rehearsed drills of nonsensical sounds (synthetic phonics). These sounds can shut out technological and media proliferations, generative AI, the climate crisis, political unrest, the destabilising of democracy, war and all the other myriad concerns that reader-citizens will need to confront in their lives. But these sounds also shut out laughter, artistry, rhythm, beauty, emotion and meaning in texts. Books are more than codes to be deciphered: yes, deciphering them is essential, but the paths to this, and beyond this, are many and varied.
In recent years, our preservice teachers have taught reading to, for example: students who are already expert readers (some of them more accomplished than their teachers); D/deaf students; students who have experienced trauma and feel safer under tables than sitting on chairs or mats; students who are staying at home due to fear or anxiety; students with major behavioural issues who find class drills challenging; students who have conditions which make sitting still on the floor for extensive drills uncomfortable; students with vastly different accents who pronounce phonemes differently…and many, many more. Now these teachers will need to implement twenty-five minutes of explicit phonics instruction every day for every student, whether it suits that student at that moment or not. The classroom is not a laboratory where ‘phonics alone’ can be administered to anaesthetised lab animals. It is a vibrant, unpredictable, exciting place.
Phonics is, or has been, a vital component of learning to read for the students listed above. It can also be taught in many fun and engaging ways. We do not seek to perpetuate the phoney wars. Indeed, we have recently observed and appreciated our own children being taught to read using phonics, as part of ‘balanced literacy’. The general public, however, needs to look beyond the ‘phonics alone’ apparent solution to ask what this phenomenon is really about. This is necessary to protect the status of teaching and the love of learning to read for a generation of Australian students. And there is more to cause concern.
We return to Ilana Snyder, who warned in 2008 that ‘teaching children to decode and encode is vital, but it is not enough—it leaves them vulnerable to those who seek to exploit them through the use of language, both visual and verbal’. Could it be that this exploitation is at least one of the aims of those narrowing reading education and seeking compliant citizens? We leave you with beloved Australian children’s author Mem Fox’s words, from her book Reading Magic: How Your Child can Learn to Read before School:
If children are exposed to books, print, pictures, page-turning and gorgeous stories that lighten up their lives and fabulous crazy-wild-happy teachers who switch them on to loving books, they will long to learn to read. A phonics-only approach can never, in its wildest dreams, achieve this goal.