Media Release:

Reading can be, and should be, as easy as ABC

A cutting edge literacy programme achieves extraordinary results in one Sydney School; zero reading failure is becoming a reality.

According to the ABS, a shocking 20% of Australians have "very poor" literacy skills. In 2007, one Australian school, Blaxcell Street Public School (Sydney), implemented the Get Reading Right programme in the hope of breaking bad literacy habits at the onset. The results are outstanding: in just 4 months, in a school with 98% second language speakers, the school reduced the failure rate from 52% to 12%; eight percent less than the national average. Zero reading failure is quickly becoming a reality for Blaxcell Street Public School.

"Get Reading Right" is a step-by-step fun and multi-sensory programme which systematically teaches synthetic phonics to children and adults alike. After continued overseas success, Australian co-founder Jo-Anne Dooner is bringing the "Get Reading Right" programme home.

The consequences of illiteracy in Australia are disturbing; 27% of year 3 pupils "do not meet the minimum performance standards of literacy required for effective participation in further schooling"¹.

"In 2005 we had the answer," said Jo-Anne, synthetic phonics consultant and Get Reading Right Director.

"The Australian government did the research and concluded phonics was the way ahead for teaching our children to read and spell. Years later the UK government did similar research, found the same conclusions but made it mandatory in all schools. We haven't seen the same level of action for our own schools so it would appear our literacy rates aren't improving."

Although the Australian government recommended: "an early and systematic emphasis on the explicit teaching of phonics"² as the author of the report himself, Dr Rowe, pointed out: "the sad thing is that we do not have enough people in this country trained to teach it explicitly and systematically"³.

"After 20 years of teaching reading and consistently seeing some children just not getting it, I trialled synthetic phonics in my school. We set-up one class using the old approach and another using synthetic phonics. Within weeks we had to call the trial off: those using the old approach were just too far behind. I then went on to co-develop "Get Reading Right". We are now seeing reports of literacy rates at nearly 100% with our programme."

"As a teacher myself I know the workload to implement a new programme is tough so we have done the hard work so teachers and parents don't have to. We have provided everything any teacher or parent wishing to teach children to read needs: teachers toolkit, parents handbook, lesson plans, readers and games," added Jo-Anne.

Learning to read with synthetic phonics involves decoding or 'breaking' words into separate phonemes (sounds) that can be blended together to read a written word. Synthetic phonics explicitly teaches all 44 sounds of the English language and that this process can be reversed to ‘encode' or spell words.

www.getreadingright.com

References:
1 http://www.dest.gov.au/nitl/documents/report_recommendations.pdf, pg 26.
2 http://www.dest.gov.au/nitl/documents/report_recommendations.pdf, pg 9.
3 http://www.theage.com.au/news/education-news/inquiry-reveals-phonics-hangup/
2006/02/11/1139542409947.html

Mum Zone Release Date: 21st April 2009

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