Thursday, 22 February 2024

Literacy education

Trung LUU (Western Metropolitan) (18:28): (737) My matter is for the Minister for Education regarding Victoria’s current method of teaching students how to read. The action I seek is for the minister to commit to a strong target to lift literacy rates and adopt a structured literacy approach across the board. Almost one-third of Australian children across years 3, 5, 7 and 9 failed to meet the new proficiency standard of literacy in last year’s NAPLAN test. In Victoria the number was one in four. The Grattan Institute released a report in which they say decades of disagreement about how to teach reading and a lack of explicit guidance are responsible for the underwhelming NAPLAN results. The institute say that the stagnant results for reading can be expected if the government continue to use a balanced literacy approach, which is teaching reading and writing strategies through guesswork from pictures and context, rather than using phonics.

The solution the Grattan Institute propose is to focus on phonics, a method called structured learning. This approach teaches reading by using phonics and involves students sounding out each letter to understand how a word is built. I can attest to that, having come from a culture of a different language. Growing up here, when I went to school we used phonics back in the 1980s, and it worked. English, believe me, is one of the hardest languages to learn. The Grattan Institute warn if schools do not adopt this structured literacy learning, then a disadvantaged student will be left further behind their peers. Victoria is known as the Education State, so I urge the government to focus on student literacy education and drop the phonics phobia, because phonics works. Bring it back, please, Minister.