Australia Association for Research in Education
teaching reading
Decodable or predictable: why reading curriculum developers must seize one
Despite the promise to ‘improve clarity’, ‘declutter’, and remove ‘ambiguous’ content, the new draft curriculum has left teachers …
A Brief History of ‘The Reading Wars’
The so-called ‘Reading Wars’ have a long history within reading education. They began as a series of competing …
COVID coaches: tutoring only works when backed by quality teaching directed at the students who really missed out
The injection by NSW and Victorian State Governments of more than half a billion dollars on tutoring programs to help students catch up after Covid-19-related disruptions to normal schooling is welcome. However, there is a need to ensure the intervention is more than an economic ‘sugar hit’ and that it leads to sustained improvement in …
Seven things teachers agree on about teaching reading in Australia. Stop all the political haranguing over phonics
There is widespread agreement among educators and school communities about the importance of teaching phonics and other code-based literacy practices in early years classrooms. Why, however, is phonics instruction, one of the processes teachers use in helping children learn to read, so foregrounded by government policymakers and bureaucrats in Australia these days? Why is one …
Teaching literacy is more than teaching simple reading skills: it can’t be done in five easy steps
If we truly care about all Australian children and young people becoming literate I believe it is vital we understand and define the complexity of literacy. The conflation of different terms like reading instruction and literacy is not very useful. While reading is part of literacy, literacy is a much bigger concept which is continually …
This is how Australian teachers are taught how to teach children to read: not just phonics
There is a lot of misinformation out there, as well as ill informed commentary, about how we prepare teachers to teach reading and writing in Australian schools today Of course you have heard the argument that teachers do not teach phonics any more and worse, that many early career teachers do not even know how …