This week’s debate over reading should have been over long ago. We should rather be starting to fix the mess.
For the past couple of years I have been teaching part-time in journalism at the University of Canberra.
This is not going to be a whinge about “young people today”. To the contrary, I found all but one or two students among the hundred or so I taught to be enthusiastic, attentive and willing to learn.
But precious few had any idea how to punctuate. They put commas where they should have put a full stop, or even a new paragraph. They reserved colons for descriptions of the digestive tract. When I explained hyphenation of compound adjectives or the use of the perfect tense for reported speech, they thought I was teaching Swahili.
Their spelling was generally good – because they corrected every misspelled word not found in Microsoft Word’s dictionary. They spelt inoculation with one n and accommodation with two m’s and so on.
But they tripped so often over homophones. When I told them so, they thought I was talking about a gay man on a mobile. I was under threat of being dobbed into the discrimination Nazis until I patiently explained. They confused “hear” and “here”, “there” and “their”, “your” and “you’re”, and so on.
If you are going to be a print journalist, I told them, you have to write according to an agreed standard. It is no good being creative if the way you write obscures what you write about.
The standard of reading was astonishingly variable. Handing out a 600-word piece to each student in a tutorial was asking for trouble. Three-quarters would zip through it as you would expect of a journalism class. Others would labour – victims, it would seem, of the whole-of-language school of reading.
These were second- and third-year students.
Few would like the education system to revert to rote learning. But with basic literacy and numeracy, students need more than mere exposure to others reading and print. Reading does not come by osmosis. You have to learn how. You have to break words into sounds and understand the connection between the marks on the page and the sounds you hear. Eventually a student learns to look at words they have never seen before and pronounce them.
However, there is a difficulty with phonetics. We English speakers make it unnecessarily hard for our children to learn to read because we have irregular and unpredictable spelling.
Asking a child to break a word into its sounds to read, for example, C-A-T is all very well. But when you break down “through” or any other “-ough” word you have to revert to memorising the exceptions. The overlap and confusion between C, K and S is no longer apparent to an adult reader who has – without knowing – learnt thousands of words by rote. In a purely phonetic system S-A-I-D would be a port in Egypt rather than a verb describing utterances.
We tolerate thousands of exceptions in the language. It would not be tolerated in, say, the language of mathematics. It would be unworkable.
A bit of spelling reform would help our children, but it would cost the present generation of readers. It would be a bit like the introduction of the metric system: a pain for a generation to the ultimate benefit of future generations.
The now-discredited whole-of-language approach to reading which took hold in the 1980s and 1990s suggests that learning to read is like learning to speak – a natural process. It is having the sad result of increasing illiteracy and its accompanying human misery, lost opportunity and economic cost to the victims.
We should get back to teaching reading by phonetics. But those who advocate that must acknowledge that reading is a human-made system – not some system that emerges from nature or our biology. And once you acknowledge that phonetics is a system, you have to acknowledge that it can be improved.
If we are so concerned about ensuring children learn to read and become literate adults we should make it easier by reforming spelling.
The language would not lose one jot. Say I have two copies of Dickens’s Christmas Carol: one written in reformed spelling and the other written traditionally. It would not matter which one I read to a child, the sound would be exactly the same.
Sure, languages develop. They are dynamic. They arise out of the myriad of human thoughts and actions. New words arise, illustrating the genius of English. “Google” is now a verb, for example – one word to describe “searching for something on the internet”. But the gradual introduction of new words and the gradual change of word usage does not mean that the spelling which depicts the language must only develop in the same gradual way.
Far from it. Indeed, the ubiquitous Microsoft’s spell-checker might well freeze the spelling of English as at 1995.
Then, again, the Microsoft spell-checker’s very universality might make it the best vehicle to institute the changes to spelling which will make learning to read easier – provided Microsoft itself has absolutely nothing to determining those changes. Let’s leave that to the experts in phonetics.