Using phonics in teaching could be a 'real danger' academics say

For the past 18 months, the teaching strategy has been adopted by Glendore, Budgewoi, Belmont North and Kurri Kurri public schools, following below-average NAPLAN results.

The teaching method is used to break down literacy and numeracy in the classroom, but Globeducate director of education Oahn Crouch says the "robotic" teaching method is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

"What usually happens is the reaction to NAPLAN or results driven data. It's if students are not going in the right direction, they must be doing something wrong, not looking at it from a root cause," she said.

Ms Crouch is a University of Newcastle alumni who grew up in Newcastle before travelling and working in different leadership roles in Europe and Asia.

"Being educated in Newcastle has been a useful backdrop for me to compare and contrast the NSW and Australian curriculum with the varied education models from around the globe," she said.

She said the recent wave to use phonics across NSW classrooms could be seen as a Band-Aid solution

"Sometimes it becomes an easy fix. Let's just work on phonics, but you can't just have a one-size-fits-all approach," she said.

"While phonics is certainly a key component of reading, there is so much more involved."

Ms Crouch said phonics could produce learners who decoded, but didn't necessarily appreciate the sound and rhythm of the written word, and understood how to use them in context.

"If phonics is the only strategy that is being used, we risk the danger of bringing up a generation of robotic readers," she said.

"You're going to have students who will be scared to write those beautiful, magical long words because they'll be worried they can't spell it properly. You'll get boring words like 'nice'."

"They choose to go safe, and that's the danger that you have."

On the other side of the debate is Glendore Public School deputy principal, curriculum pedagogy Elise Mountford, who has been helping other Hunter schools implement phonics into the numeracy curriculum.

She says the teaching process is about mastering one concept at a time.

"We're checking for understanding throughout that teaching process and ensuring we're building students independence gradually," she said.

"We do lots of work on whiteboards, lots of checking for understanding and making sure they're not making mistakes really early in the process."

The NSW Department of Education told the Newcastle Herald that all NSW public schools had reading and numeracy improvement measures in place from this year and they applied to all students.

"The department is implementing explicit teaching and is delivering evidence-based and targeted support to guide teachers in how to explicitly teach reading and numeracy skills through the curriculum," a spokesperson said.

But Ms Crouch says while the method allows students to repeat their times tables quickly and pronounce words, they still might not know how to apply it in context.

"Teachers become so fixated with making sure they're learning tables without underpinning why do they need to know sets of 20 really quickly.

"It's going to be of no use if they can't apply it into real-life situations, like adding up a shopping list or working out how many bricks they need for a wall."

She said the challenge with phonics was there were different levels and it could be a limiting factor "if that's all you're relying on".

"Phonics is like a code, each language has a different code and how they use the alphabet together in different forms and in different combinations, and that's all it is," she said.

"The problem with English is there are so many exceptions, and that's what makes it difficult."

"It's very robotic. For some students it does work, but only up to a certain point."

"For some students, their decoding skills might be very high and comprehension is low, and for others it's the opposite."

University of Newcastle Laureate Professor of Education and Teachers and Teaching Research Centre director, Jenny Gore says there's "a real danger" in the push for explicit instruction.

"I think it's been taken up in quite a narrow way, that is not necessarily going to be helpful," she said.

"Particularly when people take it to the extreme with scripted lessons and to me, that's not what most people went into teaching for. Teaching is incredibly complex work, and I think we need to acknowledge that, and I think we need to respect teachers as professionals.

"It's a complex field we're playing in."

Ms Crouch said the shift in teachers' focus should be on how to use phonics as a tool and to understand the science to find out where it fits in the teaching landscape.

"Where, when and how do we teach phonics? It's not in isolation. It's within context of other things because we also make sure you read aloud," she said.

"The most important thing is measuring the success and if they are on the right path. If not, do we need to scrap it and try a new strategy?"

She said different strategies worked for different individuals. When students found ownership in their learning, they felt a purpose.

"That's when the magic happens because they will start determining how they can approach tasks and problems, and that's what you want to see as teachers."