New Zealand study spells out disadvantages of phonics reading education

WELLINGTON, July 4 (Xinhua) -- An international study of children learning to read has found that the widely used "phonics" teaching method can disadvantage children for years later, say New Zealand researchers. Another study, carried out by the same researchers from New Zealand's Otago and Victoria universities, found that children who read alphabet-based languages used the same cognitive processes as children who read character-based languages when learning to read. Children were "primarily geared towards learning to read through storing words in the brain," said a statement from Otago University Monday. That meant that the phonics system a teaching method that breaks language down to its simplest components of single letters, then simple letter combinations and words was unnecessary past the initial stages of learning to read. The researchers found that 6-year-old Scottish children taught through phonics read at a much slower speed than children taught through New Zealand's more book-centered approach. The phonics learners at ages 8 and 11 were also less capable of identifying real and non-real words in tests, more often picking non-words such as "blud" as real words. The researchers also found that Scottish university students who had been taught through phonics as children were worse at reading new or unfamiliar words that did not follow regular lettersounds than their New Zealand counterparts. Phonics instruction left a "cognitive footprint," resulting in a longterm disadvantage, said the researchers. "These findings suggest that educators and policymakers need to look beyond any claimed short-term advantages of particular

teaching methods, and take into account longer-term effects when considering the merits of different approaches to teaching reading, " said Associate Professor Claire Fletcher-Flinn, of Otago University. The researchers also studied Japanese kindergarten children and Japanese adults learning to read and New Zealand students taking Japanese in high school as a second language. They found that the same cognitive processes in learning to read words in an alphabet-based writing system, such as in English, occurred in children learning to read a system based mainly on characters for syllables, called Japanese Hiragana. This meant the same learning process occurred in both children learning English and those learning Japanese, despite being two different writing systems. "This is a very important finding which suggests a general learning process for learning to read, regardless of the way the language is written," said Fletcher-Flinn. The researchers said teachers should strongly support a child's development of a vocabulary of print words connected to words in their spoken vocabulary from the outset, which was already a feature of the Japanese teaching of reading. The results of two research projects are to be issued at the 17th Biennial Australasian Human Development Association (AHDA) Conference, being held in the New Zealand city of Dunedin, from Monday to Wednesday. The AHDA is a prominent think-tank in the area of developmental psychology in the Australasian region.