Why Phonics Can Help Solve Australia's Deepening Literacy Crisis

As many as a third of Australian children may struggle to read this sentence.

This is a sobering statistic based on the recent findings of a Grattan Institute report and 2023 NAPLAN results, showing that in the typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can’t read well.

Such results are the latest in a series of reports and surveys showing Australia performs poorly when it comes to equipping its next generation with basic education skills, such as literacy - lagging behind many other developed countries. These shortcomings have reignited what has been dubbed ‘the reading wars’ as education leaders and policy makers grapple with the best approach to teaching children how to read.

Systematic Phonics
Various bodies of research - known collectively as ‘the science of reading’ - have explored the essential skills required for reading instruction. These are, typically:
● Phonemic awareness: the ability to manipulate and identify individual sounds in spoken words.
● Phonics: the relationship between sounds and written letters.
● Fluency: the ability to read smoothly and accurately.
● Vocabulary: word meanings.
● Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning of what is being read.

‘Systematic phonics’ (or ‘structured literacy’) underpins the first two stages of reading development, paving the way for students to master the remaining skills.

Phonics involves teaching children the sounds of letters, or groups of letters, to effectively ‘decode’ whole words - allowing learners to tackle words they have yet to come across. Around the world, this method is replacing more traditional approaches, such as ‘whole language’ (learning entire words and phrases in meaningful contexts, rather than as isolated letter sounds in a word), or ‘alphabetic’ (learning, in isolation, that letters represent sounds).

How Effective is Phonics?
Dr Jennifer Buckingham, Executive Director for Policy and Evidence, NSW Centre for Education, summarises the academic community’s findings in a recent paper: “Even with a revisionist and conservative analysis of the research literature, the strongest available evidence shows systematic phonics instruction to be more effective than any existing alternative.”

Elsewhere, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a charity that seeks to improve education levels for children from low-income backgrounds, has compiled a report on various studies into literacy teaching methods. The EEF found that phonics is ‘more effective’ for teaching early reading than whole language or alphabetic approaches.

How Should Phonics be Run?
Memories of your own early literacy experiences as a student probably involve a small group completing a round-robin style ‘guided’ reading session, with kids taking it in turns to read one sentence or page at a time. Texts used by teachers were often predictable and uninspiring, full of hard to decode words. Guessing strategies, such as the three-cueing method, were also commonplace when the need to figure out a new word arose.

Guided reading is no longer fit for purpose - if it ever was - when viewed through the lens of scientific reading research. Instead, schools should be moving towards decodable reader techniques that focus on targeting specific phonic patterns. This is the most obvious change teachers and school leads can make, ensuring students are getting the specific and explicit phonics instruction they require - and can actually read what is in front of them without guessing.

Crucial to this is ensuring decodable reader resources are selected that align with students’ phonics knowledge base - meaning they are only being exposed to the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they have been taught.

For children that need specific support, studies have found that both one-on-one interventions and small group interventions, occurring up to four times a week for a three month period, allow children to make significant progress. One-on-one interventions saw children make an additional five months progress across a normal year. Small group interventions saw children make four months extra progress.

‘Out of the Box’ Phonics Resources
While the delivery of phonics needs careful planning and training, there is an increasing amount of support available to educators to make the introduction of a new programme easier. 

For example, Twinkl has recently made its collection of ‘Rhino Readers’ phonics-led books, that take children from decoding to fluency, available in print across Australia. If you are a primary teacher, your school should already have access to these materials as Twinkl sent a free box of Rhino Reader books to every primary school in the country in July. 

Rhino Readers aligns with the Twinkl Phonics Australia programme, based on Twinkl’s UK scheme which is endorsed by the UK Government’s Department for Education and has been used by over 300,000 educators to date. Twinkl Phonics Australia has been carefully restructured and aligned to the Australian Curriculum by local educators.

Rich Literacy Environments
While phonics is clearly highly effective in teaching children to read, ultimately, it needs to be the foundation stone of a wider school literacy strategy.

A successful strategy will also incorporate other wider reading skills, such as plans to enhance fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Phonics can help teach children how to decode words, but the additional skills will allow them to fully master the art of reading and immerse themselves in the world of their favourite books.

But, by taking a more evidence-backed, multi-discipline approach to teaching reading, schools can start moving the dial when it comes to improving Australia's literacy rates.