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STUDENT teachers will be forced to learn the phonics method of teaching children how to read as the state government moves to override university programs.
In a move set to trigger a showdown between the government and the State’s universities, the Board of Studies and Educational Standards NSW has declared it will strip institutions of accreditation unless teaching courses return to the more traditional literacy learning method.
Phonics involves children being taught to read by sounding out letters in words.
The system was sidelined in the 1980s by a more whole-language, word recognition approach, which continues to be taught as part of Bachelor of Education courses.
However, State Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said paying lip service to the method was no longer good enough.
“Some unis are just paying lip service while others are doing it thoroughly,” he said. “It will become a requirement they teach phonics and we are going to enforce it.
Over-emphasis on the letter-sound relationship is very confusing for children learning to read.
The important point about a phonics approach is that it teaches an analytic approach to words, one that is designed to exploit the alphabetic principle.
The major criticisms of this approach include that it can seem nonsensical to the learner, that it obscures the function of reading (that is to say extracting meaning from print) and that many of the contrived texts lack coherence beyond the sentence level.
