By Dr. Rebecca Jesson and Judy Aitken

Shared with permission. Originally published in Volume 37 Issue 3 2022 of Literacy Forum NZ.

You may have heard or even contributed to a call for Aotearoa New Zealand Ministry of Education to discard Reading Recovery because of a perception that the intervention is aligned with a ‘whole language’ approach and therefore teachers do not deliberately teach phonics. As Reading Recovery Trainers, we reject this characterisation. Instead, we emphasise a multidimensional and networked nature of literacy learning, informed by research findings (Compton-Lilly, et al., 2020) within which the learning of phonics plays a key role. We argue here that Reading Recovery teachers are skillful teachers of phonics, engage in ongoing professional inquiry around the contribution of phonics to literacy learning, and ensure phonics is integral to every Reading Recovery lesson. For transparency, we outline the assessment and teaching procedures that guide Reading Recovery teachers to support young learners to develop word and sub-word level skills for reading and writing. We illustrate how teachers actively incorporate commonly advocate phonic skills, including alphabetic principle, grapheme-phoneme correspondences, phonemic awareness, segmenting and blending, within reading and writing activities in every 30-minute lesson. We also consider the notion of ‘systematic’ in relation to phonics teaching, demonstrating how the individual nature of Reading Recovery allows for careful daily observation of children’s learning and, therefore, ample scope for responsive systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Finally, drawing from recent studies of phonics interventions, we highlight five repeated findings that can help guide lesson design for students getting underway with literacy. In doing so, we intend to dispel misconceptions and counteract oppositional views by showing how Reading Recovery teachers use systematic teaching procedures to build phonics knowledge for individual children.

Read the rest of the journal article here.