Individual Steps Are the Key to Literacy In Children
A one-size-fits-all pattern used by schools to improve children’s literacy is not necessarily helping every child learn to read. Like most other countries, New Zealand is challenged to meet the needs of children who are not making sufficient gains in literacy. The estimates of literacy learning difficulties in the U.S. hover between 15-20%. In New Zealand, approximately 5% of children experience significant difficulties while others are challenged to keep pace with their peers.
Professor Jan Gaffney of the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education believes children need to be taught at the level they have reached to ensure they achieve reading success, rather than receive a standard reading programme.
“Programmes with sequenced steps can work well with the average or above children, who would learn to read well anyway, but not with those kids who have the greatest difficulties,” she says.
“People who create them are trying to do what is best, but programmes by their very nature are standardised and inflexible and this rigid approach does not work well with children who are struggling with their reading.
“They need customised teaching with tailor-made steps responsive to their individual needs. We have to find out where they are on their set of steps rather than trying to fit them into our way of programmes.”
A core part of this belief is the importance of focussing on their literacy competencies rather than their problems.
Professor Gaffney is Professor of Educational Psychology-Literacy in the Faculty of Education’s School of Curriculum and Pedagogy. She joined the University of Auckland from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she held appointments in Special Education, Educational Psychology, and Curriculum & Instruction and was the Illinois Reading Recovery Director and University Trainer for 8 years. She was partly drawn here by the fact that Dame Marie Clay, a pioneer in early literacy who developed and designed the Reading Recovery program and exported it to the U. S. and Australia in 1985, was a former lecturer at the Faculty. Her commitment to children’s literacy learning began with her K-12 teaching experience with Native Americans in tribally operated schools.