Learning to read is the most important outcome of primary education. The ability to read allows an individual to acquire new knowledge, and it is the foundation of employment, political participation, and health and well-being throughout life. It’s therefore no wonder that the ambition for all children to achieve basic literacy is enshrined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Goal 4: Quality Education).
Virtually all children can learn to read if given adequate instruction and the opportunity to practice. However, despite high levels of primary school enrollment, nearly 60% of pupils in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are unable to read a simple, age-appropriate story by the end of primary school. Some estimates place this percentage even higher following the pandemic.
These data confirm a huge failure of school systems worldwide. Our research published in Nature Human Behavior asks why so many children who are in school are failing to learn to read. We sought specifically to discover whether pupils in the initial years of primary school are acquiring the basic subskills that are known to underpin reading.
Evidence from psychological science – often called the science of reading— maps out a series of subskills that need to be mastered before a child can read with comprehension. For those learning alphabetic languages, these subskills begin with knowing of the names and sounds of the letters in their alphabet. Children can then use this knowledge to decode simple words: for example, to decode the printed symbols [cat] as c->/k/, a->/æ/, t->/t/. Learning about how letters are used to represent language is necessary because otherwise, children perceive these visual symbols as nothing more than arbitrary lines, squiggles and dots.
We assembled data probing the reading subskills of over 500,000 pupils from 48 countries across the first three years of reading instruction. We used a set of assessments known as the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) that allows appropriate reading tests to be designed across languages and countries. We measured scores from these tests against well-established benchmarks for becoming a successful reader, and for needing additional support.
Our analyses showed dramatic failures to achieve even the most basic subskills such as knowing the names and sounds of letters. Only a small proportion of reading scores in our sample met minimum benchmarks for successful reading development, and performance fell further away from these benchmarks with each year. By the third year of reading instruction, 96% of our samples had scores so low on knowing the sounds of letters that they fell below an established severe risk benchmark, indicating the need for intensive intervention. Unsurprisingly, we found a strong, positive relationship between each of the subskills measured and reading comprehension. Pupils are not able to engage with the meaning of text if they don’t know what letters are or what they represent.
Our work shows that pupils in LMICs are moving forward at a glacially slow pace, one that makes it almost impossible for them to ever become proficient readers. The cost of this failure on children’s life chances snowballs as pupils grow older and need to use reading to access the secondary school curriculum. The failure to deliver foundational reading skills also reduces the overall effectiveness of global investments in education because pupils are not able to capitalize on those investments.
The consequences of our findings motivate an urgent policy response. Thus far, the frameworks that govern how international development agencies benchmark literacy in LMICs are focused on comprehension. That focus needs to shift so that pupils become fluent decoders, ideally by the middle of primary school. The targets around comprehension stated in these frameworks cannot be met if children are not able to turn strings of letters into words.
The science of reading provides a clear path to addressing the policy failure documented in our article. We have over 30 years of evidence showing that providing systematic phonics instruction is the key to developing foundational decoding skills that are the basis of reading success. Systematic phonics is a structured program of lessons typically undertaken daily during the first two years of primary school, and designed to teach pupils explicitly how the letters of writing system relate to the sounds of the language. Our results suggest that this established body of evidence is not being used to inform teaching in LMICs.
Our findings resonate more broadly with the realization that schooling is not the same as learning. The pupils in our samples were all in school but were not learning effectively. It is vital that the implementation of evidence-based reading instruction is accompanied by regular assessments of pupils’ decoding and wider reading skills. We should not be waiting until the end of primary school to discover that pupils cannot read.
LMICs typically spend close to 4% of their GDP on education, and improving literacy has become a major focus for international development agencies. Reading is the learned capacity that is most indispensable to students’ overall success, and all of the Sustainable Development Goals depend on having a literate population. By taking a hard look at the failure of LMIC education systems to equip pupils with the most basic foundational skills for reading, we hope that policymakers will bring new urgency to designing and implementing evidence-aligned instruction that works.
Source: blogs.worldbank.org