The alphabetic principle and beyond

Surveying the landscape

Robyn Cox, Susan Feez, Lorraine Beveridge, Robyn Cox, Susan Feez, Lorraine Beveridge

• Publisher: Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781925132472
• eBook ISBN: 9781925132489
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The genesis of the idea for The alphabetic Principle and Beyond: Surveying the landscape can be found in the current prioritising of the alphabetic principle in the teaching of early reading, and in discussions about how teachers might better understand varying perspectives in order to inform their practice. The editors committed to providing teachers with the latest research-based and evidence-based pedagogical practice while at the same time translating these big ideas.

PART 1

SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE

CHAPTER 1

Reading: an essential activity in our society

Robyn Cox, Susan Feez and
Lorraine Beveridge

Reading is an activity that, perhaps more than any other in our time, shapes the trajectory of our lives. In the act of reading, a configuration of skills, knowledge and dispositions coalesces in ways that enable the reader to make meaning from written text. The ability to read is the foundation of learning in our educational institutions and in the wider community. Learning to read, and reading to learn, are precursors to social and cultural participation and fulfilment, improved health and wellbeing, and material advantage – in summary, to what counts as a successful life in contemporary developed societies.

In this book the spotlight falls on those skills, knowledges and dispositions readers need in order to cross the sensory threshold into reading and writing English. These include perceiving and distinguishing the contrasting sounds of spoken English and knowing how these sounds are represented visually by the letters of the alphabet. Learning to read involves learning how the sounds of our language correspond systematically with the letters of the alphabet. The systematic correspondence between the sounds of spoken language and the letters used to represent these sounds in written language has become known as the alphabetic principle.

ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET

Teaching and learning about the alphabetic principle is popularly known as phonics, although the etymology of this term, derived from the ancient Greek word for ‘sound’, reveals only half the story, and in fact leaves out the most fascinating part. The word ‘alphabet’ transports us back 3000 years to the Phoenician sailors plying their trade across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, between regions we now think of as Africa, Europe and the Middle East. They traded in ivory, spices, incense, silver, glass, and especially in the purple dye made from sea snails and used for royal robes that gave them their name, Phoenicians (‘people of the purple cloth’).

Because the Phoenicians were traders, they needed a quick and accurate way to keep records. At that time Egyptian writing was based on elaborate hieroglyphs, pictures representing both objects and some of the sounds of the language. The Phoenicians developed this idea. To record their transactions in written form (but more quickly and efficiently than was possible with hieroglyphs), they devised simple outlines to capture the sounds of their language. They used a simple outline of an ox head with horns to represent the first sound of the word alep (ox). This drawing evolved into the letter A, the first letter of the alphabet. An outline of an adobe house (the mud houses of the region we now know as Lebanon, where the Phoenicians came from) was used for the first sound of the word for house, bet, later becoming the letter B. In the same way, the letters C and G were derived from the first sound of giml, the Phoenician word for camel, and the letter D for the first sound of their word for door, dalet. Writing down the sounds of the language in this way, using a limited number of simple outlines, is the origin of the alphabet, which is now used to write down the sounds of most of the languages of the world, including English.

The early development of the alphabet is linked to the ancient Phoenician city of Byblos, the origin of the Greek word for book, biblia, from which English words such as ‘bible’ and ‘bibliography’ are derived. The Phoenician’s innovation, the alphabet, not only expanded their capacity to trade across the Mediterranean Sea, but also transformed human societies the world over.

TEACHING AND LEARNING THE ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE IN THE EARLY YEARS

Learning the correspondence between letters and sounds in the early years of school is an essential step in the literacy development of young children learning to read and write in English. For this reason, early years teachers must know about the alphabetic principle and its relation to other aspects of reading. They also must know how to apply this knowledge in their teaching. Knowledge about the alphabetic principle and its place in literacy pedagogy embraces a diverse range of perspectives, from research evidence and professional expertise to community expectations, all of which contribute to the landscape of early literacy education. This territory can be challenging for classroom teachers, where they are at risk of being buffeted by many hostile forces: persistent myths, conflicting traditions, divergent research findings, strident public debates, competing commercial interests and overwhelming accountability demands. Inevitably, teachers can too easily find themselves feeling professionally disoriented.

In a literate society, all members of the community have a stake in early literacy education. The shared community expectation is that all children will learn to read and write at school to a standard that enables them to participate fully and productively in society. This shared expectation is captured in two overarching educational goals for young Australians, the achievement of which the Melbourne Declaration has identified as a whole-of-community responsibility (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training & Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 2008, p.7):

• Goal 1: Australian schooling promotes equity and excellence.
• Goal 2: All young Australians become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens.

Achieving these educational goals is the collective responsibility of governments, school sectors and individual schools as well as parents and carers, young Australians, families, other education and training providers, businesses and the broader community.

While these educational goals, and the responsibility for achieving them, are shared, how the goals might be achieved will always, and necessarily, be the focus of ongoing academic research, community debate and the professional development of teachers. One of the most enduring of these debates concerns the teaching of early reading, perhaps because the achievement of both educational goals in the Melbourne Declaration depends on all young Australians learning to read and write.

Almost all adults with a stake in early literacy education in Australia have learnt to read, although individual experiences and levels of reading achievement differ widely. Our memories of school, and of learning to read and write, colour our perceptions of what is involved. Our expectations of early reading programs may depend on our own levels of reading achievement, and on whether we are parents of young children, members of the wider community, researchers, policymakers or teachers. Parents want their children to experience early reading and writing in ways that either echo or differ sharply from their own memories of learning to read and write, depending on whether those memories are positive or negative. Community members want their taxes spent on educational programs that are seen to work, and providing evidence of what works is the job of researchers in the field of education. The task for policymakers is to draw on this evidence to support early literacy programs that achieve the goal of teaching all children to read and write as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible in order to build a literate, skilled and productive workforce for the future. For teachers the task is an intensely personal one. Teachers want every student in their class to be effective and enthusiastic readers and writers, students who successfully make the transition from learning to read and write in the early years to reading and writing to learn throughout the remainder of their school years and beyond.

All these expectations can easily become entangled in debates about how best to teach the alphabetic principle. Untangling past memories of learning to read and write from current expectations of literacy programs has become even more challenging now that teachers are also expected to prepare their students for the rapidly changing, and hard to pin down, literacy demands of the 21st century.

THE ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE IN THE 21st CENTURY

In the Australian Curriculum, reading, alongside listening and viewing, is identified as one of the communication processes through which we decode, comprehend, interpret and analyse texts. Texts are the means we use to communicate, and they can be written, spoken or visual, either in print or in digital, online forms. Traditionally, reading has been the process used to decode, comprehend, interpret and analyse written texts. With technological innovation, the language in written texts is increasingly combined with a range of other communication modes – including still or moving images, sound and interactive features – to create multimodal texts.

Face-to-face spoken communication has always been multimodal, because our spoken language is typically combined with gesture and other types of body language. Written texts have also always had the potential to be multimodal; that is, producers of written texts could always combine different handwriting styles or typefaces, different sizes and various layouts, alongside images. Film is multimodal because it combines moving images, human movement, speech and music. Until comparatively recently, however, multimodal print and film texts could only be produced by specialist illustrators, publishers and filmmakers. With the advent of digital information and communication technologies, the texts we use every day are becoming more multimodal, and it is increasingly easy for non-specialists to compose multimodal texts using digital media.

Typically, reading multimodal texts means decoding, comprehending, interpreting and analysing not only written text, but all the other modes used in these texts and their organisation on the page. For this reason, the plural term multiliteracies has been coined for the multiple processes required to read and compose multimodal texts (Lamb, 2011; Kalantzis, Cope, Chan & Dalley-Trim, 2016). Nevertheless, whether a text is composed using written English only or in combination with other meaning-making modes, it is written down using the alphabetic principle. Decoding text represented by letters of the alphabet is as critical for reading digital texts as it is for reading paper-based texts. Making meaning from written text remains central to students being able to use texts of all types and modalities effectively in community, educational and vocational contexts. Becoming literate continues to mean learning how to read and compose written text, even if this now occurs alongside learning how to read other meaning-making modes. Learning how to read and compose written English necessarily involves learning the alphabetic principle.

MEASURING READING ACHIEVEMENT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

In recent decades, the what and how of teaching the alphabetic principle has become increasingly a topic of public debate and discussion, not only for those inside the teaching profession and among educational researchers, but also among a wider group of academics, policymakers and politicians, the popular media and the general public. While teachers remain responsible for teaching their students all the processes involved in reading texts (decoding, comprehending, interpreting, analysing), researchers from fields such as cognitive psychology and speech pathology, as well as politicians and media commentators, have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Part 1: Surveying the landscape
• Part 2: Exploring the terrain
• Part 3: Finding our way
• Glossary
• Index
• Backcover