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Give Boys a Chance
In a comment to “Why Boys Fail”, Susan suggests a read of Bonnie Macmillan’s book Why Boys Are Different, available from our lending library. According to Dr. Macmillan, there are essentially two kinds of beginning reading instruction: the multi-focus approach (now called Balanced Literacy) and the single-focus approach (systematic phonics), and boys learn much better if they are taught by a single-focus approach. Here’s an excerpt from the section on reading research (p. 119).
“A large body of reliable research consistently demonstrates that the more a method is focused on the direct teaching of the two sets of information and the two skills used during reading, the faster and better children learn to read. The more time a teacher spends on teaching other things, the slower and the lower the reading achievement.
“Large classroom studies in Scotland, Canada, England and the USA that have compared the effects of different teaching methods are particularly convincing: they show that single-focus-taught children end up with reading ages as much as one to two years above their actual ages, whereas those taught by other methods can often wind up reading or spelling well below their age level.
“In a large classroom study in Canada, conducted by Karen Sumbler and Dale Willows in 1996, it was found that time spent engaged in the following six activities makes no difference to beginners’ reading achievement: phonological awareness training; sight word learning (memorizing words); shared reading; class chanting of patterned or rhyming books; any attempt to write text; the learning of letter names.
“Sex differences are eradicated by the single-focus method, and sometimes boys even outperform girls. For example, Scottish research examined the long-term effects of this form of instruction. Five years on, boys taught by the single-focus method were reading at a level not only two and a half years above their age but also seven months ahead of similarly taught girls.
“British government surveys confirm these results. In England, multi-focus methods swept into use in the last 1960s and early 1970s, but infiltrated Scottish schools much later. After the introduction of these methods in England, it was discovered that the average English child was reading at a level 18 months below that of the average Scottish child. During this same period, significant sex differences in reading began to appear. These were apparent by the late 1970s and early 1980s in England, but did not appear in Scotland until the late 1990s.”
This is a good article. It makes me wonder if this is what I saw in my son, compared to my daughter. They both began their formal education in private schools over in Asia. Quite honestly, I don’t know what method my son was instructed in: I didn’t have to. He was reading Tolkien at age seven, and did his reading assignment on the bus, en route from school. Upon arriving home, he’d talked about what he had just read, everything he had done in school that day, and constantly about The Hobbit, etc. On the other hand, at age seven, my daughter came back here to Ontario. I could not get her to read. It took until she was in seventh grade to find a genre that would get her to settle down and read a book. She reads now, so does my son, but unfortunately, he stagnated, reading only fantasy for many years. Just an observation—not ‘science’ but I think that the schools over here had something to do with quashing my children’s young minds, and it was an enormous amount of work to undo it. This has often made me think of what Ontario schools have done to the minds of children enrolled in schools here, who have never had the opportunity to be in good schools. What have they lost, and all of us as a society?