Sarah McGinnis
Telegraph-Journal

The Education Department has to go back to the ABCs and relearn how best to teach reading, says a reading expert.

Patricia H. Huggard, a reading specialist for more than 50 years, is appalled at the number of students being pushed through the education system without basic literacy skills and says a shift is needed in the way reading is taught from day one.

"If it's taught the right way, there's no question that every kid can read," Mrs. Huggard said. "This is what bugs me. There's no reason to have all these kids who don't understand and can't read. It's a misery."

Mrs. Huggard, the author of Can Your Child Read Better Than a Hill O' Beans? and founder of the Laramac Reading Services in Fredericton, has taught hundreds of adults and children to read.

She blames poor literacy skills for dropping test scores on provincial math exams and in other subjects.

"I think all these poor levels coming up are (because) kids can't read the questions properly or they can't write things down or spell them," she said. "If you can't do that, you can't do any subject."

The province has moved in the right direction by instituting the phonemic awareness system, Mrs. Huggard said. Phonemic awareness uses the sight and sounds of letters, with emphasis on the importance of vowels, to help children understand how words work. It is a systematic approach to allow youngsters to break apart words to figure out how they sound and then later what they mean.

"They are using phonemic awareness, which is a very good system, but what they are doing is they are still bringing the old whole language into it. They are mixing the two together and that's wrong," Mrs. Huggard said.

Whole language attempts to have children memorize words. For instance, they are given books and asked to look at the pictures and connect the image and the word. They are also asked to read a sentence and if they don't understand a word, are to guess what it might mean from the other words in the phrase.

"They had to look at a word and divide it up and look and see if they could find a small word inside the big inside it. That was ridiculous because fat and her would be father," Mrs. Huggard said.

With more than 400,000 words in the English language, she said memorization just won't work. She also wants to take the guesswork out of the system. By sticking with phonemic awareness and teaching children the vowel sounds and how they come together with consonants to create a word, as she does in her private tutoring program, Mrs. Huggard said kids will begin reading.

In April the province announced the Quality Learning Agenda with a special focus on early literacy skills. The $21.6-million investment included a promise to add 500 new teachers over four years and a commitment to have all students reading by Grade 2 and 90 per cent of them reading at their grade level.

The president of the Learning Disability Association of New Brunswick applauds the government for announcing changes in the education system, but said it's time for the province to explain how it will make its Quality Learning Agenda a reality.

"The commitment pleases us greatly that children will learn to read by the end of Grade 2, but we are concerned that there needs to be methodology there that is presented in such a way the children will have the best chance to learn to read," Mary Ann Stevens said.

"If they don't learn to read after Grade 2, what do we do for those children who haven't been able to grasp it in that length of time? Where do we go from there?"

Ms. Stevens said a greater emphasis must put on giving educators the tools they need to teach literacy.

"Teachers are typically not taught to teach reading. (When) people who have learned to read themselves, the assumption is they can then teach somebody," she said. "It's like lots of things, in anywhere in life: if you know something, you are not necessarily able to break it into his parts and teach somebody."