Civitas Blog

Those with sufficiently intact and long memories will doubtless still be able to remember quite vividly how easy and enjoyable it was to learn to read in primary school. One aid in the process back in the 'fifties and 'sixties were series of very simple reading books that gradually became slightly but progressively more challenging and interesting.

One notable example of such were the Ladybird 'Peter and Jane' stories.

That approach got swept away in the wake of more progressive but less effective methods introduced into primary schools with disastrous effect in the seventies.

Well warranted concern by the present Labour government about high rates of illiteracy among schoolchildren and school-leavers led to its imposition of a 'literacy strategy' that required children by age seven to have been taught to read 158 specific prescribed words.

Today's Times reports some startling results of a £1million research study just completed by Warwick University's Institute of Education that call that strategy into question.

Among its findings were that: 'only 100 of the most common words were needed to tackle any book, including adult fiction and non-fiction'; that 'only 16 words accounted for a quarter of written English'; that, with mastery of those hundred 'high-frequency' words, children could understand nearly a half of all texts; and that the additional 58 words required under the literacy strategy added only between 2 and 4% to the understanding of children.

The implication of the research is that young children need not have been obliged to learned as many as over a third of the words the literary strategy requires them to by aged seven before being able to read for themselves. The time set aside in school to ensuring children have mastered the surplus third of prescribed words would have been better spent letting them read books that, like the Peter and Jane series, initially used only words from the most common 100 and then gradually expanded the children's reading vocabulary by introducing new words.

Those, like the present writer with both distant but pleasant memories of having learned to read with the old-style Ladybird books and more recent but distinctly less pleasant memories of seeing what purgatory their own children's primary schooling was made by the government's literacy strategy requiring them to master masses of lists of words at the expense of letting them read easy texts for themselves, will have a word of their own to describe that strategy that, despite being an easy word does figure among the government's list of prescribed words.

Can you guess, readers, what it is? Here is a clue: it has four letters, starts with 's,' and ends with 't'.