Back to basics best for black kids (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Back to basics best for black kids

Dorothy Illing 12nov04
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11360822%255E2702,00.html

A LEADING academic has reignited the debate around poor Aboriginal
literacy, saying indigenous students "will fly" if they have the right
teaching.

Director of Macquarie University's Special Education Centre Kevin
Wheldall said all children, including Aborigines, would benefit from
fundamental changes to the way reading was taught in schools.

"If they had an approach that included an emphasis on basic skills
teaching ... it would lift everybody's game," he said yesterday.
"Aboriginal kids won't be any different from anyone else."

Education Minister Brendan Nelson reopened the reading wars this week
when he announced a national inquiry into the way reading was taught in
primary schools. And yesterday he was reminded that some of the worst
cases of illiteracy occurred in indigenous communities. Chairman of the
Shalom Christian College in Townsville, Reverend Shayne Blackman, urged
Dr Nelson to extend the inquiry to focus on indigenous education.

Professor Wheldall wants more emphasis on phonics when teaching reading.
He was among the 26 leading educators who wrote a letter to Dr Nelson
in April urging the inquiry. They argue that the whole-language
approach used in many schools should give way to phonics, a system that
relies on knowledge of the alphabet and decoding words into syllables
and sounds.

Professor Wheldall believes there is room for both systems but that the
pendulum needs to swing back towards phonics.

He recently went to the isolated town of Coen on Queensland's Cape York
where he met indigenous leaders and visited the local school. "I have a
bit of a problem with this idea that somehow Aboriginal kids are
different and they need to be taught differently. They're kids," he
said.

But principal of the southern Queensland Aboriginal community of
Cherbourg's state school, Chris Sarra, said you could not separate
teaching from other learning-related issues such as attendance rates.

Since 2000, the literacy rate at the Cherbourg school has risen by 83
per cent and attendance levels are now at 95 per cent. Mr Sarra said
the improvements had little to do with phonics-based or
whole-of-language approaches.

"You can have the sexiest literacy program in the school, but if the
culture of learning is not right then it just won't happen," he said.