READING WARS - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

READING WARS

A In many developed countries literacy skills are under siege. This is true even in societies where access to primary education is universal and governments invest heavily in education. New Zealand, for example, was leading the world in literacy rates in 1970, but tumbled to thirteenth place in 2001 and then again to twenty-fourth just a few years later. Test scores in the USA also slumped ten percent during the 1990s despite the country riding an economic boom for much of the decade. In some cases these statistics reverse trends that were in motion for over a century and a half. The steady, gradual expansion of literacy across social groups and classes was one of the greatest successes of the period of industrialisation that began in the mid-1850s.

B This reversal of fortunes has lead to widespread contention over the pedagogy of teaching literacy. What was once a dry and technical affair — the esoteric business of linguists and policy analysts — rapidly escalated into a series of skirmishes that were played out in high-visibility forums: Newspapers ran special features, columns and letters-to-the-editor on the literacy crisis; politicians successfully ran their national campaigns on improving reading test scores; and parents had their say by joining Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) and lobby groups.

C The arguments around reading pooled into two different classroom methodologies: constructivism and behaviourism. The constructivist methodology grew from a holistic conception of knowledge creation that understood reading and writing to be innate, humanistic and interpretative practices that suffered when they were spliced and formalised within rigid doctrines, strict rules and universal skill-sets. Constructivists associate words with meanings; each word might be thought of as a Chinese ideogram. Students are encouraged to learn individual words and skip over and guess words they do not understand, or learn to interpret those words by situating them within the lexical infrastructure of the sentence and the story's wider narrative. These practices materialise as learning processes centred on guided group reading and independent reading of high-quality, culturally diverse literature or textual composition that emphasises pupils conveying their own thoughts and feelings for real purposes such as letters to pen pals or journal entries.

D Behaviourism sees the pedagogical process in a less dialectical fashion — words are initially taught not lexically, as vehicles to convey meaning, but rather sub-lexically, as a combination of features that can be separated and learnt in a schematic process. The behaviourist approach does not focus on words at all in the early stages of learning. Rather, it is centred on a universally applicable method of teaching students to isolate graphemes and phonemes with the intention that students will eventually learn to synthesise these individual parts and make sense of spoken words textually. In this way, individual components are not equated with the strokes of a brush on a Chinese ideogram, but rather as the focal pieces of interpretation — as in, for example, learning to read musical notations or Morse Code. Because of its emphasis on universal rules, behaviourism is much more conducive to formal examination and the consolidation of results across regions and countries. The ability to master language is considered to rest in the acquisition of a set of skills that exist independently of individuals. Classroom learning is therefore based upon the transmission of knowledge from tutor to student, rather than seen as an internalised process that erupts within the students themselves.

E So who comes out on top? It is not easy to say. Champions of behaviourism have claimed victory because constructivist learning took over in the late 1980s, just before test scores on literacy began sinking across the West. Constructivists, however, can make the valid claim that the behaviourist approach has a heavy methodological bias towards testing and examination, and that test results do not represent the ability of individuals to use and interpret language freely and creatively. Furthermore, different socio-economic groups respond in different ways to each method. Those from wealthier families tend to do well regardless of the method, but thrive on the constructivist approach implemented in the 1990s. Children from poorer families, however, are better served by behaviourism. These outcomes have ramped up levels of socio-economic based educational disparities in educational systems that have pushed the constructivist method.

F It is unlikely that either constructivism or behaviourism will be permanently sidelined from curricula in the near future. Most teachers find it easier to incorporate aspects of each approach. Constructivism may ultimately hold the trump card because of its proven success with pupils who come from families where they are introduced to reading and writing in various forms from a young age — this process of 'living and learning' and immersing oneself in language is a sound principle. In a world rife with social inequities, households with illiterate parents and a scarcity of funding for education, however, the behaviourist approach may have the upper hand in teaching children to access the basic skills of literacy quickly and efficiently, even if some linguistic creativity is crushed in the process.