Teaching methods must change to address globally poor reading skills, experts say

New research led by a team from Royal Holloway and the World Bank asserts that teaching methods should improve, after discovering that global literacy goals will not be met without major intervention.

The study, which is published in Nature Human Behaviour, concluded that evidence-based reading instruction methods—such as systematic phonics—should be put into practice as soon as possible in low- and middle-income countries.

Systematic phonics is explicit instruction about how the alphabet is used to represent spoken words, allowing children to take parts of words—such as “oy” in the word “boy” or “ay” in the word “play”—and apply them to unfamiliar words.

The research could prove of huge significance in efforts to improve global literacy. The researchers examined reading skills in more than 500,000 pupils in 48 low- and middle-income countries, assessing the children on things like the names of letters and correct pronunciation of single words.

Researchers found that basic reading skills are falling far below the minimum benchmarks, and that the performance gap widens across the first three years of learning to read, meaning children across the 48 countries are falling at the first hurdle when it comes to literacy.

Global literacy goals that were set out in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, will not be achieved without major intervention, according to the conclusions of the research.

The consensus among researchers is that the best method of developing literacy in children is to use high-quality, systematic phonics in the crucial early years of reading instruction. Systematic phonics has been used in England for around 15 years and has led to dramatic rises in basic reading skills. This is something that policy makers should introduce urgently in low- and middle-income countries, according to the researchers.

The researchers underlined the importance of improving global literacy, as being able to read is seen as an important foundation of economic growth, and a key contributor to health, gender equality and political participation. The researchers stressed that wider investments into global education are less effective than they should be because children are not learning to read.

Professor Kathy Rastle from the Department of Psychology said, “Our findings reveal a major failure of public policy. Teaching children to read is the most important task for education systems worldwide, and yet, children in low- and middle-income countries are not even getting off the starting block. Systematic phonics provides the means to get these pupils onto a trajectory for successful reading.”

Michael Crawford from the World Bank added, “We have over 30 years of research showing how to develop successful readers. Education decision makers should urgently put that evidence into action.”