MY PREDICTION - Stuctured Literacy Will Help Level the Educational Playing Field

Canadian students have struggled to read and write. That stops this year.

- Jamie Metsala

In the AI age, literacy is more important than ever. Even a simple Google search requires users to structure their questions, interpret information and judge the reliability of sources.

Students need these core literacy skills, yet for decades, our teaching methods have often closed doors rather than opened them. In 2019, I worked with the Ontario Human Rights Commission on a public inquiry into the province's education system to find out whether students with reading disabilities were getting the instruction and interventions they needed. The answer was damning: Ontario wasn't only failing those students, but many others as well.

Since the '80s, Canadian school systems have favoured "balanced literacy"-closely related to the "whole language" approach-which places emphasis on oral language and prediction.

Students were encouraged to use cues from sentence structure, pictures, letter-sound connections and other context clues to discern the meaning of what they were reading, rather than receiving explicit instruction on how to read. When students came across words they didn't know, they'd use a carrier sentence they may have memorized, like "The boy ran up to the..." then guess the new word-"truck"-from the picture on the page.

Some students did learn to read using this cueing method, but as of 2019, at least a quarter of Grade 3 students didn't meet the Ontario provincial reading standard.