| But what if you
start late? |
393 |
|
to identifying the next
frontier, the third-wave children - that small core who do not appear able to accelerate
at the rates of the majority of pupils for whom the scheme is the appropriate
measure."28
Despite that international praise, many New Zealand
primary schools say that combinations of
other programs - as reported in this chapter - are much more effective, and certainly much
more cost-effective, in teaching youngsters to read.
Personal key vocabularies
Other than Marie Clay and former Director of Education,
Dr. C.E. Beeby, the New Zealand educational innovator best known in other countries is
probably the late Sylvia Ashton-Warner. She first burst to prominence internationally with
her book Teacher in 1963. It was based largely on her work teaching primary school
in New Zealand rural areas with a mainly Maori population. And her supporters* would say
it provides one of the main effective answers to that "third wave" reading
problem. In the early 1950s, New Zealand introduced into its schools the Janet and John
series of readers, a British modification of the American Alice and Jerry series.
But even then teachers were encouraged to make up their own books based on children's own
lives.
In listening to young Maori children,
Ashton-Warner"came to realize that some words - different words for each child - were
more meaningful and memorable than others." When she asked a young child to write
about a "train" he wrote about a "canoe".
She then started to listen to each child and selected
the key words "which were so meaningful to him that he was able to remember them when
he had seen them only once". As Lynley Hood writes in Sylvia, her biography of
Ashton-Warner: "Her pupils learned to read from their personal key vocabularies.
Nearly every day, from their experiences at home or at school, Sylvia helped each child
select a new key word. She wrote the word with heavy crayon on a stout piece of cardboard
and gave it to the child. The word cards became as personal and precious to the
* Those reading Sylvia Aston-Warner's work for the first time should, in fairness,
be made aware that, among her many excellent other qualities, she was also eccentric and
prone to exaggeration. While she can claim credit for inventing the key vocabulary
concept, many of her writings wrongly imply that she was a lone voice crying in New
Zealand's educational wilderness of child-centered education. In fact, Beeby, as head of
the Department of Education, was pioneering that very concept, in a rational and effective
way.
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
