Phonics Articles

• The Origins of the Fitzroy Method, Philip O'Carroll
• From Jungle to Literacy, Philip O'Carroll

The Origin of the Fitzroy Readers

In the early seventies, Faye Berryman and I met and started up the Fitzroy Community School in North Fitzroy, an inner suburb of Melbourne.

Faye had been a secondary teacher who had witnessed firsthand the sad results of children emerging from primary schooling with poor literacy skills. I had been a philosophy lecturer, specialising in logic and linguistics. We had not been involved in primary schooling, but were confronted with the problem of teaching young children to read.

We believed that fluent and accurate reading was at the core of a good education. We were unaware that schools at the time had dropped the phonic approach – the traditional technique of deciphering words by sounding them out. No wonder we were puzzled that we couldn’t find any Readers (i.e. simple books designed to help teach children to read) in the educational bookstores.

At the time we didn’t realise that in other schools, stories were being read to children, and that the plan was that after sufficient immersion in these regular stories, children would in time get to know how each word looked and, in this way, gradually become fluent readers and writers. Time has proved that this method (Whole Language) is inadequate for a large percentage of children; but until its decline in recent years, it had actually gained a stranglehold within the school system.

We constructed little stories from basic spelling principles – like the easy to sound-out early Fitzroy Phonics Readers: A Fat Cat, A Big Pig and The Pet Hen. We waited until Story 9 to bring in our first digraph ('oo'), and after that only very gradually introduced the rest of the digraphs into our programme.

There are, of course, some words that don’t fit into the system – words like the, said, and eye. We call these special words, i.e. words that have to be learned by sight. We made sure there were only a few of them with each story and warned the child (and teacher) about them on the back cover of each book. They were not to be sounded out, but only read as whole words. They could be practised before the story was read.

The secret of the Fitzroy Readers’ success is that when children actually get to read a 'book' for themselves, their confidence grows, and, as a result they will want to try the next one.

After a while, it became obvious that Faye was the better story writer, and the majority of the story ideas are hers. Indeed, long before the school was even thought of, Faye had written several Black and White Bear stories for her children, each story covering an emotional fact of life such as friendship, mood changes, jealousy, etc.

I eventually managed to edit these stories without ruining their flow, and I made them long enough or short enough, making much use of the new sound for that story and using previously learned words. I fitted them into our series of stories to make a gentle, logical progression.

Editing was a very involved process in the case of our readers. Every story needed to be constructed so that there weren’t any 'surprises' in vocabulary, while still being a rewarding read. This 'no surprises' aspect is what has restored the reading confidence of many children who previously struggled with literacy.

At first, the distribution of these stories to other schools was not intended. We wrote them for our own students, and it was as much a surprise to us as to anyone else when our students started regularly winning national poetry awards and other writing competitions; gained first-class scores on literacy tests; and passed entrance exams to highly selective secondary schools with impressive ease.

As a result, teachers from other schools soon asked us what reading method we used and urged us to share our readers.

Despite the prompting, we were still not sure whether other schools would actually use our new phonics materials, so we weren’t keen at first to devote much time or energy to publishing them – especially since Faye was so busy teaching. Up until that point our texts had only ever been hand printed and roughly illustrated by Philip – a non-artist using one black pen.

Nevertheless, we photocopied a few hundred of each, offered them to other schools and, lo and behold, they were snapped up. This made us fully aware of the great need for materials of this kind, so we engaged an artist who drew much better than Philip. With her black drawings, we got the words typeset in a plain English font and printed them in a new edition. This, too, was quickly snapped up.

Our next move was to go to full-colour illustrations, which most teachers preferred. From there a whole new project developed, one that has helped children not only in over 3500 Australian schools, but also in schools spread throughout many other countries, including: New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and the UK. To date we have sold well over 1,000,000 story booklets and the demand keeps growing.

It is our hope that one day our programme will be used in many more countries to instil reading, writing and grammatical confidence among students who have been taught to believe that they are poor learners.

We hope to show that in reality there are few poor learners – just clumsy literacy programs.

May children everywhere be blessed with the joy of literacy.

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From Jungle to Literacy

THERE is a marvellous moment in the movie Greystoke, a grown-up version of the Tarzan story. Visualise an aristocratic dinner party in Victorian England. Tarzan has been brought out of the jungle, is dressed in fine clothes and is being shown off to the guests.

Inevitably, one arrogant blue-blood passes a very denigrating remark, in exquisite English, about the “savage” at the table. The party freezes, embarrassed by the unpleasantness. The silence is soon broken however by Tarzan himself, who repeats the insult, word-perfect, imitating flawlessly the noble accent in which it was uttered. Delightful.

What Tarzan is demonstrating here, to a rare degree of refinement, is the human ability to reproduce the sounds of one’s environment. In hunter tribes, this ability is a matter of survival. Imitate the prey, get close, catch dinner. In modern times this aural/oral mimicking is still a vital living skill, but the only sound most of us now go to great pains to imitate is the speech of our fellow humans.

And in what is still the most extraordinary feat of learning regularly performed on this planet, infants acquire fluency in a modern language in just a few years, starting from a zero-language basis - normally without the help of the school industry.

In short, we humans are genetically endowed with amazingly elaborate hardware that enables us to first mimic, then comprehend, and then articulate utterances in the local language. A high degree of linguistic competency is already evident by the time we start school.

School, we hope, will then broaden the range of texts the children are exposed to. Improved vocabulary and more refined grammar should painlessly follow. What does not automatically follow is the ability to read and write.

An interesting suggestion was put forward some years ago - that perhaps literacy is acquired in the same way as language. Just immerse them in the written word and they’ll pick it up. This notion became, for a time, educational gospel.

But alas, the Tarzan faculty of language by osmosis does not extend to the written word. Written symbols have arisen very late in human evolution, and a facility for decoding them has not become innate. Proof of this can be expressed in one simple statement: virtually everyone can speak, but many cannot read or write. Despite being surrounded by visual symbols.

Many a post-primary educator finds that a proportion of students have to be taken aside for catch-up English before they can effectively engage in the other subjects at an ordinary level. I think it is safe to say that most literacy educators now recognise the necessity of involving human phonic skills in their English program.

Of course English spelling is notoriously inconsistent. But given the oral/aural genesis of human language acquisition, children gain immensely by becoming conscious of the common ways of writing the sounds of English.

The Fitzroy Readers have made this job easy for thousands of teachers.

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