Dr Michael Johnston: Broken news

Learning to read is the first step in school education. It is essential to later learning. At first, it is also very difficult.

Things are made much easier for beginning readers if they are explicitly taught the regular correspondences between spelling and sound. It enables them to sound out words they haven’t seen in written form before, provided they know those words in spoken form.

Dr Michael Johnston: Te reo in year 1 - beginning readers need one language at a time

Last week a new educational controversy broke in the media. Headlines accused Education Minister Erica Stanford of ‘banning’ Māori words from primary school reading books.

The debate that followed generated more heat than light. Some commentators implied the move is racist. But there is a sound educational reason that Stanford asked the Ministry of Education to remove Māori words from books for Year 1 students. Unfortunately, none of the media coverage has explained that reason very clearly.