Jennifer Buckingham and Linda Meeks have conducted a new review of Australian initial teacher education for Multilit and Five from Five. They reviewed all of publicly available material published by universities on their websites that related to core literacy units, including prescribed texts and lecturer background.
The findings are pretty grim. Only 4% of courses had a specific focus on early reading instruction, with a further 26% mentioning it but lumping it in with other phases. The rest didn’t mention it at all.
This is not surprising given that only 15% of lecturers and unit coordinators could be identified as having expertise in early literacy. 55% had expertise in other aspects of literacy such as ‘multi-modal’ literacy (which I think is something to do with computers). 30% had expertise in areas other than literacy.
Strikingly, not one course outline mentioned The Simple View of Reading. This is a leading theoretical framework, with further empirical validation published recently. We might speculate that if reading ability can be largely explained as the product of decoding knowledge and oral comprehension, as the simple view implies, this leaves little space for conceptions about comprehension that are popular in education faculties.
Phonics denialists will use ad hominem to dismiss this report. Multilit offers reading programmes that schools can purchase. However, these programmes are largely about correcting the failure of initial reading instruction so it is presumably in their commercial interests to maintain the status quo. This argument will not satisfy phonics denialists who are not well-known for their proficiency with logic.
Filling the pail 
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