New literacy program based on years of research, new French program 'a political experiment'

Former education minister Dominic Cardy believes the new literacy curriculum set to roll out in kindergarten to Grade 2 classrooms this fall deserves to be the sole focus of teachers and students.

Cardy worries the plan to replace French immersion hasn't been tested and if it's introduced, will interfere with the new science of reading program that officials in the Department of Education have been working on for years.

"That's going to be watered down and washed away a little bit with all the chaos going on around the second-language program and all for nothing," he said.

"Because this is now not an evidence-based, data-driven process, it's now purely politically driven and we've seen the results of endless political interferences in New Brunswick's education system. It doesn't work. It makes things worse."

Tried out in some classrooms

Development of the new literacy program, called Building Blocks of Reading, has included consultation with teachers, the development of new materials and classroom pilots for kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2 students.

Cardy, who resigned as minister in October, said that this is in stark contrast to the new plan for the French second-language curriculum, which would eliminate immersion in favour of a program where all students spend half their day in English and half in French.

He said the French framework was "just literally invented politically over the course of the last few months."

Mount A prof helped develop curriculum

The new reading curriculum has been in the works since 2015, when Department of Education officials started hearing from teachers who said they didn't have what they needed to help struggling readers.

That prompted a move to the new program based on the science of reading and away from the approach known as balanced literacy.

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Mount Allison psychology professor Gene Ouellette, who researches literacy acquisition and language development, is a consultant on the new early literacy curriculum.

"The science of reading is basically what I do for a living in terms of research and have for 20-plus years," he said. "And so it's very timely now to see that governments and education departments are looking towards that direction."

When he was first contacted by education officials in 2020, Ouellette said he was asked for "a little input" on the new program under development.

"I really thought the intent was excellent, and I loved to see the direction, but it wasn't quite necessarily compatible with the science of reading," he said. "So I ended up sending them back 25 pages of notes on it. Those notes were the beginning of a collaboration."

Ouellette said researchers usually just talk to other researchers, and teachers just talk to other teachers, so to be directly involved in developing curriculum that will be used in his home province has been rewarding.

The new science of reading program has five components, one of them being phonics, but Ouellette stressed it is not a return to the reading program from the 1970s and '80s,, when students sat at their desks doing worksheets.

Teaching based on research

"The science of reading basically means we're going to teach reading based upon research and the science of what we know about child development and how their reading brain develops," Ouellette said.

"Your oral speech and language is the foundation — how it's built upon your ability to process sounds, how it relates to vocabulary. So there's a lot of other components, but phonics is one piece. It's not simply a return just to to old-fashioned phonics."

Literacy comes first

Cardy said the new literacy program was his "singular focus" in his time as minister, because it is "at the very heart" of the problems the education system faces.

The province has long struggled with low literacy rates. The most recent test results show just 59.5 per cent of Grade 4 students met the desired standard for reading in 2021-22.

"Giving more kids the chance to be properly literate is going to vastly improve some of the other issues that we regularly talk about around the school system," Cardy said. "Like the problems with discipline and classroom composition."

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He said students who get to grades 4 or 5 without the ability to read often act out or withdraw.

"My team spent years putting a carefully timed package together that started off with the literacy reforms that we're talking about now," Cardy said.

After the literacy reforms, he said, the next issues to tackle are streaming and improvements to the inclusion program in schools, and then second-language training.

"All of those have to come in sequence."

Ouellette has lived in New Brunswick for more than 15 years and has seen the many changes to French immersion over the years.

He said those kinds of changes are something he hopes the new science of literacy curriculum will avoid, because it is based on scientific research.

"That's the thing with science is you don't have to throw out this approach and change it." Ouellette said. "You can just tweak it as more research is done and more findings come in.

"It evolves and then we make incremental changes to programs so we can stop abandoning programs and adopting something 100 per cent new every couple of years."

Time to set priorities

Ouellette believes it's time the government decided what it is going to prioritize — second-language acquisition or literacy.

"We're spending all this time and money developing this literacy program because it was recognized that it's an issue in New Brunswick, so now are you going to sacrifice some of that? Like what is the priority? 

Ouellette said the proposed French program that would have students spend half of every day in French, and half in English is "not compatible with anything we know" about human development, nor language development.

Based on research he believes the Grade 3 entry point for French Immersion was the best compromise for the acquisition of literacy, and language.

"If we could focus on boosting oral language in the first language and developing literacy in the first language through kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2, and start immersion in Grade 3 — it's kind of the best of all worlds," he said.

"Why we abandoned that I'm not sure. And now to go a half day in each [language] — I don't see how you're going to have first-language or literacy development."

Cardy said ignoring the years of work that have gone into the new literacy program by rolling out an ill-conceived French program at the same time will be demoralizing for public servants, but ultimately students will pay the price.

"This is not right for the kids of this province," he said.

"We cannot inflict an emotionally driven program that is not properly developed, that is not properly resourced — not just because it's wrong on the face of it for French-language instruction but because it's going to damage other things like teaching our kids to read."