Melanie Capobianco has one goal for her son this school year: improving his reading.
She spends hundreds of dollars a month to make this happen.
Capobianco’s son, her oldest child, is in Grade 2 in Toronto. Near the end of 2022, after his first term in Grade 1, she and her husband learned he was struggling to read. At first, they were not too concerned; they thought he was having difficulty because he started school during the pandemic.
But his report card at the end of the school year showed the problem had continued.
Confused, Capobianco asked other parents about their experiences. Many had similar stories. Their children also struggled to read. As Capobianco learned more, she realized her son was not learning a key literacy skill: phonics.
“I’m just astounded at how many children are not able to read,” said Capobianco, a devout book lover.
Her son’s teachers were supportive but have limited resources. So, Capobianco hired a private tutor. Her son spent part of the summer learning letter sounds and spelling. He still sees his tutor weekly. To his parents’ surprise, he enjoys it. His grades have improved dramatically.
She worries about other students.
“We live in Canada. I have an expectation that our children are going to be taught to learn how to read at school,” Capobianco said.
In many Canadian schools, children are not learning to read. Specifically, they are not being taught skills, such as phonics, that teach them the sounds that different letter combinations make.
Parents, teachers and education experts are calling for change. They want more schools to teach using a structured literacy approach, which emphasizes teaching that is explicit and systematic.
Explicit teaching means students are taught how to read, including different letter sounds. Teachers do not wait to see if a student will figure out how to read just by having books read to them, for example.
Teaching also needs to be systematic, where the skills they learn build upon each other.
180-degree change
In some places, change is happening. But — just like learning to read — it happens slowly.
Last month, the Ontario Ministry of Education announced that starting September 2025, phonics will be part of the Kindergarten curriculum.
In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released its landmark Right to Read report, which noted that 26 per cent of all Ontario Grade 3 students in 2018-2019 were not meeting the provincial standards for literacy. “With science-based approaches to reading instruction,” only about five per cent of students should have been below grade-level expectations, the report said.
The report included 157 recommendations for improving how Ontario’s schools teach students to read. The report recommended that phonics be taught in Kindergarten to Grade 8.
The report “called for a 180-degree change in the approach to education in Ontario,” Patricia De Guire, chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commissioner, said in an interview this week.
Saskatchewan’s Human Rights Commission released a similar report in September that also said teaching phonics is good for students.
The Saskatchewan government has not said what it will do with the report’s findings. In a statement to Canadian Affairs, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education said it is aware of the report and examining “initiatives already underway.”
Curriculum needs to change, says Andrea Fraser, a former elementary school teacher in Saskatchewan. Currently, elementary students are told to use a word’s shape, the context of a sentence or pictures to determine what a word says.
If this fails, children are encouraged to guess — and not corrected if they are wrong, says Fraser, who is now a professor in the faculty of education at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Sometimes, students are told to skip a word instead of figuring out what it says.
But children need clear instruction about how to read, she says. Teachers cannot give children books and hope “they will eventually figure it out on their own,” she said. “We know that is just not how reading develops.”
Phonics is a much more efficient way to teach reading than relying on context in a sentence or sight reading, says Robert Savage, dean of education at York University in Toronto. Science backs it up, too. Phonics focuses a student’s attention, he says, which helps them retain information.
At the First Nation School Board in the Yukon, students are required to have 90 minutes of literacy instruction each day, divided into three 30-minute sessions. One is always about phonics.
The school board, which was formed in 2022, has made structured literacy a priority, even though it uses the British Columbia curriculum that does not mandate structured literacy. But the Yukon teachers thought this was important — because they had met many Grade 4 students who could not read.
Students have weekly tests, but they are not spending their days filling out workbooks. Lessons incorporate First Nation culture.
For example, they may go fishing on a lake and then write about it as part of their lesson. The school board hosts family literacy nights so the whole community is involved. Literacy coaches travel to schools across the territory — including to a fly-in school — to help teachers and determine if students are struggling with reading.
“Our bottom line with the First Nation School Board is that we’re building relationships to support students, with teachers, with parents and community,” said Lauren Murphy, one of the school’s literacy coaches.
‘No quick fix’
At the Loft Literacy Clinic in Toronto, Diane Polk teaches children to read with workbooks and games. In her hour-long tutoring sessions, students start by practising writing. Then they practise different letter sounds before moving onto reading short passages. Each lesson ends with a game that reinforces something from earlier in the lesson. For example, they may play Go Fish with cards printed with words that contain “sh.”
It takes time, says Polk. If students practise phonics twice a week, for an hour each time, they should see results in six to eight months, she says. “This is not a quick fix.”
Structured literacy is not about endless workbooks, says Melanie Baerg, a certified school psychologist and an instructor in the school of education at the University of Northern British Columbia. “But it is practice. And practice is hard.”
Baerg authored a December open letter from the British Columbia Association of School Psychologists that called on the province to reject literacy methods that rely on things like cues, and embrace the scientifically proven structured literacy approach.
Ultimately, structured literacy instruction may take work and discipline, but it gives students an opportunity to love reading.
“Nothing kills the joy of reading like not being able to read,” said Baerg.
Capobianco is starting to see that joy with her son. Time will tell if he will become a book lover too.
He reads his Lego kits’ instructions on his own now, instead of asking his mom for help. He has more confidence; his parents have less stress.
“He feels empowered by these tools,” Capobianco said. “He is a completely different kid.”
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Melanie Baerg is a former school psychologist. In fact, Baerg is a registered school psychologist.
