At the end of a week in which the only news about Aboriginal
Australia was the legal system’s failure to protect a 10-year-old girl
gang-raped in Cape York, the scene at Redfern Town Hall
on Friday was a timely antidote for despair reports Miranda
Devine in the Sydney Morning Herald of 16 December 2007.
It was a graduation ceremony for 16 of 27 children who had
completed a remedial reading program launched this year by the Reverend Bill Crews of the Exodus Foundation. To qualify, the
children, most of whom are indigenous, had to be at least two years behind
their peers in reading. What that meant for many is they couldn’t read at all.
“I hated books because I couldn’t read and I didn’t
know what the words meant and I had to make it up,” said Jonny Sandstrom, 10, in year 4 at Darlington Public School.
During the 18-week course, the black marks on the page
suddenly started making sense. “I thought, I can finally read. I can read
any book.”
His favourite book is Just Annoying by Andy Griffiths. He
loves reading because “I get to find out what’s in the book.”
Nine-year-old twins Naryma and Wasana Grovenor, from Alexandria Park Community
School, also couldn’t
read. Now, says their mother Nadine Dixon, they always have their noses in a book
– on the bus, or even, perilously once for Wasana, when walking across the
road.
Nadine’s pride is mixed with sadness for her 16-year-old son
at home who still can’t read and has dropped out of school. “He thinks
he’s dumb,” said Nadine. “He says, ‘They’re getting all the help I
didn’t get.’ But he’s really proud of his sisters.”
Wasana can recite a long list of favourite books, especially
the Selby series about a talking dog. “I used to think books were
boring.”
Naryma’s favourite is Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s
Stone because “there are lots of hard words to read”.
She has shown phenomenal progress, says Macquarie University’s
Professor Kevin Wheldall, who devised the MULTILIT (Making Up Lost Time In
Literacy) program with its systematic instruction in phonics, teaching children
to read by sounding out words. Naryma has progressed to the standard of a
17-year-old in “phonological recoding” – the ability to sound out
non-words such as “sprank” or “klube”, which shows a child
is able to read any unfamiliar word.
All the children who have completed the program have
achieved excellent results, says Wheldall, despite some attendance problems.
After 14 weeks’ instruction, the first group of 18 slow-progress readers, from
years 3 to 6, increased their reading accuracy by an average 15 months, reading
comprehension by 14 months, word recognition by 12 months and non-word reading
by 27 months.
“Some of these kids are really bright and now they’re
exploding [with knowledge],” says Crews, who first teamed up with Wheldall
and partner Dr Robyn Beaman in 1996 when he opened a MULTILIT centre for
disadvantaged children at Ashfield Uniting Church because he was “sick of
burying kids” who had dropped out of school because they never learned to
read. “They’ve just been held back by the system.”
One by one on Friday, the graduating class took the stage at
Redfern Town Hall and fluently read speeches
they had written onto little cards for an audience of parents, teachers and
assorted dignitaries, including former education minister Brendan Nelson.
“I like to read because I learn lots of interesting
things,” said Natalia Batticciotto, 10. Oemar Alitembokarson, 11, said he
loved learning “funny words like snowbound”,
“blabbledabble” and “varoom” in his favourite book, Selby Snowbound.
“I like reading because it’s good for your education,” said Diana
Henry, 10.
Not one child wasn’t aware of the great gift received. It
was the same in Coen School in Cape York,
where Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson asked Wheldall and Beaman to set up a
reading program in 2005, with eager learners and spectacular results.
This year they will take the program to Aurukun, where the
10-year-old in this week’s news reports was gang-raped last year by nine youths
and men, who were released without penalty by a Cairns District Court judge.
The social workers, judge and prosecutor who contributed to this travesty of
justice should reflect on the great potential locked in children in even the
most dysfunctional indigenous community, if only they are given the same basic
protections expected by other Australians.
www.smh.com.au/news/miranda-devine/the-word-is-hope/2007/12/16/1197568323143.html