Reading series and methods
There is no comprehensive account of the history of reading and reading
methods in New Zealand after Price's 1987 essay, though Price himself
has a work in progress on the history of reading books from 1900.
However, the number of studies and papers on reading grows exponentially
from the 1950s. Much of the research was initiated and funded by the
Department (now Ministry) of Education and the New Zealand Council for
Educational Research (NZCER). Hig[h]lights in
Education 1816-1985 (1986) is a useful checklist of major
events in education, and Roger Openshaw's 'Schooling in the 50's and 60's' (1991) and Price's School
Books Published in New Zealand to 1960 (1992) provide accounts
of the materials and educational methods of those years. Price (1992) is
a supplement to Bagnall's New Zealand National
Bibliography to the year 1960 which excluded school textbooks;
Price contains about 2,000 titles listed in chronological order under
subject headings.
The production of
reading materials has been a traditional activity of the
Department/Ministry of Education dating back to before the 1920s;
reading readiness has latterly been a focus of its research and
publication. The School Journal , which began in
1907, has been a continuous source of reading material for schools.
Provided free to every child monthly until the late 1950s, it is a mix
of fiction and non-fiction produced by local writers and was accompanied
(1948-80) by School Bulletins for primary and
post-primary students, also published by the Department. In 1989 the
School Publications Branch of the Department of Education was
corporatised into Learning Media Ltd, which continues to produce the Journal and the Ready to
Read series, as well as handbooks for teachers on reading and
writing. Its School Journal Catalogue (1996) is a
current index.
The Department of
Education also produced guides for teachers to help them choose readers:
Books for Infant Classes (1969), a checklist
which gave the readers a rating; Books for Junior
Classes (1978), now published every two years (the most recent
in 1996), a classified guide to commercially-published material; Reading in Junior Classes (1991); and The Learner as a Reader (1996), which has a
section on recent reading resources produced by the Ministry of
Education.
Janet and John , which replaced Whitcombe's Progressive Readers series in 1949, used a combination of
phonic analysis pre-reading and 'look and say' vocabulary learning, but
the early issues were weak on narrative. ( Run, John,
Run: Watch, Janet, Watch , a study of sex-role stereotyping in
infant readers was published in 1975, and Anne Else critiqued the sexism
and racism of Janet and John readers in a paper
given at the first annual conference of the History of the Book in New
Zealand, Auckland, 1995.) Initially there were seven books accompanied
by a handbook for teachers, but it was found they needed supplementing
to reduce the steepness of the learning curve. In 1963 the Department of
Education published the New Zealand-centred Ready to
Read series of 12 little and six big books. The Ready to Read series produces new titles every
year and is issued to all New Zealand schools with junior classes;
support materials include An Introduction to Ready to
Read (1993).
At the invitation of
the Department of Education, a number of publishers also began
publishing supplementary little book series in the 1960s: Reed's Read it Yourself books and the Environmental
readers, Paul's Book Arcade Playtime readers,
Whitcombe and Tombs's Step Along Stories , and
Price Milburn. Price Milburn's 32 PM Supplementary
Readers were published 1963-65 and followed the same graded
colour covers and vocabularies as Ready to Read .
In 1968 Price Milburn began to export to America and Britain. The books
were revised in 1969 and included in the long-running series PM Story Readers , many of them written by
Beverley Randell, one of the best known and most prolific writers of
story readers for children. Hugh Price's Beverley
Randell: A Checklist of Children's Books Written by Her,
1955-1995 (1996) indicates the scope of her writing and the series
of children's books available.
Shortland introduced
the Story Box series for five-to eight-year-olds
to New Zealand schools in 1978 and started exporting them in 1979. Many
of the readers were written by Joy Cowley, the well-known novelist.
Wendy Pye's reading scheme Jellybeans (for the
parent market) began in 1985 and contains about 200 titles, again many
written by already well-known writers like Cowley and Margaret Mahy. A
number of more recent issues have also come out in Mäori
translations. Pye's export of school readers to Europe and the US has
been phenomenally successful and she has also been the first publisher
in the world to successfully market an educational reading scheme on
video. Thomas Nelson took over from Price Milburn and produces picture
books and other early reading material. In 1997 Learning Media expanded
into the United States, introducing two new children's
programmes—Learning Media Literacy and Learning Media
Professional—with 140 New Zealand children's books and
materials adapted for the American market.