Some of you might be aware that Finland is sometimes brought up as an argument against teaching babies to read because Finnish students start school at the age of 7 and have one of the highest literacy rates in the world and top international tests. Some people use this to say that children should actually be thought to read even later than kindergarten and that baby reading is pointless. This article finds a couple of problems with this.
One is that the Finnish language is far easier to learn than English, so it’s possible to achieve higher levels of literacy with far less effort. Second, large numbers of Finnish children are able to read before the start school. So, it isn’t true that students in Finland start learning to read at the age of 7. Many of them can already read or have pre-reading skills before officially learning to read in school.
I second that. Back when I was growing up in Russia, everyone entered school at 7, including me. Russia has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, around 99%, or at least used to have. But, I could read books well before that, as well as write, because I was taught at home. So, the age when you enter school itself is not representive of the ability to read. And, as the article points out, a large percentage of Finish students could read before entering school, so that kind of makes the argument of delaying reading instruction based on Finish example pointless.
It would actually make sense that if formal education begins at 7 that many parents would step in and teach something before then, especially in a country like Finland where learning and reading are so much a part of the culture. A lot of children might also figure out some of the basics of reading themselves by the age of 7, if they have been read to a lot. I find it odd that so many people make this argument without checking the facts first.
This article is a bit strange.
“Finnish is much easier to learn”
Finnish is one of the most difficult languages of the world;
mother’s language is not easy or difficult to learn; it just is.
Personally I know basics of Finnish (I attended language courses for some months). For foreigner, it is really hard to learn, but it is easy to learn to read or write. There is just one way how to spell each letter, and the word is just a sum of letters. But this is not anything strange in this region; also in languages of neighboring countries like Estonia, Latvia, Sweden, Russia, writing and spelling is “the same”. I know Russian and Swedish better than Finnish and I am Latvian. Estonian is so similar to Finnish that it can be considered as dialect, but Estonians are not top scorers. Also we Latvians are not top scorers and our writing and spelling is the same, with few and well-defined exceptions.
In Latvia also children go to school at 7, and reading is not required at this age. Children start to learn to read only at the first class. But most of children can read before the first class. Their parents teach them. In kindergartens, children must learn just capital letters. Similar system might be in Russia. It is changing just now; since the last year, reading is thought earlier.
As I know my neighboring countries, there can be one reason why Finns are better. If Finland (and also in Sweden as i know), it is good to be a teacher in the state school. Teachers are well paid and reputable. State school is a safe and nice place for child.
It’s easy for native Finnish speakers to learn to read in Finnish because it is an almost purely phonetic language. It is also easy in the sense that it can be easier to figure out word meaning based on context. That does not mean that it would be easy to learn as a foreign language. The article is referring to the ease of learning to read for a Finnish speaker in comparison to the greater difficulty in learning to read in English for a native English speaker. But Finland has advantages other than language, such as low rates of poverty and a culture that places a lot of value on learning. So, language alone is not the reason they do so well academically. It is one factor that probably helps a lot.