Marie Clay, 81; her plan for helping poor readers in first grade caught on

Marie Clay, a New Zealand psychologist whose efforts to identify and help struggling readers before they finished first grade profoundly influenced educators in the United States and other countries, died at an Auckland hospice Friday after a short illness. She was 81.

Three decades ago, Clay turned her ideas about early remediation of poor readers into a program that became known worldwide as Reading Recovery.

The program focuses on helping first-graders in the bottom 20% of their class catch up to their peers and maintain grade-level performance. It challenged educators not to wait until second or third grade to tackle reading problems.

Clay’s methods were adopted nationally in New Zealand in 1983 before they began to spread to other countries, including Canada, Britain and Australia. They were introduced in 1984 in the United States, where 1.6 million students have gone through the Reading Recovery system of intense, one-on-one tutoring.

“She was by far the most important champion of the idea that reading problems could be identified and addressed with young children,” said Timothy Shanahan, president of the Delaware-based International Reading Assn.

“She found that she could catch a lot of these kids up and keep them from falling behind,” Shanahan said. “At this stage you don’t get much argument about that. That ... is due to Marie Clay.”

Clay was born Jan. 3, 1926, in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. The daughter of an accountant and a musician, she completed teacher training at Wellington College of Education in 1945 before earning a master’s degree with a thesis on teaching reading to children with special needs. She also worked as an assistant psychologist in the New Zealand Department of Education.

In 1950 she traveled to the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship to study child psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Welfare. She later returned to New Zealand to teach elementary school and help develop a postgraduate training program for educational psychologists at the University of Auckland, where she earned a doctorate in 1966 and became its first female professor.

Her doctoral research focused on when educators should begin to pay serious attention to reading problems. The conventional wisdom then was not to intervene too early because educators believed most children would catch on by second or third grade. But Clay thought that was too late. “Rather than waiting until they were 8 or 9,” she asked, “could we detect problems earlier and do something about it?”

To answer the question, she observed 100 first-graders for an entire academic year. One of her most novel tools was a booklet she devised with simple words and pictures. She used it as the basis of several activities she asked the children to perform.

If they held the book upside down, didn’t know where the cover was, or tried to read from right to left instead of left to right, she knew they were not familiar with print and would need extra help to master reading. Those who became proficient readers, on the other hand, knew just what to do.

Clay coined the term “emergent literacy” to describe the behaviors she observed in young children before they actually learned to read and write.

“She brought to people’s attention the fact that even very young children are learning important concepts about literacy before they come to school,” said Gay Su Pinnell, a reading expert and emeritus professor at Ohio State University, who was instrumental in introducing Reading Recovery in the United States.

Clay began to develop the reading program in 1976. Conceived to produce results quickly, it featured one-on-one, half-hour lessons each school day for 12 to 20 weeks.

Students left the program after they could read at the average level of first-graders in their school. Clay reported an 80% success rate with nonreading first-graders who completed the lessons in New Zealand.

During the 1980s and ‘90s, the program was embraced by schools across the U.S. By 1997, 2,500 Reading Recovery programs were operating in 49 states -- with 400 in California.

Clay was elected president of the International Reading Assn. from 1992 to 1993. She was the first non-North American to fill the post.

Critics complained about the cost of Reading Recovery -- about $7,500 per student -- and what they perceived as a de-emphasis on phonics instruction. A dip in reading test scores and a strong phonics movement in the 1990s slowed the growth of the program in the U.S., but advocates have maintained that it is effective.

Last month a federal research clearinghouse gave Reading Recovery the highest possible rating, noting positive effects on students’ alphabetic skills and general reading achievement.

Shanahan, who has been critical of Reading Recovery in the past, said the research validates Clay’s “basic notion that you have to give these kids help all along the way, identify them early on, and give them additional, more powerful instruction. She was right on all that.”

Clay is survived by two children, Ian and Jenny; and three grandchildren.

elaine.woo@latimes.com