Vini Olsen-Reeder, research fellow at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Auckland. (Photo supplied)

Education minister Erica Stanford has imposed a near-total ban on Māori words in new additions to a series of books used to teach five-year-olds to read.

Stanford has decided to exclude all Māori words except for characters’ names from any new books in the Ministry of Education’s Ready to Read Phonics Plus series for five-year-olds.

Here’s Vincent Olsen-Reeder and Corinne Seals on why the justifications for the change just don’t stack up.

To explain its decision to remove Māori words from junior reading books, the Ministry of Education chose to hide behind jargon.

In a statement about the book At the Marae, it said:

“The Ministry has made this decision due to the high number of words that appear in the text in te reo Māori. Te reo Māori vowel sounds are different than English, making this book less appropriate for students to practice decoding words containing grapheme-phoneme correspondences that have already been taught.”

There are a few issues here.

We can’t help but point out the incorrect use of “than” (it should be “from”) and “practice” (it should be “practise”). They’re minor things, but this is the Ministry of Education, after all.

The much bigger issue is this: none of the claims make sense or appear to be based on research, once you unpick the jargon.

Here’s what we think the ministry is really doing.

1. Hiding behind jargon: “Decoding”

The ministry claims that the “high number” of te reo Māori words makes it difficult for children to practise “decoding” the text. “Decode” is jargon for “grasp the meaning of.”

Firstly, there are only eight Māori words in the book and all of them are in the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English. The words are marae, karanga, wharenui, Tāne (as a proper name), koro, hongi, karakia and kai.

These are te reo Māori words that are so common they’re now regarded as part of our national English vocabulary.

Secondly, research from credible linguists indicates that the average adult in Aotearoa can grasp the meaning of around 1,000 Māori words with varying degrees of accuracy and confidence because these words are so frequently used in New Zealand English. And as many as 70 Māori words are decoded by New Zealand English speakers with both high accuracy and confidence.

If the ministry is going to stop our nation’s children from seeing Māori words during a formative part of their learning, then it’s blocking our children from learning New Zealand English to the same degree adults can capably produce now. Why the ministry would chase less proficiency in English and try to lower someone’s ability to communicate with other New Zealanders is beyond us.

2. Hiding behind more jargon: “Grapheme-phoneme correspondences.”

In using this jargon, the ministry is trying to tell us that in Māori and English, vowels are written with the same scribble (grapheme), but they sound (phoneme) different.

That might be true sometimes, but it’s not a problem. It’s helpful.

Take, for example, the question: “Are there machines for pruning?” Regardless of what language is being written, whether English or te reo Māori, the vowels a, e, i, o, u sound identical when they’re read aloud.

That’s because both English and Māori use these sounds. They are identical here, and so we can say there absolutely is a grapheme-phoneme correspondence in the two languages. That’s helpful because you get the benefit of learning about two languages, not one.

Knowing how to use two languages together within a sentence helps build greater understanding of how both languages work. That strengthens the ability to use both languages. This has been studied well, and has a name, translanguaging. The ministry should know about this concept.

The ministry seems to be trying to argue that there isn’t ever a “correspondence” between vowels and sounds across the two languages. As we can show very easily, that’s not true.

There are instances of this in the book The Karanga Starts. All four occurrences of the vowel “a” correspond in terms of their scribble and their sound. The Ministry argues it only wants to teach things “that have already been taught.” That means students will have been taught the word “start”, and can immediately apply that to the word “karanga”.

Let’s then consider that, yes, sometimes Māori and English vowel sounds are different, which also appears to be a ministry concern. But it really isn’t a problem.

3. “Te reo Māori vowel sounds are different” from English

The first point to make is that vowels in English are not pronounced in any one consistent way.

They can be pronounced multiple ways, and there is no real formula to the variation — the rules of English pronunciation come with many exceptions. Consider for example, the sound of the vowel “o” in the words “dog”, “some” and “home”.

Here’s another example. If you can pronounce the phrase “Are there three or two”, you can pronounce every Māori vowel like a real Māori speaker. We think primary-school children are likely to understand this particular sentence, so they can already make the sounds the ministry is complaining about here.

Since there is so much variation in English vowel pronunciation, it is certainly in every English learner’s best interest to know as many ways vowels can be pronounced as possible so that they can communicate with more people. Seeing vowels present in Māori words further grows a person’s ability to communicate and to understand New Zealand English, of which many Māori words are an everyday part.

Targeting Māori vowels as the problem is made more ridiculous by the fact that the five vowel sounds of Māori are always consistent, and occur constantly in English, so children already know them all.

Is this a focus on learning or ideology?

Instead of checking their own statement, and use of language, for accuracy, the ministry is busy persecuting te reo Māori.

Neither of us is surprised. The persistent and frankly gross anti-Māori ideology that defines this government has found a home in this ministry, which has stripped funding, cancelled contracts, and diverted resources away from te reo Māori to English-taught subjects. It is a textbook executor of anti-Māori and anti-Māori-language sentiment. Nothing more.

If the ministry did care about te reo Māori, it surely would have reminded itself that three in five New Zealanders think the Māori language should be taught in all schools.

Depending on how much te reo Māori a New Zealander knows, between 42.6 percent and 46.3 percent of their language exposure comes from schools. Blocking exposure to te reo Māori in schools is the opposite of what citizens want, and take, from education.

The jargon didn’t fool us, and it shouldn’t fool you either. Misinformation seems to be the name of the anti-Māori game right now. So much curriculum reform seems to be based on the misuse of terms like “grapheme-phoneme” correspondence”, “knowledge-rich”, “the science of learning”,  “ritual learning” and “heart words”.

The government is currently considering repeals to the Plain Language Act 2022 — the law that requires them to speak to us clearly, without jargon and misinformation. It’s worrying to think that repeal might clear the way for more decisions like this one.

Our children will certainly pay for this mistake. Most of our tamariki Māori are in mainstream education. The ministry hasn’t made much effort to give those tamariki exposure to te reo Māori beyond those resources that it is now erasing. They say it’s part of inspirational reform for education, but it’s misinformed waste.

The Māori Language Act, Te Ture mō Te Reo Māori 2016, requires agencies not to enact these kinds of policies — so how is this kind of waste getting through the gate?

The ministry needs to be honest about the attitudes that led to this decision, and then respond to those attitudes as our nation expects, and as our tamariki deserve.

Dr Vincent Ieni Olsen-Reeder is a Research Fellow at Te Herenga Waka. Associate Professor Corinne Seals is currently the Associate Dean (Research), also at Te Herenga Waka. Both are passionate about how translanguaging (the use of two languages together within a sentence) helps build greater understanding of how both languages work, and strengthens abilities to use both languages.

E-Tangata, 2025