John Bald/language and literacy

"A brilliant tip..."

...said the mother of a genuinely brilliant six year old - six years three months, to be precise, and already reading Alice in Wonderland, though having trouble with tables. Splitting up the twos into groups of five at a time, and coming back to reinforce hesitations after an interval knocked out the twos and then we worked on threes. Met the parents again ten days later - "Had those tables stuck?"  Yes.

And my pupil who had severely injured himself is now doing well, reading on his own, and tackling words like exhausted with no problem. Exhausted - have to know not to pronouce the h, unlike exhale, and to put the stress on the second syllable, unlike excellent. Also the slightly difficult au pattern. Nice to see him putting all three together. 

Tania Tirraoro

Tania read my piece on dx on Conservative Home, and asked me to write an explanatory version for parents, which she has posted here. Tania's site is very strong on autism, with a very extensive network of parents and lists of contacts.

Place Value - or losing your place? French-ruled paper can help.

Since decimalisation, place value to two places of decimals has become easy. Everyone knows that 1p is not much or 10p either these days, though it is of course better than 1p, which you might not bother to pick up. A pound has become the unit, and everyone knows that £10 is a lot and £100 a great amount. So, we work to two decimal places all the time, and HMI have quite rightly commended money as a way of teaching place value. Children understand it.

But move from this to putting figures on paper, and we have a different problem. The range of problems that children have as they do this, and the errors they make, encompass virtually any way you can think of to get something wrong . I have personal experience of this. In my  Year 7 arithmetic exam, I interpreted my father's advice that it was more important to show your working than to get the right answer, by carefully and neatly writing out every single sum and then not actually doing any of them. It took a concerned visit from a parent to persuade the school that I really could add up. They, alas, then took that too literally by putting me in a top set, doing work I could not understand (in geometry. I  understood it in my thirties).  This propensity to get things wrong has, my piano teacher tells me, been very valuable to me as a teacher, as it enables me to understand my pupils' problems. The poor man has to think of something positive to say. My wife sympathises with him.

Well, I've hit on the idea that the sums involved in arithmetic to two places of decimals are not that difficult, provided children know their tables, and so I spend a great deal of time teaching these and practising them. But then the problem seems not so much to be in the maths, which are often based on single digits, but in losing track of the sum, losing your place, leaving out a step, forgetting to put in a 0, etc.  Pupil in Y8 (with statement for dyslexia, in my view unjustifiably) is prone to these errors, and I've developed for him a series of steps for division which I've posted below and which he finds helpful

French ruled paper (a sample here) helps him to keep on track better than anything else. The main squares are big, so his largeish figures don't throw him out of track with columns, and the series of steps and improving tables mean that he is beginning to handle division by a single digit to two places of decimals  accurately. Rounding up was a problem though. P understood that you rounded up the second digit, or left it untouched. He did not, though, delete the third placed digit. Another small step, quite a lot of practice, and he'd got it by the end of our session. Maybe doing things like that myself helped me to understand how other people do them, and to adapt the explanation accordingly. 

French ruled paper is equally useful for helping people with weak handwriting - the feint narrow lines between the main squares are very good for establishing consistent size in the body of letters.

 

 

Guessing games, French and a little maths using French notepaper

Pupil 1 this morning, does not know when to use their and there. It strikes me that there is a pattern I haven't seen before - their is followed by a noun (which may be accompanied by an adjective). Having taught the pupil to identify a verb, a noun is easy. However, this, like virtually everything about language, needs qualification own in on their own is listed in OED as a pronoun, though it is not easy to see why. Once again, we are dealing in patterns rather than absolutes.

Pupil 1 picked up a house point at his primary school for being able to write je m'appelle accurately, despite his learning difficulties. So can his eight year old brother. It's easy enough once you take the time to explain it using the principles set out in postings below. So why can't the rest of the class do it?

(Here's how. The French like their language to flow. Je me appelle would have a jerky sound between me and appelle. So, they take out the first vowel and insert an apostrophe. (This pattern occurs several times in every paragraph of French and is one of the keys to the language.)  Then, appelle is unusual, as it has two double letters. We spell it out rhythmically several times - a - double p - e - double l - e. Then write it on sleeve with finger. When confident, write it on paper, then the whole phrase. Not as daunting as it is made to appear.)

Reading brought more guessing games. Pupil and his brother are interested in animals, and have the DK encylopaedia of animals. They start reading about a Siberian tiger, and read Siberian as saber-toothed - prior knowledge, guess + partial match to letters. Read provide as prooved on same basis, and misread seized as sneezed. All serious errors that would lead to misunderstanding, and also important evidence of the need to continue to teach reading, and in particular attention to detail in reading, beyond the initial stages. 

French lined paper has larger squares than ours, and extra feint horizontal lines. Using this paper helped pupil 3 to keep a division sum such as 4765 divided by 8 correctly laid out, so that he did not misplace digits. This pupil's problems with division stemmed, first, from his primary school's failure to teach him any multiplication tables at all, and, second, from a tendency to lose his place in a division. Eg, having correctly calculated that 8 into 72 goes 9 times, he then switched to the 9 times table for the next part of a sum, writing 45 (5 9s) instead of 40 (5 8s). Is losing one's place a problem with maths or with co-ordination? Whatever the cause, Pupil 3 can now do division by a single digit, and will learn long division next week - I say this with confidence, as the last question I asked him was, How many times will 36 go into 90?  and he said Two. 

The French paper is also now my first choice for helping children with irregular handwriting. It is fairly standard in  French schools, and known as "Grands Carreaux". Available in hypermarkets.

Teaching Schools Alliance Modern Languages Conference, Manchester, October 2011

This power point presentation was given to the Training and Development Agency's conference for the Teaching Schools Alliance on 11th October.  Download Language Learning and Brain Activity. TDA Oct11.  A list of references for further reading is here.

An interesting Saturday morning

To take the last pupil first, the parent who wrote me the kind email two postings below brought her daughter, aged nine, one of the quickest learning pupils I've known. Explaining English spelling took about twenty minutes, and she was able to apply the principles immediately. The pupil had been taught little or no phonics, and was using her high intelligence to guess at things. She had worked out some patterns - eg ea in sea, tea etc, but not in head, bread etc, and did now know ou (ground, found) or ow. own. The explanation that voice letters - vowels -are overworked, and that we need to know what they are telling us in particular words, did the trick, and we worked on each pattern that she did not know as they arose in the text - this is a perfectly reliable way of covering phonics, as the patterns are so imbued in the language that they will all turn up in a few pages of text. In this case, we used the first book of the Narnia series.

The approach also avoids a huge snag that arises in using simplified texts that focus on just one pattern at a time - when we read, we need to recognise and use each pattern quickly, with immediate support of a whole series of the same words. Too many phonics schemes do not enable the learner to do this.

Mother and daughter set off on their two-hour drive home with a happy wave, and left us with a request to see her nephew, and a cake.

Pupil 2 was having trouble with arithmetic, his teacher no doubt having seen that moving him from simple division to three places of decimals last week was too big a jump. We went back over smple division, and worked out the steps he needed to take, as follows (in shorthand):

To divide, say 162 by 8:

Set out the bus stop

Try - find the first number 8 will go into - in practice, move along the line till you reach a number that is 8 or over. It helps to add a zero each time you can't divide a number - doing this in the hundreds column is redundant, but helps you remember to do it later on, when it is important.

Add to the answer (in the correct column, on the bus stop roof)

Multiply what you've added to the answer by 8

Subtract from the number we are dividing

Bring down the next digit

Repeat

So, dividing even by a single digit number takes five steps that have to be repeated accurately and in order. Understanding the importance of columns in denoting tens, hundreds etc is important, but you also need to make sure you don't miss a step, put a figure in the wrong place, or take away the wrong number. These are matters of co-ordination rather than maths - we have to know in our mind exactly which stage of the process we are at, and not lose our place.

We made some progress - the pupil can use his tables, if hesitantly, and understands correcting to to places of decimals. We will see if he manages the half dozen I left him for homework, using the steps as set out on a card. One thing is certain - if you don't know your tables, and can't subtract accurately, you can't do division at all, which may be why it has been abandoned in so much of primary mathematics.

Pupil one is preparing for entry to a local private school, and is not being taught to write properly at his primary school - in effect, he is doing very little writing at all. I'm using the Galore Park English books with him, selectively - even they are capable of occasional improvement - and he is beginning to control punctuation, though he slips from past to present time without knowing what he's doing. He is ten, and the Galore Park book is designed for seven year olds, but we have to start with what he already understands. My thoughts on presenting grammar in ways that are easier for children to understand are here. 

A teaching hint, and a compliment from a parent.

It can be difficult for a child to work out the middle of a word while holding the first part in his head. Repairing was a recent example. I had the child cover rep with a finger from his left hand, and ing with a finger from his right, leaving air, which he could not read.  I explained the ai group, and wrote down fair, which he could read. Then hair. Remove h and we have air. Add p and we have pair. Lift left hand - repair. Add ing.  I use this approach a lot with polysyllables, as it allows the child to focus his full attention on the part of the word that is causing problems, without having to hold the rest of the word in mind at the same time. When we revisit it next time, I'll add impair, despair, and any others I can think of. 

Can't resist sharing this compliment from a parent, who is bringing her daughter to see me shortly:

It feels like a new, beautiful dawn! When we practised reading today, I could feel myself applying some of the points you briefly and so clearly explained on the phone, and I am beginning to see where her over-complications arise. It's remarkable.

Professor Sue Gathercole, Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit - children can improve their use of working memory

Professor Sue Gathercole is director of the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge, whose work is too little known among teachers. Mea culpa - I didn't know that it had changed its name from applied psychology unit. Professor Gathercole's personal page, here, has links to interesting research on improving children's working memory. I'll read the original papers over the next few days, but Professor Gathercole's summaries are most encouraging, as they show that it is possible to teach children to make better use of their memory, and so to learn more effectively.  The papers are not in the Cambridge Education Faculty library, but in the Applied Psychology library, where teachers are very unlikely to see them.

The CBU unit's website, here, has some fascinating updates, including a scan of areas of the brain that are activated in response to jokes. 

 

Not a bad day's work...

To Hackney, for a short professional development session on French with some of my thoughtful, determined and well-organised colleagues who are holding the line for civilisation. A quick reorganisation of my main slide on suggestions for the very first lesson, and we are away, just twenty minutes to discuss what we have achieved in our first term - introducing pronouns, positive and negative sentences with être and avoir, identifying masculine and feminine, songs and practice with Languagenut, and beginning to say anything we wish to. French is not a bolt on to the school's work, but fundamental to its core values of helping children to make the right choices, and to see that hard work and concentration will pay off. A very happy atmosphere, and I am rewarded with a warm round of applause. This will not make it any less tough when the children return next week. Bon courage à tous.

Then across London to work with a ten year old whose reading problems have not been completely resolved by synthetic phonics. The basic techniques outlined by Sue Palmer in her description of work with her daughter, slightly reorganised so that the same guidance can be used for reading and spelling, produce their usual effect, and the observing parent describes the outcome as "fantastic". A colleague has observed the whole lesson, from the time I greeted the young man to the time I left his home, and will send an account to Sir James Rose, who did not receive the evidence I sent him about this teaching, and who is now very interested in it. 

On the way back to the tube, I bump into a very senior figure in the education world, whose name I can't give here. He had also had dealings with the last government on a range of issues, and said that civil servants had become so close to ministers that they simply excluded anything that was not in the party line. They were no longer behaving as civil servants. The ministry says that my work may have been lost en route to a researcher. I can't believe this. Someone must have made a note of it, and, if it had been sent to an (unnamed) researcher, someone must have expected a response, and would have chased it if none had been received. This would have shown the loss, and I would have been asked for an other copy. It's embarrassing to lose things, but this is what I and newspapers I've worked with have done when it happens - the penalty has usually been a sarcastic comment from the sender, followed by a new copy.

My own belief is that the work was deliberately suppressed by someone in the ministry, or by someone else connected with the inquiry, as it goes against both the government line and the views of the voluntary organisations that have been given a disproportionate role in public provision for dyslexia. This is the way New Labour did things. As Mandelson once said, it involves the creation of truth. He later retracted this statement, saying you can't create truth. But he was right the first time. The price of artificial truth in this instance is tens of millions of pounds wasted on training and provision that is not based on full assessment of the available evidence, and much puffed up self importance from what New Labour termed third sector organisations that don't know as much as they think they do. The whole truth, or as close to it as current evidence will take us, is now available, and it is not too late to put right the mistake.

Sir Jim Rose Review of Dyslexia. Reply

As reported below, Sir Jim did not receive my submission to his review on dyslexia. He has now sent me this response (this is the complete text of his email).

 

John

I may well have seen your first submission but cannot now recall the precise points you made. On the Dyslexia Review, I was correct in saying that I had not seen your submission. I have now spoken with (civil servant) and we think that it may have been lost in transit to the researcher who was not based in the Department. Obviously, I very much regret whatever caused the omission.

On the important point about the teaching of regular and irregular patterns, I certainly agree that the latter should be carefully taught but I remain convinced that children should meet with early success in decoding and encoding, which the introduction of regular patterns secures. That was all too evident in what we saw in the case of well-taught Jolly Phonics, and in the Clackmannanshire programme where the s/a/t/p/i/n starter was invariably successful in switching children (and teachers) on to phonics - simple but effective.

As you know, Ruth Miskin's Programme is similarly structured but with a different set of starter letters. I have long supported Ruth Miskin's work. I invited Ruth to run the phonics training of all the National Strategy Literacy Consultants, which she did with consumate knowledge and skill. Her trainers also featured in the training video which was widely distributed to primary schools. Far from being tangential, her work has been central to raising awareness of the importance of securing high quality teaching of phonics. I suspect Ruth would agree, that much of this has been a needlessly acrimonious battle at times and one that has yet to won.

Best wishes,

Jim

So, Sir Jim accepts that irregular patterns in English need to be carefully taught. This point is not made in his reports, and is a new development. From all of my experience, it is, alongside phonics, the key to teaching people to read in English, and the answer to those who would argue, as Michael Rosen has, that those of us who see phonics as the basis of learning to read in English are presenting a distorted view of the language.

It is a pity indeed that the evidence I sent to his review did not reach him, and that tens of millions of pounds have been spent on mis-training teachers on the basis of evidence that was incomplete at best, and, at worst, deliberately distorted by people who wanted their own view to prevail.