John Bald/language and literacy

Teaching - the appliance of science

Karina McLachlain writes to me that  you need neuroscientists and respected educational psychologists in the unit. I really want a subject created at university (within the faculty of science) called 'scientific pedagogy' which will be the applicaton of science to the classroom and the creation of better methods of teaching and better curricula. I would make this subject compulsory for teachers in training and they would be forbidden from doing educational research or contributing to formation of curricula or educational policy without having studied it.

Karina is right. Much of what happens in our state and private schools is based on force of habit, personal and political prejudice, control of behaviour and pulling rank. There is a distinction to be drawn between this and downright ignorance - habit, for example, may be based on experience, which is essential, and authority is necessary if schools are to work coherently. But what we have is not good enough. Rank pulling says that the boss is right because he or she is the boss, and whether he or she is in fact right or not. This is not legitimate authority, but Diktat.

We could do without the word pedagogy, which is just a fancy term for teaching or education in general, and we would somehow need to distinguish between "respected" educational psychologists and the fee-earners who do not think about the evidence behind their conclusions, type new names into largely pre-written reports, and pontificate about problems without even trying to solve them. Much of the output of local authority psychologists, for example, is designed to reflect and legitimise the policies of their authority. These people's reports do not consitute an independent professional judgement, and often do serious harm by obscuring issues and preventing children from receiving the right forms of additional support and teaching.

Michael Gove is the first secretary of state to take a personal interest in neuroscience and in the formation of networks in the brain as the physical manifestation of learning. The Left like to label him a dinosaur, but they should look in the mirror. Gove is ahead of the game. Most of the education system, and almost all educational psychologists, are ten yards behind the ball.

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.

Dispatches, 2005, Dyslexia.

Karina McLachlain has found a link to this very useful programme , which points out the disparities between the "common view" of dyslexia and scientific evidence. It features several of the best researchers in the field of reading and learning difficulties -  Professors Keith Stanovitch, Margaret Snowling and Dorothy Bishop, and also Professor Julian (Joe) Elliott of Durham University, who approaches the topic as a straightforward but ungullible academic who wants to see propositions supported by evidence. The programme is very well worth viewing for anyone new to the subject or worried about their child. 

Still, I do not believe that the evidence supports the view that there is "no such thing as dyslexia". There are some things that we do not fully understand, even with the best of evidence, and these should, I think support a definition. I suggest the following, which is as valid now as it was in the late nineteenth century, when the issue was first noticed (nobody threw rude words like "anecdotal" at those who first observed it - people recognised disciplined observations for what they might lead to in those days). 

Dyslexia is a difficulty with reading and other aspects of literacy that cannot be explained by current scientific evidence.

Once a problem is pinned down by science - whether it be visual stress, slow or weak intellectual processing, clumsiness, weak awareness of sounds (whether social or medical in origin), poor teaching, very low general intelligence, aka severe general learning difficulties - then we can have a clear understanding of what we are dealing with. These difficulties and their consequences can be explained as well as described, and hence we do not need an umbrella term to cover them.   

Over time, as our scientific understanding increases, our ability to select the correct teaching for the individual problem facing us will improve, and the range of issues covered by the definition will shrink. Matching teaching to learning needs should be the main focus for teacher training, and it is not.

Nevertheless, as Grace Fernald found in the 1940s, the right teaching will enable anyone to read and write within the limits of their inherent ability to understand what they are reading.

This limitation, illustrated in the work and subsequent school experience of Cushla, in Dorothy Butler's Cushla and Her Books, is not dyslexia. (Cushla, born with multiple handicaps, received from birth an intensive and inspiring introduction to books from her parents and grandparents. She responded extraordinarily well, to the extent that some people did not believe her to be handicapped. This turned out not  to be true, and she never exceeded the reading expected of a seven year old. Source: personal communication from Dame Marie Clay). Cushla's difficulties were, of course, different in nature from the those of children who receive a very limited experience of language in early childhood, and so do not develop the vocabulary they need in order to succeed in school. These difficulties are social in origin, and not inherent.

Definitions, particularly of what we don't fully understand, are rarely perfect. But at least this one might rid us of our current mass-misdiagnosis, and its associated expensive "solutions". The programme is useful as an introduction to Professors Stanovitch and Snowling's emphasis on developing vocabulary and understanding as well as decoding. Many thanks to Ms McLachlain for digging it out. 

 

Dr Alan Beaton and Professor Dorothy Bishop (aka Deevybee)

Dr Alan Beaton responded very quicky and generously to a request for further information following his chapter below.  He has written a book  Dyslexia, Reading and the Brain: A Sourcebook of Cognitive and Biological Research. (Psychology Press,2004) with more detail than the article on research to that date. Dr Beaton is somewhat sceptical about some subsequent research, and recommended a review by Professor Dorothy Bishop, here.  Dorothy Bishop is the author of the excellent Test for the Reception of Grammar (TROG2 is the revised version) an instrument for determining intellectual capacity in people who, for various reasons, have limited vocabulary and speaking skills. Designed originally for use with stroke patients, this test genuinely reaches parts other assessments can't, and is the last shot in my locker when I have to use a test with people who have failed to score on other measures.

Professor Bishop's blog is scintillating - her latest posting as I write is a sharp smack for Susan Greenfield for associating computer use with autism, prompting an anonymous correspondent to try to do the same to Professor Bishop. For my money, her correspondent did not succeed, and I'm fed up with the "autistic spectrum" being used as a dustbin for all sorts of misbehaviour that have nothing to do with autism. Thanks again, Dr Beaton. Way to go, Deevybee!

See also this Guardian piece by Professor Bishop on autism, and   this brilliant review of Isobel's World. And this on a range of related neurological issues - including the incisive and crucial point that

Dyslexia, and the other (neurological) conditions listed above, are all diagnosed on the basis of behavioural rather than neurological criteria. 

As the conditions are neurological in origin, and the criteria for assessment are not, misdiagnosis is both inevitable and endemic. This is the root cause of our strife over dyslexia.

International Case Studies of Dyslexia Peggy L. Anderson and Regine Meier-Hedde.

This book seeks to restore the systematic case study approach to dyslexia, the beginnings of which the authors trace to Grace Fernald, whose Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (McGraw-Hill, 1943) was the pioneering text on multisensory teaching, and has been misrepresented and neglected to the point that it was not even considered as part of the recent English review of dyslexia. Fernald’s work was recommended to me by the late Dr Margaret Peters of Cambridge University, and remains an inspiration. I have two copies, one from my review of the book in 1981 for the Times Educational Supplement, and one I rescued from the skip at Cambridge Education Department’s library. Old texts, a librarian explained, were being weeded, and Dr Peters had died. You might find a copy on Bookfinder.com, but don't buy the reprint, which does not have the case studies.

The 18 case studies here come from virtually every developed country in the world,  except, for some reason, the UK and are chosen by the  “single criterion of dyslexia diagnosis as verified by the researcher from that particular country.”  The studies are more limited than Fernald’s, as they are based on interviews with parents and children and do not go into detail on teaching techniques – in so many languages, this would have taken a whole series of books. They demonstrate that, irrespective of the writing system used,  there are people the world over who, in spite of sound intelligence, struggle with reading  for no visible reason, and identify a common strand in the  experience of children with dyslexia, who are often made to feel that those who could help have instead turned their backs on them. Children’s and parents’ voices come through strongly.

 Most have to wait a long time for their difficulties to be recognised and treated, but there are good as well as bad points in individual systems. Felix in France is assessed orally and not in writing. This reflects a long tradition of oral assessment in France, which is not a soft option.  Hassan in Egypt is learning English, Arabic and French at the same time. His mother reads to him for 28 hours  a week to help him study, and he has extra oral explanation from teachers at breaktimes.  All of the pupils have problems with homework, which is much heavier in most countries than in the UK.

There are some familiar themes  - João from Brazil has  recurring bouts of ear infections. Most of the children have parents or relatives with similar problems.  They tend to work slowly, and are punished for it  –  Felix is not allowed out to play, and Christian in Germany is called stupid in front of his faster classmates, who are praised. Anxiety is universal – Christian – If  I mess up first grade, I will mess up my whole life – also depression. Christian’s slowness reflects Uta Frith’s finding of the effects of dyslexia in Austrian pupils – they could read, as the language is very regular, but excruciatingly slowly.  Christian’s salvation also strikes a chord –  his former clinical therapist explains to the school board that he was participating in a international study, in which his lack of progress would be reported.  Lo and behold, an immediate and comprehensive individualised remedial programme.

Insights abound. Hassan understands better than Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman that words matter - …if I was trying to read I wound up skipping over a hard word and nothing made sense after that. And a study by Mousa, 2006 shows children  learning Arabic and English experiencing more difficulties than children just learning Arabic. 

I don’t pretend to have read all 18 studies yet, let alone the copious references to research and teaching techniques. A pity that Fernald’s own work is not described in more detail, but this is still a book I will return to with pleasure and interest, despite its hefty price tag. 

 

Lambeth and Edge Hill

Lambeth council apparently tried to ban a headteacher, whom it has been found to have unfairly dismissed, from its public libraries and parks. This is as amazing as Edge Hill University's alleged refusal to answer questions it had invited students to submit in the context of its course on dyslexia. 

How can anyone be so ignorant and stupid as to try to ban another human being from a library - or, indeed a park, in the absence of any allegation of misbehaviour?  How can a university lecturer refuse to answer a question? I don't mean refuse to give a student the answer they want or expect, I mean refuse to answer at all? 

A strange world, my masters...

Bagatelles, Dyslexia and the Truth (as far as we can know it).

The posting on Dr Ross Cooper's bagatelle theory of learning difficulties, below, has led to an interesting thread of comments on the Guardian website, to which I've just added this one. I'm following it here with my best analysis of the truth about dyslexia as we've known it over the last hundred and thirty years.

Cribsheet posting. 

I agree with Teacher 2 on synthetic phonics, and in particular on the value and validity of the Clackmannanshire research, which has been unfairly and in some cases dishonestly criticised. I see the other things that may help individual children as additions to them rather than substitutes. What I usually find with people who have been assessed as dyslexic (I do not make such assessments myself, and only use the word if someone else does so first) is that they need more practice and reinforcement in order to use their memories effectively and reduce the number of words they have to work out from scratch. I see the use of selecting a word from a series that have already been worked out and explained, which is the technique I have borrowed and adapted from the Down's work, as reinforcement and not primary teaching ( it is used as primary teaching in the original Down's research).

There is also no doubt - and this is not a personal view - that reading in English is made more difficult by the high proportion of words, particularly of common words, which do not fit phonic rules. Stephen Pinker, in Words and Rules, argues that irregular verbs are used so much that they resist reversion to the norm, ie the rule. For example, the verbs to be and to have are almost always irregular in European languages.

The same - personal view this time - probably applies to our irregular spellings. A person who finds reading difficult in English has to contend both with their difficulty in wordbuilding and blending sounds, and then with the fact that a lot of the words they meet every time they pick up a book can't be read in this way - compare has, which is regular, and was , which is not. This problem can be tackled quite easily by explanation, but it can't be tackled if it is not recognised and understood in the first place. Too many teachers, trainers and "experts" do not recognise it, and, if they do, do not act on it. This does continuing harm to children who find reading difficult.

I have said on my blog, listed at the top of the original posting, that I offer a free service to anyone who has difficulty with these issues, and that includes those whose children have been assessed as dyslexic. I mean it. I agree with Sir James Rose that it is wrong that a parent whose child has difficulties should find the school an obstacle rather than a help, and this is still too often the case. Sir James has recently told me that the evidence I submitted to him on teaching techniques did not reach him, despite an acknowledgement of receipt by the civil service.

It is quite wrong, and disgraceful, that a family whose child meets with a problem should have to spend their savings or holiday money trying to help them, particularly when so many psychologists charge hundreds of pounds for a report that simply tells them that they have a problem that they already know they have, but does not help them to solve it. I'm also not impressed at all with televised pundits who think they can solve these problems just by beginning to take an interest in them. The line of research on which my work is based goes back to Grace Fernald's in 1943, and is not the stuff of dream schools and soundbites. I see parents and children together at all times, so that the parent can see and understand the teaching, and reinforce it - if they don't do this, it is wasted. I have an uptodate CRB.

So, if you or your child has a problem with literacy, or if you have a problem, or if you are a teacher who deals with these issues, look at my blog and get in touch. 
This is not commercial - it really is free.

The truth - as far as we can know it

The Wickipedia article on dyslexia, here, is a good summary of current public understanding of the issue and of its history since it was first observed in the 1880s. From the beginning, dyslexia was seen as an apparently inexplicable phenomenon - a person of otherwise normal development and intelligence had a difficulty with reading and spelling - the origin, in effect, of the term "specific" learning difficulties, rather than more general ones. The World Federation of Neurology's definition, from Wickipedia is  "a disorder manifested by difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence and sociocultural opportunity".  

(Wickipedia has also been unfairly criticised - it needs to be checked, like any other source, but its principle is freedom, and it compares favourably with the outrageous commercial exploitation of publishers, one of which wants to charge $34.50 for access to a short article published in 1881 that is obviously out of copyright.  But I digress...)

In essence, dyslexia will not be explained until and unless we have a complete and accurate understanding of the workings of the brain and of their development. Some people assessed as dyslexic have been found to have reduced activity  in areas of their brains concerned with linking sounds and letters - described in New Scientist as the Broken Bridge. The PET scanning from which this evidence is derived is not available as part of an assessment, and is in any case is only part of the story - we don't know, let alone understand, the full range of brain connections and activity involved in reading. The most difficult case I've met in 39 years of this work -  he now reads for interest and enjoyment, though not always perfectly - showed no abnormality in brain activity on a scan.

Once we understand the cause of a reading problem, it is no longer inexplicable. If we know, as we do, that some children's social and economic circumstances give them much more limited experience of language than others, that some have interruptions to hearing for various reasons before they start school, or that some are sensitive to various wavelengths in light that interfere with their reading, then we have evidence of cause and effect that remove these phenomena from the category of unexplained problems to that of explained ones. We can then work on ways of helping people whose learning is interrupted by these factors, at the same time as we continue to investigate the elements that we still do not understand. And accept that we don't know everything.

 

Bagatelle Theory - Dr Ross Cooper. Updated

Dr Ross Cooper, a former lecturer at South Bank University, has proposed a "bagatelle" theory of dyslexia and related issues, which he describes in a five minute video here. He presented the idea as "a manifesto" at a conference, Dyslexia Matters, at Edge Hill University on June 14th, where it was given the status of a keynote address. 

I've transcribed  Dr Cooper's video here, for the purposes of analysis. I've taken great care over this, and will be pleased to make any corrections to the transcript that readers may point out. 

I want to introduce to you the bagatelle model of specific learning differences. The old deficit model of dyslexia, dyspraxia and other specific learning difficulties has the idea that each of these things is something that is wrong with somebody. That it has an identifiable cause, even though nobody's found one yet, and that each of them appear to overlap in mysterious ways, but they're discrete and they can be fixed. The deficit model identifies people in terms of their difficulties, and then, in response to that, they attempt to remediate those difficulties, so, for example, if you're dyslexic, and you have difficulty with phonological awareness, then they will attempt to fix that, to remediate it, by giving you lots of phonics practice and so on. And I argue that that's actually a big mistake.

The bagatelle model is based on the game, where you have, like a ballbearing or a marble, and it's fired up into the maze of pins and holes and slots, and it bounces around until it arrives in a particular hole or a particular slot. Now, we can use that as an analogy of human beings. We need to make it a little more complex though. Instead of their being one ball, let's imagine there's a few. They're all fired up together. And let's imagine that instead of a two-dimensional maze of pins, we've got a three-dimensional maze of pins. But essentially, the model is that the balls are fired up into the maze, and unlike ballbearings of course, people react to the different experiences, some of which can be rather humiliating and painful and difficult, and the ballbearings end up in particular slots or holes. 

Now, the deficit model identifies dyslexia, or dyspraxia, by which combination of holes or slots that you end up in. And I'd say, that's looking at the wrong end of the process. Let's imagine that some of us have a particular difference in these ballbearings or marbles. And they're fired up into the maze. And we bounce around, and we're predisposed to end up into particular slots. But not predetermined. Now what is this core difference? The core difference is a very strong preference, almost need, to process information holistically, to make sense of the big picture. Now, if you process information holistically, that requires, depends on, creativity - to map things and make connections. It relies very little on working memory. In contrast, if you prefer to process information sequentially,  that relies heavily on a good working memory, and very little on creativity. 

So, we have this difference, we're fired into the maze, we're predisposed to end up in particular slots , and they'll say, "OK, this slot, reading difficulty, phonological awareness difficulties, working memory difficulties, we'll call that dyslexia. Ok, working memory difficulties, difficulty co-ordinating, muscles, clumsiness, we'll call that dyspraxia. Difficulty focusing on one thing at a time rather than everything, ADHD. And now, we can go on.

Now where you end up in these particular slots is a matter of chance, a matter of your experiences through life,  and how those affect of you, and how you perceive yourself as a result of them. And what I'm really saying, is that all these specific learning differences (emphasised) have the same core difference. They're the same as each other. They end up in slightly different places, but with lots of overlap. So we know, for example, that if you get diagnosed as having ADHD, fifty per cent of those people are also diagnosed as having dyslexia, fifty per cent are also diagnosed as being dyspraxic, twenty-nine per cent are diagnosed as having Asberger's. These aren't small overlaps. These are significant overlaps, because really we're talking about fundamentally the same thing.

We can also have the situation where someone is fired into the maze, fired into the bagatelle, with the same differences as me, but doesn't end up in exactly the same slot, and they're not diagnosed as having a specific learning difficulty. And other people end up in the same slot surely, purely by coincidence, and they are diagnosed as being dyslexic or dyspraxic or ADHD, but actually they are not the same as me, they've got a range of different core differences. And I think, if we need to understand (emphasised) specific learning differences, we need to understand the core differences, and how through our lives we end up in particular slots and holes and traps.  

There are pros and cons to this argument.

Pros

There is much misdiagnosis of dyslexia on the basis of phonological processing difficulties or memory difficulties. These are characteristics of individual people which may stem from causes ranging from glue ear to very limited exposure to language. They are not dyslexia.  

There is much misdiagnosis of ADHD, Asperger's and autism, with no firm scientific basis.

The categories can have the effect of slots into which people are fitted, and have a limiting effect on the way they think about themselves and people think about them. Once in such a slot, it is difficult to get out of it.

Cons

There is no reference to any scientific or other evidence to support the argument. It is an idea from a children's board game that has no parallel with learning or any branch of education. It has no more to contribute to a discussion of learning difficulties than Pin Ball Wizard.

The statement that there is "no identifiable cause" of difficulties such as dyspraxia and dyslexia is an ignorant denial of the scientific investigations of, among many others, Dehaene at the Collège de France, here, and Professor Margaret Snowling and her colleagues at York University. 

The idea that people are fired into a bagatelle, a game that involves, if not a level playing field, a consistent slope that is the same for each player, takes no account of the well established links between different experiences and social conditions that characterise English-speaking societies. A bagatelle ball goes where the initial force, the board and gravity takes it. It has no control over its fate. Human beings have parents, and at least some element of free will.

The equation of remediation with "extra phonics practice" ignores the research on phonological awareness that has been shown to help children make sense of phonics. This is not at all the same thing as extra phonics practice, and it is dishonest or ignorant to claim that it is. Phonics involves using the information about sounds contained in letters in order to read words. Phonological awareness builds up children's knowledge of differences between sounds, some of which may be obscured in the everyday language they use and meet.

The statement OK, this slot, reading difficulty, phonological awareness difficulties, working memory difficulties, we'll call that dyslexia  takes the current practice of superficial diagnosis of dyslexia as the only evidence of dyslexia itself. This sets up up a false definition and then attacks it. Phonological awareness difficulties often stem from limited experience of language, and are not dyslexia. Working memory difficulties are not dyslexia. If people are described as dyslexic on the basis of these issues, they are mis-diagnosed.

The statement that extra phonics practice is "a big mistake" ignores research evidence on the effectiveness of phonics, and offers no evidence of the effectiveness of any alternative.

There is nothing in this presentation that even pretends to help anyone learn to read and write, or to address any of the issues raised in the Rose Review or in any other serious attempt to tackle the problems caused by the difficulties or differences that Dr Cooper discusses, whether or not they are termed dyslexia. It is ignorant, superficial nonsense.

Update. Guardian Cribsheet has posted some of the transcript here, with an excellent comment from a parent, seeingclearly, which I have used to add to the above.  I have found this account of Dr. Cooper's model delivered at Cambridge University, no less.  LSE has also climbed aboard, with this at Brainhe.

So, Dr Cooper has clearly struck a chord. In both cases, the language is a bit fancier than in the video, but there is still no evidence whatsoever of this approach helping people learn to read and write. In fact, the only logical conclusion to Dr Cooper's attempt to ignore what he calls the "sequential processing" that is needed to learn to read and write - itself an oversimplification, as everyone learning to read has to understand the patterns and connections he associates with creativity -  and to replace it with "holistic processing" is that literacy is both unnecessary and a barrier to learning. In the end, the bagatelle model is more a wail of anguish than a scientific theory, and should be treated as such. Seeingclearly says she is tired of having theory presented as fact, and Edge Hill and LSE seem to have come dangerously close to doing this.