John Bald/language and literacy

How New Labour has botched primary languages

The introduction of languages in the primary school has been botched, for the following reasons:

1. Cumbersome documentation, schemes of work and assessment that are too complicated for people to use. The French have a few pages in their primary curriculum, while our govt framework has 133, some of them with no more than a pair of inverted commas on the whole page. The reason for such poor communication puzzled me for some years, as the same mistake was repeated time and again, for example in the literacy strategy. The only answer is Blair's disguised New Left idea of "joined up government", in which everything the government does has to be loaded with its hiddent agenda.

 

2  No foresight of the need to train teachers and no provision to do so. Training institutions, like everyone else, are having to patch courses together with what they have.

 

3. No research, so no evidence of what does and doesn't work. The latest book on primary languages, by Philip Hood and Krustina Torbutt here promises research evidence, but does not really deliver it - the chapter on research is just a theory, which speculates that an approach that appears successful with older children - though again it needs proper investigation - will also work with younger ones. There is no solid evidence of children making better progress as a result of primary languages teaching, and we need some.

 

4. Too many competing initiatives, including social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL), a complete new assessment system for primary schools, rehashed literacy and numeracy strategies - with the literacy strategy apparently abandoning its one successful idea (the use of word, sentence and text levels in teaching) - and new MA degrees for all teachers, as well as vicious and stressful pressure on heads from "New Ofsted" and the botched SATs. The result is that languages have had to fight to establish a toe-hold in teaching time, particularly for eleven year olds transferring to secondary school.

 

5. No progress (HMI), ten and eleven year olds doing same work as seven and eight year olds, and not progressing from words and phrases to sentences. No assessment in place in most schools to track progress. This has been accepted by national spokespeople at three conferences I've attended, but they have no solution to it. It is probably the most damning finding of all, and the only one based on genuinely independent evaluation.

 

6. An obsession with intercultural understanding rather than languages teaching - head of links into languages is an intercultural specialist whose CV lists no experience of languages teaching. Following lobbying by the Association for Language Learning, an attempt to force this into the curriculum for older children has been abandoned. It is an important issue, but it is not the key to learning languages.

 

7. Fudged guidance based on "expectations" and "entitlement" without making clear what was really required and when. Result -  the introductory date has been put back and back, and is now Sept 2011 - subject to Rose - and then for Y3 only. The result is that schools that don't want to introduce a language are under no obligation to do so. The response to my complaint that inpsection of languages is virtually optional has been interesting - the most HMI can do when a school says it has not made a start is to discuss what the obstacles are.

 

Overall, the introduction of primary languages has been beset by a lack of clear thinking and poor organisation. There has been an expansion in the number of schools that are at least doing something, but government claims of better progress are based on responses to surveys rather than hard evidence.  Primary languages need a clear place in national priorities, backed by clear thinking to enable schools to introduce language teaching without undue pressure and without abandoning key priorities. 

 

 

Inspection, anyone? Updated, September 19th - one step forward.

Update. Following the posting below, CILT has announced that HMI will now discuss with schools that have not yet started languages what the "main deterrents" are. HMI also said at the conference that, following "a strong case" within Ofsted, the letter to the school published on the Ofsted website following an inspection did not give an overall grading, and that the inspection would take account of the school's state of development in languages.

This is a step forward. However, languages lessons in the normal run of inspections may still be observed and graded by inspectors who don't know the languages, or indeed any languages, and I share HMI's concern that this may  lead to data that is not, in Ofsted terms, "secure". Ths issue of inspecting a subject that is not part of the National Curriculum, but which is still fudged as an "entitlement" has not been fully resolved, and should be.

An interesting revelation from HMI at last week's CILT briefing conference for primary languages consultants - if you tell HMI's administrative assistant that you're not doing languages yet, Ofsted won't come. HMI told the conference that "it would be a waste of resources" to inspect what wasn't there, and that roughly a quarter of schools had not started doing languages - "or said they hadn't. My administrative assistant can't ask, Are you sure?"

As over 90 per cent of schools have started offering languages, there is something of a gap between reality and inspection. Part of the problem is that the inspection is rigorous, and some schools are frightened of it if they've just started. One LEA consultant told me that she advised schools to say they hadn't started yet, even if they had, because of one such unfavourable report. This is clearly wrong. But so is talking about an "entitlement" to a subject that is not compulsory. The government has fudged the issue hugely by delaying the introduction of primary languages until 2011, while pretending that there is an "entitlement" - which in plain English is an enforceable legal right - next year. The truth is that there is no entitlement without title, and that the government has placed local authorities and HMI in an invidious position. Such is truth under New Labour.

GCSE - the slump continues.

According to The Guardian, 670,000 pupils took GCSE this year. 0f these, 188, 688 took French, and 73, 469 German. 67,020 took Spanish. The number of pupils taking more than one language is minuscule, and roughly 3000 took each of a range of community languages. So, well under half took one of the three major European langauges.

The unions blame the government, but inspection experience in the early years of the century confirmed to me the truth of the argument that children were failing to learn languages long before they became optional. From what I'd seen, teaching methods that did not enable children to learn effectively were to blame, and mixed ability teaching, generally foisted on heads of department either without consultation or with token consultation, was the main cause of this failure. The weakness of mixed ability teaching was not only that the highest-attaining pupils were not stretched, but that the lowest-attaining did not understand their work at all, started to fail during the first lesson, and were effectively out of the game by half-term in Year 7, with no chance of getting back into it. HMI's consistent argument that children should be grouped according to their learning needs was ignored. As one local authority inspector put it to me - though in the context of history, not languages - "Who the hell takes any notice of them?"

Result - misery, wasted time and burned-out teachers. Unfortunately, many of those responsible for these developments, and for the National Curriculum, are still in charge of languages nationally, and mixed ability teaching is high on an agenda that is generally kept hidden, as those in charge of it know that most of the people who have to do it do so against their will and against what they see as the interests of teh children. So, mixed ability teaching is rarely promoted openly, but other forms of grouping are simply not mentioned. We need a change.

Victoria, Australia, Website, with thanks to Steven Gibson.

Steven Gibson, of Hyde Park Junior School, Plymouth, has recommended this very useful site from Victoria. It has lots of good, clear simple activities for beginners with sound and interaction. Steven sees it as a free introductory scheme of work, and this seems pretty accurate. Definitely worth checking out, and includes German and Italian.

Terminology and language learning - some more thoughts

Linguistic terms were mostly developed in order to analyse languages rather than to learn them. The analyst needs precision, and as long as other analysts know what he or she means, there is no problem. The learner, though, does not know what a new word means in advance, and so the term itself is part of the learning. 

Where a term does not have a meaning in common language - eg verb - it is straightforward to learn it as any other new word. Vygotsky's observation that our understanding of word meaning develops can be applied to teachers as well as children here. Verbs are still commonly presented as doing words when the most common verb, to be, does nothing at all. This problem can be avoided by careful phrasing - eg most verbs do things, some just are, so that words such as is, am, was, were, are, are all verbs. Chomsky's term verb phrase is useful as an indication that a verb can contain more than one word. I suggest verb group, as everyone knows what a group is.

The problem gets worse when there is a pre-existing meaning for the term. Subject, which is tne next most important grammatical term after verb - because nearly all sentences contain both - has the general meaning of topic which must be got rid of before a learner can understand it. Careful explanation and practice, for example using questions such as What is it? or Whodunnit? can help children to detect the subject, and to act on it when they write - in practice, repeating or changing a subject raises the question of using strong punctuation or a link word. Understanding subject lets the learner make an informed decision on these points rather than just guessing. This is a key point at GCSE as well as in SATs.

Articles are another problem. An article, in common language, is an object, a thing. Historically, an article has been seen as any separate item. It is highly likely that the term article was applied to short words such as a and the simply because they had to be called something - the examples in the OED entry are interesting on this point. Sometimes articles are now called determiners, though what they have to do with determination is so obscure to someone who does not already understand this sense of determine that the word is really an obstacle to learning rather than a help. To children, I just call articles short words that are a bit like the cement between bricks. We use them because we expect to. Some languages don't. Latin often left them out, as does modern Turkish.  Short words makes sense to children - article doesn't. Anyone have anything better?

Further prolematic terms are adjective, adverb, participle and tense.

Tense is a corruption of the old French word for time. We should ditch it, and return to the idea of time, as modern French grammarians have. Everyone knows, in an everyday sense, what time is, and today, yesterday and tomorrow are clear introductory markers.

Participle. Part verb would be clearer and have a link to verb. It's a paradox that we add something to a verb, and yet take away its completeness as a verb.

Adjective and adverb. The second at least links the word to a verb, so is slightly informative. Adjective is obscure -originating as a word that could not stand on its own - but at least has no conflicting meaning in normal English. It needs careful explanation - it's nbot a word that can stand on its own, hence its Latin route, and to call it a describing word leads to confusion with adverbs. We talk about verbs being modified rather than described, but this is sophistry - to say someone runs quickly is to describe the way they run in common language. 

Here are the relevant parts of the OED entry on adjective

 1. Gram. Naming or forming an adjunct to a noun substantive; added to or dependent on a substantive as an attribute. noun adjective: a word standing for the name of an attribute, which being added to the name of a thing describes the thing more fully or definitely, as a black coat, a body politic; now usually called an adjective only, see B.

1414 DK. OF EXETER to Henry IV in Hall Chron. (1809) 55 Scotland is like a noun adiective that cannot stand without a substantive. 1561 T. N[ORTON] Calvin's Inst. I. xiii. (1634) 46 All other names of God [except Jehovah] are but adjective names of addition. 1612 BRINSLEY Posing of Parts (1669) 3 Q. How many sorts of Nouns have you? A. Two: a Noun Substantive, and a Noun Adjective..A noun adjective is that cannot stand by itself, without the help of another word to be joyned with it to make it plain. 1875 WHITNEY Life of Lang. vi. 103 The variation of an adjective word for gender and number and case

 1. a. A ‘Noun Adjective’ (see A.1.); one of the Parts of Speech.

1509 HAWES Past. Pl. V. x. A nowne substantyve Might stand wythout helpe of an adjectyve. 1597 BP. HALL Satires VI. i. In epithets to join two words in one. Forsooth, for adjectives can't stand alone. 1690 LOCKE Hum. Underst. III. viii. (1695) 267 Our simple Ideas have all abstract, as well as concrete Names: The one whereof is a Substantive, the other an Adjective; as Whiteness, White; Sweetness, Sweet. 1865 MARSH Eng. Lang. xiv. §11 The only striking peculiarity of the English adjective..is its invariability, or want of distinct forms for different cases, genders and numbers.

 

I would like to find a simpler word to replace adjective. The only one I can think of is adnoun. Don't think it is very elegant, but it is at least more descriptive, and like adverb.

Phoneme is unnecessary -  sound is a better and shorter word. Grapheme is a unit of writing - I just call it a letter or group of letters. Both of these terms can be learned, but why? They are not more precise than the words of plain English.

And of course, noun and pronoun. A little like verb. These words do not exist outside discussions of grammar, and the French alternative, nom, is not much help as there is interference from the common meaning, name. Both short words, and there is no interference in English. Can be learned,  needs careful explanation - one hint from an OED example is that you can put a or the before the word and make sense. But why proper noun, when proper is in the sense of property, and hence obscure, for different reasons, to both children and adults. A first thought is that the term name could be reserved for proper nouns, which in English all have a capital letter, as the child's own name does. A noun could then perhaps be described as a thing, a feeling or a thought, and practised.

And that is my final point. As Wittgenstein said,  What can be said at all can be said simply. If it can be, it should be. The national strategies have made a serious error in taking terminology from academic linguistics and feeding it straight to children without the benefit of what Jerome Bruner called a courteous translation into words they can understand. And of course, they then back this up with the authority of government. We can do better.

Speedy Spanish - An Explanation? (updated 1st August 09)

Why does Spanish sound particularly fast to new learners? Any new language at normal speed sounds faster to us than our own, because we don't have the mental structures in place to understand it as we hear it - every time we have to pause and wonder what a word is, we are lost, as the speech keeps going at the same pace and leaves us behind.

With French, the main problem is the way the language likes to run words together. This can be learned, but it takes time (for a slowish learner like me, a long time) and study. But Spanish tends to pronounce every syllable, so this is not the problem. I´ve been discussing the point with my friends at Duero Formación in Tordesillas for some time, in the context of the speed needed to teach English learners of Spanish, which seems to be slower than that needed for speakers of other languages (usually French). When I did a word count in French and English on two radio broadcasts some years ago, in the context of one of Julian Whybra´s courses for gifted children, the speed was virtually identical at 206 and 208 wpm, though of course the French sounded faster.

I haven't yet repeated this with Spanish, but found a clue in the characteristic noted above, of pronouncing everything.  On a long tube trip, I counted the words and syllables in a paragraph from Amalia in Lawaetz, Penguin Parallel Texts 2, p84 , and its English translation opposite. The Spanish had 80 words, and 165 syllables. The English 81 words, and 108 syllables. Each Spanish vowel that was separately pronounced was counted as a syllable, which accounts for the difference of roughly 30 per cent in the amount of articulation required.

This made me curious enough to try two more comparable texts when I got home. These were on recent ETA activity, from El Pais and The Times of 31.7.09. The El Pais article had 117 words, in which I counted 251 syllables. The first 117 words of The Times piece had 177 syllables.

Update - I checked the first 117 words of the corresponding article in The Telegraph, which, co-incidentally, also contained 177 syllables. To square things up, I repeated the exercise with El Mundo, which had 250 syllables in 117 words.

There is an interesting historical element here. When voicing the -ed  ending in most English verbs was dropped (instead of dropp-ed as in learn-ed) around the turn of the 17th century, Jonathan Swift wrote a furious attack on the shortcut. But it accounts for some of the compactness of modern spoken English, and is a factor in the syllable count - ido, ado add two syllables in Spanish.  Similarly, the adverbial ending mente in Spanish has two syllables, the English ly one.

Errors and borderline judgements on syllable boundaries excepted, I offer this as prima facie evidence -no more, no less - that, in comparable texts, Spanish has significantly more syllables for a given number of words than English has, and that the need for increased articulation to pronounce these additional syllables in the same space is what makes Spanish seem fast. Any views? 

Zim Zam Zoum, Module 2 - three more cheers!

I've just had the great pleasure of checking out an advance copy of ZZZ module 2. It would be hard to overstate the impact of Module 1 on young children learning French - its brilliant animations, light, melodic and rhythmic music, and careful script make it a pleasure to use, and anyone who has not seen it should make a bee-line to it.

Receiving the pack in August, I can't try it with a class yet, but it seems every bit as good as Module 1. The very popular theme song has been reworked, the music and animations are top flight - the music has aa real French feel to it - and the linguistic content has an excellent combination of new, authentic French material and plenty of practice and reinforcement. A new feature is a series of animated descriptions of basic French grammar, followed by interactive exercises. The explanations are very clear and slowly paced, and may well be useful to non-specialist teachers as well as pupils. I'd be very grateful for any feedback on their use in practice, and will try them myself as soon as term starts.

ZZZ is now used in every school in North Yorkshire as well as in Hackney. Very highly recommended. http://www.taughtbysong.com/

Intercultural Understanding - a third of MFL or New Left Politics?

Learning a new language involves learning about the culture of the people who speak it. It always has. I was interested to find, in what is now Year 8, that the French did not eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, and more interested still to find that they had a custom of drinking a glass or two of wine with their supper, which I found an improvement on tea. Their cider tasted different from ours, and they had this thing called Perrier, which I thought was probably pear cider (perry) and found cordially revolting.

But a third of language learning, and when the main substance of language learning is in such a parlous state?  Pure PC, pure manipulation, pure government-sponsored ignorance, designed to draw attention away from the important task of giving children real understanding of their work and generating enough interest and enthusiasm for them to want to carry on with it. In other words, New Labour, taking a good idea and using it as a mask for a thoroughly bad one, and in the process helping disguise the fall in standards - any idiot could get 100% on that assessment, hiding weaknesses elsewhere.  

The politics go deeper. Most of us thought that the New in New Labour referred to modernising, getting rid of nationalisation - more fun and much cheaper to tax businesses than to buy them - and reducing the "beer and sandwiches" culture of the unions. This was the public agenda. The private one was to put in place the policies of the New Left. This was done under the shaded leadership of David Miliband, Blair's head of policy, and the architect of the shift from the early attempt to raise standards (eg by summer schools run by people who mostly didn't know what they were doing. Blair has a naive streak.) towards the dilution that has drawn criticism from academics in maths and sciences. This latest step will lead to less language teaching and more indoctrination. Negative responses to consultation might work - New Labour will always step back from something that loses it votes. My hunch is that they believe they can get away with it, and that they probably will get away with it. Personally, I'd had enough of them some time ago. I have a naive streak myself, and helped them at the beginning, meeting shadow ministers and contributing to their first policy document. I've now joined the Conservative Party.

The White Paper on languages - and what it should have said.

The government's White Paper on Education - in effect, the preparation for a new Education Act - mentions languages twice. In para 3.7, it says that partnerships with specialist schools can make languages available to all, and in para 4.12, it says that central support from the ministry can encourage more people to take maths, science and languages to A level. That is all.

The first comment hides the catastrophic decline in languages in most schools - and hence for most children - in the country. The second, a similar disaster at A level, where languages are kept alive by heavy subsidy from more popular courses.  There is no attempt to address the underlying causes of this failure, and the government made sure they would not be addressed by spiking the "independent" review of languages by the late Lord Dearing by appointing its chief official as his co-writer. This ensured that, whatever else was criticised as a cause of language failure, the government and its policies would not be.

What should the White Paper have said?

1. That the idea of simply exposing children to "a rich input" of the new language will only lead to learning if the children understand the language.  I made this point to Lord Dearing, and he told me that he accepted it.  I was told this week that the mangled version of the point that appeared in the report - that children "needed to understand what they were learning and why" - was not based on this point at all.  Direct observation of children learning, and discussions with them, have convinced me that deliberately giving them language they don't understand, particularly in the early stages, is a catastrophic error.

2. One major error in the National Curriculum, moving to full speed in listening almost from the beginning, has been moved to Level 7. However, it is still present in many of the materials teachers use, and these need to be replaced.

3. Separating listening from its context is another error, particularly in the early stages. We only listen without a visual context via the radio, and this is an advanced skill in a foreign language. Normal speaking and listening is supported by facial expression, gesture and body language, and children should not be expected to operate in new language without these elements. Listening should not be presented out of context before A level, and even then it should be presented with great care. Now that video can be used just as easily as sound recording, there is no reason to continue with the practice of artificial separation of listening from its normal context.

4. Government communication on languages continues to be cumbersome, ineffective and politically loaded. As I left my meeting with Lord Dearing, he told me that the primary Framework was "repetitive and overloaded". So is everything else the government produces on education. This is because of its commitment, under what Blair called "joined up government" and Miliband "equal opportunities...the political lodestar", to promoting a political agenda rather than to raising standards. Sir James Rose's reports, for good or ill, have been genuinely independent. Lord Dearing's report on languages was not. If it had been, I believe it would have read very differently. My reason for this belief is his other parting comment as I left the ministry - "I've learned from you," he said. The government hasn't, and won't.

4.  The late Professor E C Wragg's surveys of primary and secondary children's opinions of teaching found that they valued clear explanation above everything else. My late friend Michel Thomas applied the same principle in teaching adults, and the primary Toolkits I've produced with my colleagues in Hackney do this for primary children, explaining, for example, the idea of gender in terms that six year olds can understand. This approach needs to be developed further. It is not possible to learn a language, either our first (past an everyday level) or a second language, without understanding how it works.

5. We need a new approach to the subject, based on hard evidence and on direct observation of teaching and learning to establish what works and what doesn't. The present state of research is a disgrace when compared with any other academic discipline - much as the research into phonics was prior to the Clackmannanshire study.

Grow, Story, Grow - Val Thornber

Val's new website is here.  Lots of interactive stories, at levels that will suit Y2 upwards, in the style of Little Tails, but with more scope. Highly recommended, especially at its current price (free).