John Bald/language and literacy

Pie Corbett, story for young children

Can't resist this story from Pie Corbett's website. Talk about using what comes to hand!

 

Word history and teaching English

I almost always ask new pupils how table comes to be spelled as it is. None has ever known the reason, which is that it is a French spelling - if we say the word in French, we can hear the l before the e. It's important as it unlocks and  explains the spelling of a large number of words - cable, stable, staple etc. 

Does that mean that we need to learn French to teach people to read? a teacher asked. 

It doesn't, but it does mean that teachers need to know enough of the history of words to be able to explain to pupils why language is not always logical, and to point out patterns in the irregular words that will enable pupils to make connections between them and learn by analogy. No reading scheme does this and, as far as I know, no teacher-training programme does either. The result is that even schemes that give children a good understanding of phonics do not fully equip them to read in English, as they have to work out irregular words for themselves, and have no basis on which to do this.

It's not that children can't understand this idea - I've never met one that can't, provided it is explained in terms that make sense to them. If I  say to them that the language is a thousand years old, and that if we were a thousand years old we'd have a few wrinkles, this makes perfect sense. If I say letters don't always behave perfectly, they understand this because they don't behave perfectly eiither. If I say that We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything, they begin to understand the system they are dealing with, and adjust their thinking accordingly.

Unfortunately, people who base their thinking about literacy on dogma and politics - the latest contribution of the Left is a professor of education at Greenwhich who has coined the term Conservative Neoliberal Phonics - have either pretended that irregularity can be ignored, or have used it as a reason to dream up various guessing game theories of reading that do not give childre the skills they need. 

The truth is different, and it is time for the truth to form the basis of literacy teaching.

Phonics, Reading and Language Development - a note from a parent, and serendipity.

The basis of reading in English, as in any language that uses an alphabetic system, is the information conveyed in the letters, which we learn to use by blending sounds and building words. This is all that synthetic phonics means.

The mother of the very bright pupil I saw last week noticed that I moved quickly from very short words such as his name, or cat, to much longer words that had similar phonic components - catastrophe, catastrophic. I do this both to show that phonics can tell us most of what we need to know in order to read long words - I call this phonics' "second wind" - and what it won't tell us, which is how to pronounce them, and in particular where to place the stress. There is almost always just one stress point in an English word, and it is movable - see photograph, photography, photographic. 

Where a child has the ability to understand more complex vocabulary, as Derek clearly had, I spend a lot of time unpacking and discussing the words, explaining what letters do and don't tell us, and using frequent flashbacks, asking them to read words I pick out from the set, so that they learn to use all of the information contained in the letters, and not just to sound words out.

One of the key features in learning to read in English is that information contained in letters has to be interpreted - eg the difference between can and can't, which caused Derek more trouble than the difference between catastrophe and catastrophic. The only way to deal with this is to explain, discuss and practise. For example, after explaining that some letters give us information about other letters, and once Derek was confident with this on mad and made, I wrote late and plate, both of which he read with ease. Then template, which he read more hesitantly, but could explain to me. Then contemplate, which we discussed, and which Derek told me applied to his brother, a mathematician. We spend similar amounts of time on the origin of the illustrate, in lighting up a text, then illustrated, illustration.

There is probably no alternative, in this aspect of reading and language development, to relaxed but focused conversation with an interested and educated adult, who knows the language well enough to pick out key words to illustrate ideas or patterns, and how can provide Jerome Bruner's "courteous translation" of the adult concepts they contain, so that the child can understand and enjoy them. 

A key element in my teaching is not to teach a word a child has got wrong, but another with the same pattern, almost always the pattern at the end of the word rather than at the beginning. I then explain the pattern clearly, and practise it with other words that share the pattern. Once the child has the pattern clear in their mind, I throw in the word that caused the problem, and they usually get it right. I started using this little technique in the first reading lesson I ever taught at Beaufoy School, when someone could not read round, and I got a pound of of my pocket - still  notes in those off days - and taught the boy to read that. Round was then easy. Since then, the value of this approach has been confirmed and extended in the work of Professor Usha Goswami. Its relevance here is that similar letter patterns can lead us almost anywhere in terms of meaning. As everythinlg must be explained so that it is clear to the child, every esson is therefore different, and more likely to sustain interest.

I'm grateful to Derek's mother for pointing this out so clearly.

Another difficult case turned round in one session.

The best friend of the pupil referred to in this posting came to see me yesterday with his mother and Karina McLachlain. A bright boy approaching nine years old, who was failing in reading, and who benefited from the clear explanation of what letters do and don't tell us in English, followed by practice. The different sounds represented by a in can and can't took as much work as the pronunciation of longer words such as catastrophe, catastrophic - and we had to work quite hard on memory too once Derek, as we will call him, had understood how he needed to adjust his thinking.

Derek's mother's verdict was "brilliant", and Derek left in as cheerful a mood as he had arrived, having read a page of his Horrid Henry book, and joined in with me on General Jack Seeley's Warrior. Highlights of this reading were his self-correction of Isaac, and reading episode correctly.

Wordbuilding is the basis of learning to read, as it takes accout of the irregular as well as the regular features of English. It is therefore a more accurate as well as a more compact term than synthetic phonics,though the blending involved in synthetic phonics is the core of it. 

In the afternoon, saw a charming girl of 11 whose spelling was phonically accurate, but who had not understood variations such as double letters and groups of letters, and so was reaching very low scores in her school's spelling test, which could have been designed to have children fail, including words such as onomatopoeia, typical and mystery, without any explanation of their tricky features, which come from Greek and, in mystery, from our indistinct pronunciation of some vowels - mystery was spelled like history. Siobhan did very well during the lesson, but will need to practise using groups of letters and y (not for nothing known to the French as Greek i), and to use extra letters in words only when she's learned she needs them. Another happy, smiling child, and we enjoyed some French at the end, using Zim Zam Zoum (Taught by Song, and wonderful.)

Siobhan is expected to learn to spell, but without any explanation of why things are as they are. The basic problem with Derek is the need for a flexible explanation of English as it is, and not as it appears when chopped up in to "phoneme-grapheme correspondences" which are not always reliable. The very phrase is a fudge - what we need is not correspondence, but a clear indication from the letters of what we need to say. Usually, letters give us this, but not always, and they don't always tell the full story.

The NUT's attacks on phonics are part of an international folly that sees phonics as a way of making children fail rather than as the key to success. The British Left is equally hostile to the idea of formal English as the basis of education - its view is summed up in the National Association for the Teaching of English's pamplet Made Tongue Tied by Authority. There is no basis for such views in fact, but to win the argument we need to understand and present English as it is, including the underlying difficulty of accurately representing voice sounds in letters, which accounts for the partial information conveyed by  a in can and can't. The information conveyed by letters in English has to be interpreted as we read, and not taken at face value, and the brains of English speakers adapt themselves to do this. Some need more detailed explanation, and more practice, than others. 

Sir M Wilshaw, Ofsted and Literacy. Quite right, and high time.

Guardian has report of Sir M Wilshaw HMCI on literacy, here. Sir Michael is quite right. Too little attention is being paid to handwriting and spelling, because these have been deliberately wrecked by the leftist National Association for the Teaching of English and its associates in high places. It is no surprise that its annual conference this year was sponsored by one of our "examining" boards. English teacher training is almost entirely under the NATE thumb, and hence a further major contributor to the problem. As a result of this combination of subversion, ignorance and dereliction of duty, most teachers do not know how to teach spelling and handwriting, particularly to children for whom these skills are not straightforward - eg clumsy boys such as myself.

Level 4, though, would be fine as a baseline for secondary education if it meant what it said. Unfortunately, the tests have been fiddled to the extent that Level 4 usually means Level 3, so our current level 4 is fraudulent. 

The Ofsted report is here, and it raises interesting questions.

70% of teaching, and up to 78% of schools' curricula, are rated good or outstanding. And yet too little attention is paid to handwriting and spelling, and much of the work in Years 7 to 9 is criticised for being poorly organised and related to GCSE and not the immediate needs of the pupils. How can the curriculum and teaching be rated so highly with this imbalance?  If the commentary is correct, then HMI have not been evalating teaching and the curriculum properly. This may be because they have looked at paperwork rather than what is really happening, or becuase some of them have bought into the "progressive" English agenda themselves. Whatever the reason - see paragraphs 43 and 47 in particular - what HMI have chosen to say is out of step with their inspection evidence.

Boys are behind girls in langauge development at 5, and further behind by GCSE. A curriculum that does not meet the needs of boys as well as those of girls is not good enough, though the conversion of GCSE English into an English literature examination, to meet the leftist agenda of the National Association for the Teaching of English - I first heard the mantra "teach the language through the literature" in 1980 - is also a major problem.

Then there is what Ofsted describes as a "myth" that it requires lessonsto be planned in a particular way. This is no myth. It is a creation of New Labour's deeply flawed national strategies, that imposed a Cromwellian structure - we might call it the New Model Lesson - and of David Bell's Ofsted juggernaut that focused on paperwork rather than teaching. Ofsted might disown the myth, but it helped create it.

Where Ofsted has a point is that headteachers have too often bought into this mind-set themselves, and have imposed over-rigorous planning on staff for their own purposes. Anything bullying or unreasonable, as so much is, can then be blamed on Ofsted. This paragraph sums up the outcome:

125. It is not unusual for inspectors to be presented with a three- or four-page lesson plan. A typical example might ask teachers to identify: learning aims and outcomes; resources; references to the National Curriculum and National Strategy objectives; links to a programme of learning skills; assessment opportunities; differentiation strategies, and so on. Lesson plans frequently expect teachers to refer to particular whole-school topics such as numeracy, information and communication technology or citizenship. Furthermore, the plan will include a detailed breakdown of the lesson, sometimes in five- or 10-minute chunks. It is not uncommon to find a lesson plan that includes (in addition to the features listed above) up to 500 words describing the lesson activities. This level of detail is counter-productive and does not necessarily lead to teaching that is clearly enough focused on specific learning outcomes for pupils. Previous English reports have commented that learning objectives were frequently over-ambitious for single lessons. Lesson plans should be simplified to encourage teachers to consider the central question: what is the key learning for pupils in this lesson and how can I bring it about?

The highlighted points are crucial. Paperwork has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished. We might add that all planning does not need to be written down.

 

 

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.

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.

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. 

 

 

Peter Buckroyd: How to Achieve a C or above in GCSE AQA A English (Heinemann)

This is a very sensible book for anyone looking to make progress in English from around Y9 onwards. It has good advice on the way pupils need to move from a basic understanding of a text to a well-organised and accurate answer to the kind of question likely to arise in any GCSE English paper. Lots of good examples of answers achieving grade C, and generally clear explanation of the additional requirements of grade B. Alongside BBC Bitesize, highly recommended for anyone not quite sure of a C grade - I'm glad I bought it. 

A happy parent

Hi, John, do you remember Michael? I brought him to see you five years ago for help with reading and maths. 

I do remember - Michael's father, a local clergyman, had given me the idea of throwing down pairs of cards to speed up Michael's recognition of number combinations. He was in a drudge of a primary school, doing nothing but practising writing for SATs all day.

He's just finished his GCSEs, and got A in both English papers and A in maths. He found a maths teacher he really clicked with. I thought you'd like to know, and that he might be of help to other children who have problems. He's going to sixth form college, and wants to be an actor.

Thanks for the call, Stephen. You've cheered me up. If you read this,  sorry I had to change your names. And well done, Michael.