John Bald/language and literacy

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. 

Woman's Hour, You and Yours, Michael Rosen and Dorothy Bishop on phonics.

I was against the use of non-words for six year old testing, as it would be attacked as nonsense. I still don't know if it will be accepted, but it was better received in the pilots than I expected, and it undoubtedly tells teachers whether children are using the information contained in letters, rather than guessing. So, the information will be useful, and will help ensure that phonics are more thoroughly taught.

Greg Wallace, a pro-phonics executive headteacher, won the argument on Woman's Hour with  NUT executive member Hazel Danson with some ease, and did well against slightly better opposition on You and Yours. However, losing an argument won't put these people off. Michael Rosen has lost plenty, including one on BBC2 a couple of years ago, but persists in thinking he's right about reading, even though his work does not involve the practical, day to day business of ensuring that people can read. The range of views on reading teaching within the NUT is vast, as I know from talking to members, and Hazel Danson does not and cannot represent them.  She might have added to her remarks the fact that phonics was the preferred method of the last government as well as of this one.

Professor Dorothy Bishop, here, makes the simple point that you can't read for pleasure if you can't decode the words. Rosen's reply is not convincing - he accuses Bishop of a mechanistic approach to the brain that shows he has not read much of her work - but he cites a 7 year old reading The Broons, a Scottish comic strip, as evidence that phonics are not necessary. He couldn't be more wrong.  I grew up with The Broons and Oor Wullie, and their Glasgow dialect is conveyed by turning it into phonically regular script - see the oo in the titles as an example. The child's reconstruction of the dialect from the script shows that phonics work on this occasion, even if they don't always.

Which is why I keep coming back to my central point, without which the good done by more phonics teaching will be severely limited. Until phonics proponents accept that they need to do more than just assert that phonics work, and explain how children should be taught to tackle the irregular as well as the regular features of language, they will leave many children confused and perpetuate the reading problems of people who believe literally in what the teacher says. The solution is contained in this weblog. It  really does work.

The "Whole Word" fallacy.

 A request for Sue Palmer's piece from the TES from a friend who is trying to argue with a person who thinks the "whole word" method helps with irregularity. This is a major fallacy among proponents and opponents of phonics alike. The approach has the following problems:

1. The whole word is not irregular. The most irregular word has at least one letter that behaves as expected.

2. Only a small number of irregular words are "one-offs". Most share the irregular pattern with other words - teaching them together and explaining them creates new networks in the brain, in which each word reinforces all the others.

3. Unless we explain irregular letter patterns, the child has no way of knowing how and why the letters represent the sounds they do. 

For phonics teachers, the whole word approach to irregularity involves a suspension of belief on the part of the child, who has to put on hold everything his or her teacher has said. The importance of this goes far beyond the word itself - can the child trust the teacher?

For look and say teachers, it throws all words into a melting pot, and stumps anyone who cannot work out these relationships for themselves. But look and say is a shortcut to illiteracy for all but a lucky few.

The trouble is that a lot of teachers don't know the patterns of letters in English beyond the initial stages, because no one has ever taught them. I explain them fully in my books.  If you haven't yet seen Sue's piece, it's 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.

New phonics reading test well received.

According to the BBC this morning (16th Sept) 43% of teachers in the 300 schools trialling the government's new reading test for six year olds said that it had alerted them to problems they might not have spotted. This is a very important result, and a vindication of the test's methodology in using combinations of letters  that are not actual words to see whether children are able to use the information contained in the letters in order to read. 

And this is an issue on which,  on this evidence, I have been wrong. I have been worried about using non-words (nonsense words, as they are sometimes called) as there seemed to me to be enough nonsense in the world without creating more. But non-words remove the element of chance from testing that is caused by a child happening to know words or not, and so enable us to assess phonics as an element in itself. As phonics are the basis of learning to read, this is important, and Michael Gove is to be congratulated on pressing ahead with it.

The teachers' unions have raised objections, but it needs to be said that these union officials generally know less about the teaching of reading than the average teaching assistant, let alone practising teacher. They have mostly never taught anyone to read in their lives, and have an ideological attraction to guessing game theories - which is what they mean by "alternative methods" - as these appear to reduce the advantage enjoyed by children whose parents are highly literate. They know nothing about the subject, and parrot attractive-sounding mantras fed to them by sympathetic left-leaning academics.

The element that is needed in addition to word-building, aka synthetic phonics, is clear explanation of the irregularity in English that causes phonics not to work, fully or in part, with a large proportion of words. This is easy to do once you think about it, but most people don't. I have an email from Sir James Rose saying that he considers my points on this issue to be well made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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. 

 

 

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy.

This is a disciplined and clearly-written account of an investigation into the links between early language development and literacy problems that is the culmination of over thirty years of research, and contains within it the germ of a solution. For all of that time, Professors Snowling and Hulme have taken a practical and controlled view of the issues involved in early literacy and have made significant discoveries, chief among them the link between problems with speech in early childhood and subsequent assessments of dyslexia. They have worked patiently and hard, with respect for the limitations of evidence and the constraints of research methods. I hope that all of the authors of this excellent book will forgive me for putting Maggie and Charles first - I declare a bias, indeed an interest, in a disinterested sense of the word, having followed the research since their first publication

In this book, they and their co-authors have set up random allocated controlled trials of teaching, provided by trained teaching assistants, designed to promote the development of spoken language and to tackle problems that put children at risk of failing to learn to read and write properly. Professor Snowling has described the organisation of the study, which involved 29 schools, as “a logistical nightmare”. However, she and her colleagues have woken up in bright sunshine, with statistically and educationally significant outcomes that are an important breakthrough, not only in literacy, but in the training and deployment of teaching assistants. At the York conference presenting the work, the authors were full of praise for the work of the assistants and quite rightly - this is the first fully documented account of what assistants can achieve, and for that alone is very important. 

The two key programmes, phonology plus reading, and oral language, are described in great detail in the book and should be read by everyone concerned with early literacy. I have a couple of quibbles, the most important of which is the suggestion on p2 that “by the time children go to school, they typically have an oral vocabulary of 14,000 words”.  As Professor Snowling and many others have shown great disparities in the pre-school language experience of children, it is impossible to know what is typical, or to put a figure on it.  

The research was supported by a grant of £212k from the Nuffield Foundation. It has demonstrated that randomised controlled trials are possible in education, though to me this is still one criterion among many for evaluating research. Focus on the right groups of pupils, clear design and consistent monitoring of teaching techniques, and long term follow up are all just as important (technical paper here).  This study followed pupils up after 15 months, which is good, though follow up to 11, as in the Clackmannanshire studies, should be undertaken if possible. There is no quick fix here, either real or implied - as with Reading Recovery, the social and intellectual conditions that are part of the cause of literacy problems are still in place once the intervention has finished. But life is short. This research is the best we have had to date in this area, and much better than most of that surrounding Reading Recovery.

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy. Wiley-Blackwell, Nuffield Foundation, ISBN 978 0 4707 1185 9

The simple view of reading, and why it is too simple. Updated

A good and succinct account of the simple view of reading is here. Its basic idea is that reading consists of two elements, decoding, which it says is based on phonics, and comprehension, a time-honoured but obscure word that means understanding. 

The need for understanding is self-evident, and I welcome current research into building it up. JM Carroll and others, Developing Language and Literacy (Wiley, 2011) is an important account of this work.

The first reason the simple view is too simple lies in its equation of decoding with phonics. In order to decode in English, we need both phonics and a systematic approach to the occasions on which phonics does not work. It is not enough to say that there are irregular or sight words, as this leaves the learner with no systematic way of dealing with them, or of using the partial information conveyed by the letters that make them up.

We have, as far as I can find, no systematic research on the teaching of irregularity in English, and yet it is an issue that is obvious to everyone who has ever learned to read. For phonics proponents,  it is an Achilles' heel that has allowed the guessing game people to make fun of them, establish themselves in academic positions by means of factions, and impose nonsense on the population. For the guessing game "school of thought", it is a fact that they have misinterpreted and abused in equal measure to sustain an approach that has no basis whatever in research or practice.

What needs to be done? There are several options.

1. Careful case studies of people with serious difficulties.

2. Controlled trials. It is never possible to use the medical model in education for one overriding and essential reason - you cannot blind the teacher in the same way as you can a doctor. It is one thing to make two identical white pills, one with an ingredient and one without. It is another to expect a person to teach without knowing what he or she is doing (or supposed to be doing...)

3. Linguistic analysis. Irregularity in English is a fact, capable of objective observation and analysis without the need for experiment. It is therefore capable of investigation via inductive reasoning, provided that a model of spelling is accepted as a starting point.

What is not an option is to continue as we are, with two competing sets of half-truths. Or, more accurately, one three-quarter truth and one piece of sophisticated rubbish.

Update. The idea that word reading (aka decoding) and comprehension are the most important elements to reading appears  true. However, they are not the only elements. Reading also includes the grouping of words into phrases and sentences, and the right pattern of intonation and emphasis that is needed to bring out the full meaning of an English sentence. Quick, accurate word identification is essential to phrasing (See Perera, K, PhD, U Manchester c1989) but the idea of picking words with in a sentence for particular emphasis isn't always evident to people who have learned to read as English native speakers. These are good reasons for continuing to hear children read aloud, from demanding texts as well as from easy ones, well past the initial stages of learning to read.

 

Edge Hill University and Miscue Analysis

One of the follies of Edge Hill University's lucrative (for them) course on dyslexia is its insistence on miscue analysis as a means of assessing the reading of people assessed as dyslexic.  Miscue analysis is one of the biggest follies in the history of reading teaching, for the following two simple reasons:

1. It attempts to analyse children's reading on the sole basis of what they get wrong. It completely and deliberately ignores what they get right.

2. It assumes that the same thinking underlies errors and the reading of words that are read correctly - this is K Goodman's guessing game theory of reading, which has been comprehensively demolished by research.  Fabian Hamilton's commons committee fell into the same trap, and here are some references that should be studied by his committee and by Edge Hill

Schatz and Baldwin - Context cues are unreliable predictors of word meanings  Reading Research Quarterly 21, 1986.

M Macmartin Factors affecting reading comprehension in primary pupils (PhD, OU, 1992)

Stanovich, K, Romance and Reality, The Reading Teacher, 1993-4

Johnson, R and Watson, J, The Effects of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on Reading and Spelling, A seven-year longtitudinal study. Edinburgh, Scottish Central Research Unit 2005.  

The technique has never been shown to have any benefits whatsoever to people assessed as dyslexic, and there is no research evidence to back its inclusion in a dyslexia course. However, it fits very well into the modern, ignorant, authoritarian world of reading politics. The serious wickedness behind the folly is that public money is being spent on promoting this nonsense among six "cohorts" of teachers, who are in some danger of believing what they are told, and hence misteaching the children.