John Bald/language and literacy

Going backwards - Michael Rosen and Reading between the Lines.

"Reading Between the Lines " R4 was a good attempt at a balanced view of issues in reading teaching by the BBC, but Michael Rosen stretched credibility past breaking point with an analogy, not to driving a car, but to reversing it. When we're reversing, we can't see where we're going without either relying on mirrors or giving ourselves a sore neck. We do not read backwards, but move our eyes in the same direction as the developing meaning of the text.

Reversing might have been the first idea that occured to Mr Rosen - if so, he should have thought twice. Driving forwards and using all controls would have been a better analogy. But hey - Mr Rosen is a celebrity, so can say what he likes, whether it means anything or not. Where's that bear?

One of my key teaching ideas came from a similar source. I was not an easy driving pupil, and passed my test third time. The instructor before last said, "We believe everything the mirror tells us, but we don't believe the mirror tells us everything". I used this with pupils until I found they could not quite believe everything the letters told them, and changed it to "We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything."  This fits the facts, and is very helpful.

Ofsted's training materials on phonics for inspectors, the simple view of reading, and telling children the truth.

Ofsted has published the training course for inspectors on inspecting phonics, here and here. This is essential reading for co-ordinators, as it sets out exactly what is to be inspected and how they can expect inspectors to do their work. The second part of the course has useful examples of writing, with graded texts. Ofsted has designed the course to provide information for inspectors who might not be fully familiar with the issues, and considers that very experienced inspectors will already know much of the content. This is no doubt true, but is also a residue of Ofsted's error in 2005 in allowing any inspector to inspect anything. An inspector who does not have deep knowledge of early reading should not be inspecting it - a course of this nature is no substitute for experience. 

I have previously argued that the "simple view of reading" is too simple, partly because it associates decoding purely with phonics,  and partly because "comprehension" is only one of several elements involved in fluent reading. I'm still not sure that considering "comprehension" in terms of spoken as well as written language solves the problem, but think the difficulty may lie in the title. An activity that involves as many facets of human intellect as reading is not simple.

Further issues arise later. In what I've described as "phonics' second wind", longer words of Latin (rather fewer of Greek) origin have a high degree of phonic regularity. Like Spanish words, however, English words almost always have a single main stress point, that may vary even among words of the same family (photograph, photography, photographic). The letters won't tell us where this stress point is - we have to know the word, so that comprehension, if we accept it as including spoken language, actually aids decoding in these cases, and the information from letters has to be interpreted in its light.  

Then there is phrasing. Children observed for Professor Katharine Perera's doctoral thesis (Manchester, 1989) only began to group words into meaningful phrases once they could read 60 to 70 words a minute accurately. This shows that word identification, aka decoding, is essential to comprehension. But there is a twist.  The French government's analysis of English phrasing, here,  shows that the pulse in individual words is part of a further stress system, in which one word in each sentence or phrase is emphasised more than the others.

Placing and weighting this stress depends on a combination of fast word identification, quick thinking and understanding of the language. It has much in common with music, and should be taught in the same way. Incidentally, it is this problem with intonation that has made it so hard to design computerised speech engines in English.

My concern that irregular features need to be fully explained and taught is only partly addressed in the Ofsed materials. The fact that "tricky" words include some letters that behave as expected - eg said - is true enough, but does not go far enough. Why do we have to suspend part of what our teacher tells us is the way to read a word? Children may (rarely) ask the question, but weaker readers are more often confused, and panic, guess or give up when they can't sound out a word one letter at a time. 

The solution is to explain to children, in terms they understand, why the way we speak does not always quite match the way we write. This is much more effective than giving them a lot of things to learn separately just because they are "tricky". Languages and their spelling systems are human, and so have human foibles. Like most children, they behave most of the time, but not all of the time. Like most parents, they are usually in a good mood, but not always. They are influenced by habit, fashion and other languages, most notably French - saying table in French so that children can hear the l before the e is an effective demonstration. Then, once children know what they can and cannot expect from letters, much of the uncertainty and confusion that continues to dog reading can be dissolved, to be replaced with realistic expectations. Much like the rest of life.  

This point is much more important than most reading specialists realise - Sue Palmer's recommendation of my work in The TES, here, and the invitation at the top of this weblog, have resulted in my resolving some of the most difficult cases, including many who have failed to learn to read despite intensive teaching by virtually every other method, including synthetic phonics. Tests carried out prior to my involvement in current work with a ten year old could not have been clearer - he read correctly every completely regular word, and could not read any that could not be simply sounded out.   In every case over the past twenty years, a clear, accurate and realistic explanation of English spelling, warts and all, has been the key to enabling people to read and write. In the end, it is a question of telling the truth. 

TDA conference, October 11th. References

Here is a short list of references to accompany the TDA powerpoint presentation of 11th Oct.

The book by Professor Stanislas Dehaene, of the Collège de France, is important for the more detailed evidence it provides on the range of connections involved in reading, including evidence obtained in an autopsy of a very recently deceased person in Lausanne, Switzerland (p.102).  Professor Dehaene's book should be read by everyone with a professional interest in reading and languages. His work on mathematics, The Number Sense, is no less important. 

Bald, J. Grammatical Terms and Language Learning, a Personal Perspective. Scottish Languages Review 20, 2009. Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling. (Sage, 2007)

Blackmore, S-J and Frith U, The Learning Brain: issues for education. (Blackwell 2005.)

Fernald, G  M. Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (McGraw-Hill, 1943)

Dehaene, S. Reading in the Brain, Viking, 2009.

Pinker, S. Words and Rules; the ingredients of language. (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1999)

Swan, M and Smith, B. Learner English, A teacher’s guide to interference and other problems. CUP, 2^nd Ed 2001.

Wilkins, A. Reading Through Colour, Wiley 2003 (see also his website at Essex U)

 

Resources.

Clicker 5 + Acapella speech engine: www.cricksoft.com

www.languagenut.com

Little Tails  www.beelingua.com

Talking Pen  www.mantralingua.com   

Zim Zam Zoum 1 and 2; Vale, Venga Vamos. www.taughtbysong.com  

http://www.tts-group.co.uk

 

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.

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.

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.

 

Regular and irregular errors in a fourteen-year-old's reading and spelling

This young man is good at maths, but his mother thought he had problems with phonics. He was being badly teased at school. As they live a distance away, we started with a phone lesson.

I asked him to write down remember and read it back. He wrote rember. This is a phonic error, based on leaving out part of a word that we can hear if we say it carefully. After this explanation, and saying it slowly, he - we'll call him Simon - got the word right, and I added November just to put the pattern in his mind. 

I explained the pattern in slimmed down spelling - sounds,  groups of letters, then extra letters, and then whatever is plain awkward. Simon spelled station accurately, so the idea of groups was straightforward. Extra letters were more difficult. I asked him to spell chaos, and he wrote Kcaios. As he spelled the word back to me, he used a combination of letter sounds and items from Letterland - kicking ke, se, a, ih etc. We switched immediately to using letter names - it is disgraceful that a young person of 14 should still be using sounds as taught to a five year old - and I explained the principle of beginning with one letter per sound, and then adding others as we'd learned. K, I explained, is a very strong letter, and we only use it when we've learned we need it. That brought us to c  aos, and we then added the extra letter, h. Simon got the word right and was pleased. He understood it, and I added an other word with ch - it may have been chemist.

Simon spelled was accurately, and then a lot of other Germanic words like warm and water. These are awkward, because the a is not representing its usual sound. However, he spelled enough, enuff. Phonically accurate, but wrong.  I explained the ough group, and how it originated. Simon learned the group quickly, and was soon able to write words using it - remembering that we only use a group when we've learned we need to.

The lesson took about 35 minutes, and I asked Simon to look over his work and begin to apply its principles before he comes to see me in the holidays. Had it been helpful?  Very helpful, he replied emphatically. 

I'm not sure that mum was wholly right about the problem and its origins. Simon could use phonics, but had not been taught to do so properly - that is, to pay close attention to the sounds indicated by letters, but also to be prepared for the times when they don't work. As I said to him, The language is a thousand years old, and if we were a thousand years old, we'd have some wrinkles too. I know I say this a lot, but it's true.

 

 

 

Talking Phonics: Mantralingua. Review

Talking Phonics (£117.50, www.mantralingua.com) applies the Mantralingua recorder pen to the Letters and Sounds scheme, and brings it to life.  The versatility and potential of the recorder pen is well known - simply touch on a magnetised dot to activate a recording channel in the pen, and play back by touching a corresponding paper dot, which you can fix to a book, or anything else appropriate. The pen can also use pre-recorded material, in this case a series of laminated mats, which provide a clearly thought out and progressive introduction to sounds, beginning with the environment and ending with three letter words. Two further packs are planned, to include the remainder of Letters and Sounds.

The mats are bright and cheerful, and the activities well-designed, with clear instructions. A strong recommendation for early years settings and playgroups, providing an introduction to technology as well as phonics.