John Bald/language and literacy

Letter from Sue Buckley OBE, of Down Syndrome International

Professor Sue Buckley is a pioneer of teaching reading and language development to children with Down Syndrome, and is Chief Scientist of Down Syndrome International and Down Syndrome Education USA.  If your work involves teaching children with Down Syndrome, I recommend Sue's organisation as a source of practical advice and help.

This year will mark the 30th anniversary of the day I received a letter from a father of a young girl with Down syndrome describing her (then) surprising aptitude for reading. This letter, from the late Leslie Duffen about his daughter Sarah, was the start of a fascinating journey.

During this time I have been privileged to be involved (along with many colleagues here and around the world) with groundbreaking research that has delivered marked improvements in the support and education offered to young people with Down syndrome today. There is still much to do to properly educate and inform all educators and therapists working with our children, but there has been notable progress in many parts of the world.

Leslie's letter also marked the beginning of what was to become Down Syndrome Education International. Starting in the early 1980s as a support group for a few dozen families engaged in our earliest research projects, the charity now delivers support to over 75,000 families and professionals in over 180 countries each year.

Ongoing practical research

With a growing team at our centres in the UK and the USA and working with partners at Universities around the world, we have a busy, ongoing programme of research, including:

* Classroom reading and language teaching trial - the largest randomised controlled intervention trial to date will be underway at two centres in the UK in a few months' time and (if the results are as expected) will result in practical, assistant-delivered, daily reading, speech and language support for children in schools everywhere (supported by the UK Big Lottery Fund).

* Early reading pilot study - a pilot trial of two early literacy intervention approaches is underway with colleagues at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA (supported by The Rocky Mountain Down Syndrome Educational Fund, the McDonnell Foundation and the University of Denver).

* Early years studies - ongoing studies are investigating the factors influencing differing rates of development, effects of signing on language development and early indicators of social communication and behaviour difficulties - including early predictors of autism spectrum disorders (supported by The Sue Buckley Research Fund and general funds).

* Attention profiles - a study at the University of Oxford, UK, is examining early attention profiles and their impact on literacy and numeracy development (supported by The Sue Buckley Research Fund and the UK Economic and Social Research Council).

* Reading and language - a study is underway at the University of York, Centre for Reading and Language, UK, investigating the interrelationships between oral language and reading skills (supported by The Sue Buckley Research Fund and the UK Economic and Social Research Council).

* Oral motor abilities - a study investigating oral motor control, speech, language, and non-verbal abilities will start at Lancaster University, UK, in April 2009 (supported by The Sue Buckley Research Fund and the UK Economic and Social Research Council).

In addition, we have several studies 'ready to go' when we can secure funding. These include:

* Speech and language intervention at home - an evaluation of an intervention to improve speech clarity supported by speech and language therapists but delivered at home by parents is planned with colleagues at Macquarie University, Sydney.

* Working memory computer training - an evaluation of the effects of computer-based training to improve working memory is planned in partnership with colleagues in the Psychology Department, University of York, UK, who have already demonstrated the training helps working memory in other children with delays.

Expanding global information and advice services

Throughout its history, Down Syndrome Education International has remained focused on practical research that delivers tangible benefits to children and young people with Down syndrome, and on communicating up-to-date and effective advice and information based on this research to families and professionals. Coupled with our extensive experience delivering educational services, support and specialist advice, this model ensures that the research quickly informs effective practice.

This is a model we remain committed to today as we continue to expand our advice, support and information services to improve life for young people with Down syndrome around the world.

We have an exciting programme of ongoing and new information and advice services, including:

* Down Syndrome Issues and Information books online - from birth to adulthood, our Down Syndrome Issues and Information books offer comprehensive information and practical guidance for families and professionals.

* Step-by-step early language teaching - our new See and Learn early language programme (available free online) offers step-by-step guidance to support early language development. We are working on further steps in the language and reading programme and developing practical resources for speech, memory and number development.

* New Down Syndrome Education Conferences - reaching more people in more places with focused tracks for families and professionals, our new conferences offer high quality, evidence based training.

* Global outreach with local impact - from California to Kiev, we are working with partners around the world to support improved support and services on the ground for young people with Down syndrome and their families.

* New online seminars and interactive events - we are launching a series of online seminars and interactive events for families and professionals to be delivered via the Internet via the latest web meeting and web conferencing technologies.

* New teaching reading film - continuing our series of Down Syndrome in Practice films, we will publish a new film on teaching early reading to young children with Down syndrome later this year.

Supporting a better future

Most of our work depends on charitable giving.

Some of these activities are covered by specific grants we have secured - such as the funding from the UK Big Lottery fund for the reading intervention trial.

However, most of our day-to-day activities and much of our ongoing research programme depend on the generosity of thousands of families and friends around the world.

With an effective model of working that is firmly focused on delivering tangible outcomes, we operate our activities highly efficiently. To deliver all of the ongoing activities described in this letter our global operating expenses will total £820,000 (or $1,230,000 or €950,000) during 2009.

That is just under £11 (or under $17 or €13) per person we will help this year.

To ensure this work continues, we need your support today. There are many ways that you can give your support -

* You can donate securely and quickly online today to Down Syndrome Education International (a UK registered charity) or to our associated US nonprofit, Down Syndrome Education USA.

* You can give regularly, be kept informed and receive exclusive members' rewards by joining our new Supporters Club.

* You can organise a fundraising event - perhaps a sponsored sporting event or encourage your school to organise one of our fun, educational and easy Up for Reading events.

Your donation - however large or small - will go a long way towards improving the lives of young people with Down syndrome everywhere.

Thank you,

Sue Buckley OBE
Chief Scientist
Down Syndrome Education International
Down Syndrome Education USA

The Rose review of primary languages - well done!

Sir James Rose's review of provision for primary languages is part of his general review of the primary curriculum.  It is succinct and practical. I particularly like:

1. His emphasis on understanding, which runs throughout his recommendations on the curriculum.

2. His inclusion of languages in the same group as English, which should enhance their contribution to literacy.

3. His timetable, with introduction in 2011 and an Ofsted review in 2014, which removes much of the pressure on schools to move too quickly.

4. The emphasis on one or two languages, to avoid superficiality.

5. His emphasis on training.

The review can be downloaded here.

French at Pimlico School in the Seventies

Jonathan Miller's son William, in the Sunday Times, blames his famous father for the educational failure that resulted from his being sent to Pimlico School instead of somewhere private. It's an interesting article, and contains this comment on French:

The worst lesson was French, where I was relegated to the CSE class because I failed a single written test. Having positioned myself in the relative safety of the back row, where I could avoid being hit by flying furniture, the teacher noticed how badly I squinted at the blackboard. In order to remain in the back row, I managed to acquire a pair of (useless) glasses within days, and so slid further behind.

Miller started at Pimlico in 1975. At the time, I was teaching reading and games in Lambeth, just across the river from Pimlico. In mid-February, I had an enquiry from a local vicar, whose son was at Pimlico, and who was not being allowed to take GCE French because he had failed the mock. Could I teach him, and they would pay for the entry if it was successful?

His son's view of French was just the same as Miller's - no work at all was taking place, because the behaviour of the pupils prevented it. He knew virtually nothing. My approach was to think through the whole process of communicating in French, and to present it to the boy in a way that was as easy as possible for him to understand. I compared the language to the Mississippi, a huge river, very beautiful, flowing in a clear direction, but with complications that you needed to avoid. Our goal was to keep in the river, and avoid hitting the banks. I went into great detail on these French ways of thinking and saying things, and this was the beginning of the approach to French that is now in the Toolkits on this weblog.  My pupil's father paid his fee and he got a B, after three months' teaching.

William Miller's experience was not unusual in comprehensive school language classes in the seventies. Part of the problem was a shortage of teachers, but much of it lay in the difficulties encountered by extending language learning from the grammar schools to the whole population. The intentions were good, but people did not know how to do it. As my own first head of department put it, the lower sets "had French on their timetable". Euphemisms sprang up, chief among them "French Studies", quickly slammed by HMI for containing little or no French. As I've said earlier, I was no better myself, and moved quickly to the English department, where I found my vocation for teaching people to read. Visiting a French class to collect a pupil in a girls' school a little later, I found the teacher knitting and the class playing games, reading and doing homework from other subjects. "This is the class I don't teach," she said.

Teaching my pupil from Pimlico was the start of something different, the beginning of a road that led to friendship with the late Michel Thomas, organising an international conference for the French Embassy in 1990, and to work with John Crick, whose mastery of technology allows French and other languages to be presented clearly, easily and enjoyably to the children that previously had no chance to learn. There are several others whose innovative work is taking things forward, notably Val Thorber of Little Tails and the stunning Taught By Song team, whose animations are some of the best multimedia productions ever. TBS was developed in an Oxford prep school, and goes down better than anything I've ever seen with Hackney children. This technology, and above all the flexibility it gives us in matching work to children's needs, puts us in a position to make "languages for all" a reality.

Sending William Miller to a private school would have solved his problem, but would have left the hell-hole of Pimlico unchanged.   Like most people, my parents could not have afforded private education, and several of the case studies on this weblog relate to people who, left to take their chances with the state system, which contains the useless as well as the brilliant, were not learning at all. Pimlico, says Wiliam Miller, was streamed at the time, though in recent years I've seen more problems caused by mixed ability teaching. Both main parties seem to agree now that there is no alternative, if we are to provide proper education for all of our children, to improving the state system. David Cameron in particular has done well to move the Tories away from their association with private education. Both, though, need to break the links between their education policies and ideology. Education is about teaching and learning, just as much now as it was for Chaucer. It is also as susceptible now as it was in ancient Greece to being suborned for political purposes.

PS According to a second piece in Saturday's Mail, grandparents Miller are digging deep to give William's children a private education. A great leap, no doubt, for the grandchildren. A small step backwards for the children for whom school is an intellectual dungeon, and who need improvements in the state system to give them a chance in life. 

Jonathan Miller's son William, in the Sunday Times, blames his famous father for the educational failure that resulted from his being sent to Pimlico School instead of somewhere private. It's an interesting article, and contains this comment on French:

The worst lesson was French, where I was relegated to the CSE class because I failed a single written test. Having positioned myself in the relative safety of the back row, where I could avoid being hit by flying furniture, the teacher noticed how badly I squinted at the blackboard. In order to remain in the back row, I managed to acquire a pair of (useless) glasses within days, and so slid further behind.

Miller started at Pimlico in 1975. At the time, I was teaching reading and games in Lambeth, just across the river from Pimlico. In mid-February, I had an enquiry from a local vicar, whose son was at Pimlico, and who was not being allowed to take GCE French because he had failed the mock. Could I teach him, and they would pay for the entry if it was successful?

His son's view of French was just the same as Miller's - no work at all was taking place, because the behaviour of the pupils prevented it. He knew virtually nothing. My approach was to think through the whole process of communicating in French, and to present it to the boy in a way that was as easy as possible for him to understand. I compared the language to the Mississippi, a huge river, very beautiful, flowing in a clear direction, but with complications that you needed to avoid. Our goal was to keep in the river, and avoid hitting the banks. I went into great detail on these French ways of thinking and saying things, and this was the beginning of the approach to French that is now in the Toolkits on this weblog.  My pupil's father paid his fee and he got a B, after three months' teaching.

William Miller's experience was not unusual in comprehensive school language classes in the seventies. Part of the problem was a shortage of teachers, but much of it lay in the difficulties encountered by extending language learning from the grammar schools to the whole population. The intentions were good, but people did not know how to do it. As my own first head of department put it, the lower sets "had French on their timetable". Euphemisms sprang up, chief among them "French Studies", quickly slammed by HMI for containing little or no French. As I've said earlier, I was no better myself, and moved quickly to the English department, where I found my vocation for teaching people to read. Visiting a French class to collect a pupil in a girls' school a little later, I found the teacher knitting and the class playing games, reading and doing homework from other subjects. "This is the class I don't teach," she said.

Teaching my pupil from Pimlico was the start of something different, the beginning of a road that led to friendship with the late Michel Thomas, organising an international conference for the French Embassy in 1990, and to work with John Crick, whose mastery of technology allows French and other languages to be presented clearly, easily and enjoyably to the children that previously had no chance to learn. There are several others whose innovative work is taking things forward, notably Val Thorber of Little Tails and the stunning Taught By Song team, whose animations are some of the best multimedia productions ever. TBS was developed in an Oxford prep school, and goes down better than anything I've ever seen with Hackney children. This technology, and above all the flexibility it gives us in matching work to children's needs, puts us in a position to make "languages for all" a reality.

Sending William Miller to a private school would have solved his problem, but would have left the hell-hole of Pimlico unchanged.   Like most people, my parents could not have afforded private education, and several of the case studies on this weblog relate to people who, left to take their chances with the state system, which contains the useless as well as the brilliant, were not learning at all. Pimlico, says Wiliam Miller, was streamed at the time, though in recent years I've seen more problems caused by mixed ability teaching. Both main parties seem to agree now that there is no alternative, if we are to provide proper education for all of our children, to improving the state system. David Cameron in particular has done well to move the Tories away from their association with private education. Both, though, need to break the links between their education policies and ideology. Education is about teaching and learning, just as much now as it was for Chaucer. It is also as susceptible now as it was in ancient Greece to being suborned for political purposes.

PS According to a second piece in Saturday's Mail, grandparents Miller are digging deep to give William's children a private education. A great leap, no doubt, for the grandchildren. A small step backwards for the children for whom school is an intellectual dungeon, and who need improvements in the state system to give them a chance in life. 

Congratulations to NALDIC

Naldic's comprehensive and tightly edited training videos on using ICT to teach English as an additional language are very useful. I found I was learning from the first minute - I've not used Google World, for example, to help children locate where they lived before and where they live now, right down to street level. I will now, and won't miss an episode over the coming weeks. And, yes, they do include Clicker.... 

French Spelling Unpacked 1

There is more than one way to teach French spelling. So, I am offering here what seems to be one solution to the problem. I’ve been working on it since 1983, when I published my first version of it in The TES.  This version is working well in Hackney primary schools and worked well with secondary schools in a short project with pupils with SEN.

 

I begin by explaining that French people like their language to flow when they speak, but want their written language to be as precise as possible. To achieve this, they use two main techniques.

 

1.  If two vowels clash, such as e and a in Je ai,  they produce a jerky sound a little like a glottal stop.  To avoid this, they usually knodk off the first vowel and insert an apostrophe, just as in English when we remove a letter.  I begin with Je ai in big letters, ostentatiously rub out the e and insert the apostrophe to make j'ai. Children then look away from the board, and write j’ai on their sleeve with their finger. Who got it right? Who remembered the apostrophe?  I’ll then compare apostrophe and catastrophe with their English equivalent. Each time this phenomenon occurs, I’ll reinforce it the same way, eg in c’est. The process reinforces children’s understanding of the apostrophe, and takes just a few minutes – it has taken longer to write this than it takes to do it. Very nearly all French apostrophes are used in this way, and over three-quarters involve taking out e – the remainder usually take out a, as in l’école.

 

To reinforce the point, I explain, if children are old enough to understand it, that vowels aren’t just an arbitrary collection of letters, aeiou, but, in the first place, sounds we make with our voice.  I demonstrate this by saying a word like cat, and leaving out the vowel. The reason we need a vowel in every word is that without a vowel we can’t hear it clearly – it’s not just a spelling rule. If the children seem interested, I usually add a note on the origin of the word vowel in the French for voice - a bit like roi, royal moving into English unchanged, but with voix, changing the y to w. This is a slight simplification, but broadly true.

 

In French, they use six letters to represent vowel sounds, and we might write them as

 

a	e	i	o	u
		y

The French word for y, igrec, is, literally, greek i, which is only used in words of Greek origin. This arrangement varies from the English vowel letters I use only in w, which is double-u in English, and hence a vowel, and double-v in French, and hence a consonant.

2. If sounding a consonant at the end of a word is going to cut the flow of language, it is dropped.  The most frequent examples are t and s, but other letters are sometimes dropped – d, b, g – and maybe more. I’m not an encyclopaedia.  So, we make j’ai un chat with Clicker and write it on our sleeve. When we’re confident, we move to a small board and later to a small notebook.  If you don’t have Clicker – which makes it very east to have a child choose between je and j’ -  you can use cards or a board.

 

The technique of writing with finger on the sleeve has been approved of by everyone who has seen it, including one or two teachers who don’t agree with me on some points. Children benefit from saying the word as they write it, and I sometimes have them spell it out rhythmically first – eg etre e – little hat –t r e.  (And yes, I explain the origin of the circumflex to children from Y3 onwards. They find it fascinating. More on this and other patterns in a later post).

 

As we proceed with other work, including Zim Zam Zoum and Little Tails, I point out letters that aren’t pronounced at the ends of words wherever they occur, and show extra patterns such as pronouncing s when followed by e.  We don’t write much at a time, but concentrate on understanding underlying principles, which apply to reading as well as writing. It is working. How far and how well will take a lot more research, but I can say with confidence that it makes the early stages of learning to write in French painless and interesting. A LEA consultant who saw it at a Comenius conference has said that it made “a big difference”. And there’s an extra spin off for English as well as the apostrophe – as we don’t write much, we can concentrate on getting the handwriting as neat as possible.

First and second languages.

My interpretation of Professor Suzanne Flynn's research into second language learning is that the structures of our first language remain imprinted in our brain, and new language learning is filtered through them. The evidence comes from analysis of errors made by learners of different languages in learning English, which reflect the structures of each learner's own first language.

Here is a snippet of confirmation. My piano teacher is French, and our lessons are in French. He tells me to play a Si. I say I'm already playing a C. Then I realise that his Si is our B, and play a B. He has the same trouble moving from note names in French and English. (He is, incidentally, a most distinguished pianist, and I'm lucky to have these lessons. Check him out if you like piano music - Patrick Hemmerle). The morale is that we never lose our mother tongue - and that it never ceases to operate, whether we speak our first or second language.

President Obama and languages

Thanks to Linda Parker for passing on this clip from President Obama. He makes some really good points, including  -

Everyone should learn a language

Everyone should start young

A language can be a tool for getting a job and taking part in international business

Learning a new language is not a substitute for good English.