John Bald/language and literacy

Professor Dorothy Bishop on Chomsky

Few people working with language in the real world know much about the work of Noam Chomsky, though most have heard the name. His "mentalistic" approach to language, in which he puts forward supposedly universal theories without any concern for evidence, is one of the major academic follies of the twentieth century. Professor Dorothy Bishop takes the theory apart, and follows earlier demolition by Professor Terry Moore and Chris Carling in Language Understanding : Towards a Post-Chomskyan Linguistics. It is difficult to see how Chomsky's reputation, or his influence on people working in the field of language development, can recover from this critique.

Tips from a Memory Champion - Jonathan Hancock

My love-hate relationship with The Guardian returns to love this morning, with this intriguing piece on memory from Jonathan Hancock, world memory champion, first-class Oxford graduate, and primary teacher. We do not know enough about memory, and Mr Hancock can teach us more.  

He has written a great many books, but How To Improve Your Memory for Study (Pearson, 2012) appears to be the latest, and has clear explanations of how memory fits into other aspects of brain activity, as well as a useful chapter on reading. An interesting point is our tendency to remember things better from the beginning or end of a session, rather than the middle. I would recommend this book to parents of secondary school pupils, and to pupils themselves who are taking GCSE or A level.

The main techniques are:

Inventing funny events, stories or characters that stick in the mind and which you can associate with things you want to remember

The Roman Room, or Loci system, in which you remember a series of points in a house and associate things with each point. You can also use a journey (eg a trip round 10 premiership football grounds). Mr Hancock adds some points from the manuscript Ad Herennium that the places should be uncluttered and well lit, and that emphasis can be added to the fifth and tenth items. Wickpedia notes that puritans did not like this method, as it led children to construct improper images!

Techniques for remembering numbers, including phrases in which the words have the same number of letters as the successive digits - eg enjoy drinks sensibly, 568, the number of millilitres in an imperial pint, and the major system, which assigns a consonant to each digit, and makes up words that help us remember it. 

Pelmanism - matching items on cards.

How much use these are depends on what we need to remember, and we need some research into specific applications, such as learning vocabulary in languages. The loci idea seems worth reviving.

 

Dyslexia and Examinations

The British Dyslexia Association is complaining about the new examination arrangements as disciminating against pupils assessed as dyslexic. It is crying wolf for these reasons:

1. Pupils with genuine disabilities can be given additional time and support.

2. The dyslexia racket swaps an expensive and dubious diagnosis, based on faulty tests, for effective teaching.

3. Pupils assessed as dyslexic can achieve normal grades under normal conditions, provided they are given the right teaching.

The dyslexia establishment is set up to pay itself and its psychologists large fees for sustaining pupils in a system that ensures that they will either have to rely on the crutches it provides, or fail. It has ignored research on effective teaching going back to Fernald and her collaborator, Helen Keller, and sustains teaching methods that push children through a hard slog without providing clear explanation of how the langauge works. It is profitable, for suppliers if not for parents and children, and uses its money to set up organisations that promote its point of view in the media. It is fundamentally blinkered and, at worst, a racket.

I repeat my offer of free teaching to anyone diagnosed as dyslexic, accompanied by their parents if minors. You could well save yourselves several thousand pounds. Here is a parent's view.

How New Labour's Strategies have prevented schools from teaching reading.

I've recently noted progress in two very difficult cases, one of them a six year old who was completely unable to read when I met him in July. We made immediate and important progress in having him base his reading on the information contained in letters rather than guessing, and he has now started to read items such as shop signs spontaneously, as well as making progress in his books and words he knows without having to work them out from scratch. 

So I was disappointed, first when his school did not reply to my letter telling them about the work, and then when I received this from the child's career:

 Hello John,

We are getting on quite well thank you. XXXX has been back at school for two weeks now so we have been concentrating on his school reading books. I was disappointed that during this time back, he has only had one group read though. I spoke to his teacher last week and asked if someone could hear him read for a couple of minutes a day but was told he will only get one group read and one 121 read with the teacher a week! If he was struggling he may get one more 121 with a teachers assistant. I just don't think it's enough and said I would rather they didn't teach him about dinosaurs, electricity etc and concentrated on his reading, but had no luck.

I'm at the point now where I am sure he is progressing but it could be so much better with the school's help.

The problem here is that the teaching is still based on the group formats developed under Labour's national strategies, and that they do not allow teachers to pay attention to the individual needs of the children in front of them. When reading was taught almost exclusively by having children read to the teacher, the results could be grotesque, and I have seen video of a headteacher hearing six children read at once, with the children in two rows of three on either side of him. Labour replaced this with instruction, which is important, but which does not ensure that the children apply what they're being taught when they are actually reading.

Without the intensive teaching we gave this boy over the summer he would still not have made a start. It's sad, though, to see the person who cares for him concluding that the school is not helping him to learnn to read, and sadder still, if fairly typical, that the school won't listen. The real fault lies with the misguided people running the literacy strategy, who spent millions of pounds persuading schools that this was a good way to teach reading, and so established a lot of bad habits.

 

Genevieve Smith-Nunes on teaching computing

Lovely piece by Genevieve Smith-Nunes on her personal journey into IT teaching,with some links, which don't all work...