John Bald/language and literacy

An English lesson for a Bulgarian adult student.

I taught my first EAL lesson on Monday, to a Bulgarian student with a degree in electronics, who had begun to get by in English using Google Translate. Bulgarian, she explained, was similar to Russian, though she could not speak or write in Russian. Her spoken English had unusual patterns of intonation, and she omitted what traditional grammarians call articles, and linguistics specialists "determiners".  Her goal was to become a fluent and natural speaker of English.

As in very nearly all cases, my goal was to establish full understanding of the spoken and written language. There seemed to be two main obstacles - spelling and intonation. Once we can spell, we can write with confidence, as we do not need to hesitate over individual words, and can write whatever word we choose, rather than whatever we may be able to spell. It took me about 20 minutes to explain the principles of English spelling and the Slimmed Down Spelling technique. An outline is here, and the full story of English spelling is contained in David Crystal's Spell It Out.  Essentially, English spelling works on these principles:

1. If we can hear a sound when we say a word carefully, without shortcuts, we need a letter for it.

2. Sometimes letters work in groups, eg station, nation. We learn the group as if it were a single letter, and only use a group when we've learned the word needs it. The student made an error, spelling nation neightion. This illustration the principle of only using a group when we've learned we need it.

3. Some words have an extra letter. Face has an e that does not give us a sound in itself, but influences the sound of the two preceding letters. We only use an extra letter when we've learned the word needs it. I always explaln how this has come about.

4. Some words have an awkward spelling because pronunciation has changed over time, or because of a foreign origin. Say table in French, and you can hear the l before the e. Water comes from the German Wasser, and we've changed the way we pronounce the a. Some Scots dialects retain the original. In these words, the letter we need to use is not the one we would naturally pick - fortunately, there are patterns here, that can be learned. Sometimes, as in different, spelling is affected by shortcuts in speech, eg  difrent. The solution is, first, not to take the shortcut and, second, to find another word with the same pattern - eg   suffering.

Next, to deal with leaving out articles/determiners. First, I don't use either term as they do not explain why the words are used. I call them companion words, and explain that they are usually used only in singular - the table is new. Tables are useful. In the plural, the word has other words for company. As companion words are not used in Bulgarian, this is a big adjustment in Paula's (as we will call her) thinking.

Finally, intonation. English uses intonation to reinforce meaning in a way that native speaker are rarely aware of. There is one pulse in each word of more than one syllable, a main pulse in each sentence, and a subordinate pulse in each phrase. Getting these right is probably the most difficult element of spoken English, as we need to put in these pulses in real time, and can only do so if the process of putting the words together is automatic. We practise on things Paula would like to say, such as talking about her new car.

Paula is, as I've said, a very bright young lady. She says that everything is perfectly clear, and shakes my hand with a big smile. I lent her Collins Complete English, though for its examples of usage rather than grammar. The work appears to reinforce the view I've begun to form that language learning focuses on three broad areas - grammar, vocabulary and idiom, the third of which is the particular and unique features of the language in question. In this first lesson, idiom included spelling, companion words (overlapping with grammar) and intonation.

 

 

 

Education Echo Chamber: Bill of Rights for Teachers.

Here is an excellent idea - a set of rights for teachers who are asked to change their practice on the basis of research. Daniel Willingham is the originator, and here are his key points:

1. The right to know what is supposed to improve. What problem is being solved? For example, when I’ve been to schools or districts implementing a one-to-one tablet/laptop policy, I’ve always asked what it’s meant to do. The modal response is a blank look followed by the phrase “we don’t want our kids left behind.” Behind in what? In what way are kids elsewhere with devices zooming ahead?
2. The right to know the means by which improvement will be measured. How will we know things are getting better? If you’re trying to improve students’ understanding of math, for example, are you confident that you have a metric that captures that construct? Are you sure scores on that metric will be comparable in the future to those you’re looking at now? How big an increase will be deemed a success?
3. The right to know the approximate time by which this improvement is expected. A commitment to an intervention shouldn’t be open-ended. At some point we must evaluate how it’s going.
4. The right to know what will be done if the goal is or is not met. Naturally, conditions may change, but let’s have a plan. If we don’t meet our target, will we quit? Keep trying for a while? Tweak it?
5. The right to know what evidence exists that the intervention will work as expected. Is the evidence from actual classrooms or is it laboratory science (plus some guesswork)? If classrooms, were they like ours? In how many classrooms was it tried?
6. The right to have your experience and expertise acknowledged. If the intervention sounds to you and your colleagues like it cannot work, this issue should be addressed in detail, not waved away with the phrase “all the research supports it.” The fact that it sounds fishy to experienced people doesn’t mean it can’t work, but whoever is pitching it should have a deep enough understanding of the mechanisms behind the intervention to be able to say why it sounds fishy, and why that’s not a problem.

Seems very sensible to me. If the great Eric Kandel can explain his work in terms we can all understand, any educational researcher should be able to do the same. The Education Echo Chamber piece is here.

My conclusion, which has become my principle in dealing with educational research, is as follows:   

We cannot trust any claim made on the basis of educational research without scrutinising every element of the work to see whether human bias or errors in procedure have led to unreliable conclusions. Very, very few research studies meet this test.

 

The Empress Has No Clothes: Torgerson/Brooks' serious misjudgement of educational research

Professor Rhona Johnston, co-author of the Clackmannanshire research in reading, has replied to Torgerson and Brooks' survey of the research evidence on phonics, here.  It is a telling critique, showing that Torgerson and Brooks were so obsessed with the idea of randomisation in educational research as to distort their whole view of the evidence. Torgerson and Brooks found only two studies directly comparing analytic and synthetic phonics, hardly enough for a "meta-analysis". One was a smaller study that formed part of the Clackmannanshire research, and the other this conference paper from 1971.

If it were not for Torgerson and Brooks' own botched study of spelling in a comprehensive school, it would be difficult to believe that they would give this paper any credence at all. Here is what it did, cut and pasted from the original:

Materials

Teaching materials were seven-by-nine inch tagboard cards on which 28 words and sylables were printed, two to a card. The selection of the pairs of words for the cards difered acording to the treatments. The words and sylables used in instruction and as measures of transfer are listed in
Tables A and B.

Procedure

During a typical 15-minute training period, from two to four of the 28 words and sylables were presented. Sometimes words or sylables were reviewed.  All 28 words and sylables had ben presented to al of the subjects by the end of the ten wek training period.

 

Who on earth would set out to teach children twenty-eight words in ten weeks?  Who would confine reading teaching to fifteen minutes a day, or to two to four words a session? Who would confine teaching materials to one set of words on cards, with no books, stories or anything else? Only someone with no educational experience, such as Professor Torgerson, could entertain such pathetic nonsense, let alone dissect it as a potential instrument of policy.

Professor Johnston is too polite to her opponents. As far as I'm concerned, the Empress of Randomisation has no clothes.

 

Interlude: Charles Hamilton Sorley

A first world war officer, killed by a sniper at Loos, the first great British disaster of the war,  wrote these two sonnets. Loos was a massacre, not of the innocents, but of the experienced - the casualties were overwelmingly from the pre-war, professional army that had held up the German advance at Mons and Neuve Chapelle.  The first poem was found in his kit after his death.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember. For you need not so.

Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know

It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?

Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.

Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.

Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,

"Yet many a better one has died before."

Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you

Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,

It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.

Great death has made all his for evermore.

 

and

 

To Germany

 

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,

And no man claimed the conquest of your land.

But gropers both through fields of thought confined

We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other's truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

The Education Endowment Foundation's View of Mixed Ability Teaching.

The Education Endowment Foundation, and its associate the Sutton Trust, have produced a toolkit for teachers telling us all we need to know about research. Or rather, what it wants us to think. Its treatment of mixed ability teaching, where research evidence has been kept to a minumum and is subject to frequent misrepresentation, is straight out of the blob. Using techniques of "meta-analysis" - putting together the results of studies that may have flaws in themselves, in the hope that they will somehow produce a valid result is not science, but alchemy. It is an attempt to turn intellectual base metal into gold. 

The accompanying video shows typical thinking from the educational establishment - don't discourage children by putting them in low sets in a way that damages their self belief. Never mind if this allows no attention to be paid to developing the skills they need in order to succeed. The important thing is that they should not lose faith in themselves. I heard a virtually identical argument from the head of a London converter academy three weeks ago - he wanted mixed ability teaching because he didn't want children to feel bad about themselves on the basis of their "attainment".

Most of the research on which this "meta-analysis" is based is so poorly constructed as to tell us nothing at all about the British school system. There has never been any research in to the effects of mixed ability on attainment in modern languages, as it would be highly likely to rock the progressive boat. Ireson et al summed up the situation in the Oxford Review of Education, 1999

Although there is now a large international literature on ability grouping, there has been
very little research in this country in recent years. There is a need for research taking 
into account the limitations of the designs identi®ed above and the advances made in
understanding to date. In particular, we need a clearer picture of the relative effects of
grouping on both academic and non-academic outcomes for pupils. We also need a better understanding of the way in which grouping is related to the ethos of the school,
to teacher and pupil attitudes and to classroom teaching. Further research is needed on
the effectiveness of mixed ability and whole class teaching in relation to different curriculum subject matter.

Proponents of mixed ability teaching, who see it as an end in itself and as a political goal, will make sure this doesn't happen in the future, as they have in the past. In the meantime, the Education Endowment Foundation, like the rest of the blob, seems just to be using research to support a point of view. I can see no justification whatever in the evidence presented to support its view that the effect is negative, even if only mildly so. How exactly were the studies weighted, and for what reasons? We are not told. 

The most important consideration, says Professor Steve Higgins, is the effect on disadvantaged pupils over time. If you're in a low-ability set, and that's your experience of education, it tends to stop learners believing that they can succeed.  Professor Higgins' professional profile here. It shows no evidence of research in this field whatsoever. Not that that's any reason for him to hold back. I disagree with his principle. It is not a good idea to make children feel good about low attainment, unless this represents the best that each of them can achieve. If it is not, then making them feel good about the situation is a positive disservice, and turns schools into NEET factories.

The study of 45 schools he refers to took place in 1999. Why have we had no more in the last fifteen years?  Some of the "research" I've seen on mixed ability v setting was carried out in Israel, over a short period, and on matters unrelated to school subjects. The "researcher" on that occasion did not tell his audience what the source was, and I only found this out by looking it up myself. But what can one expect from senior academics at the London Institute of Education?

The error of the Educational Endowment Foundation is to make a pronouncement on this issue when there is, to date, not enough evidence to support it. It should either produce a technical paper listing all studies it has considered, the weighting given to them, and its reasons, or withdraw the entry in its toolkit. This should be standard practice for all items in its toolkit - we need a technical paper, with full discussion of methodology and evidence base, to support each pronouncement. We know we can't trust everyone - why should we trust the EEF?

Note. A different section of the EEF website lists a study to be carried out into setting by King's College, London, to report in 2018. Some elements of this study, including "training in best practice in setting" appear questionable, but it will involve 120 schools and include comparison with mixed ability teaching. It would be sensible for the EEF to withhold judgement until it sees the results of this.

We also need to know exactly what the "training" will involve, and who will carry it out. It is highly likely to prejudice schools' normal pattern of setting to favour the purposes of the researchers. Where is there any research on "best practice in setting?"  Ark and Harris are the only people with any serious experience of the issue. 

And finally, the Sutton Trust's Director of Research and Communications, Conor Ryan, started as a journalist with the New Statesmand and Tribune, then worked as a press officer with the Inner London Education Authority, and became adviser first to David Blunkett, and then to no less than Blair himself. He has, in short, played a major part in New Labour's catastrophic educational policies from start to finish. The Times Higher Educational Supplement once described him as "more spin-doctor than policy adviser", and the Sutton Trust's Toolkit is exactly in this tradition. We need the truth, and not spin.

How mixed ability teaching leads to educational failure, and what to do about it.

My fourteen year old pupil was placed in mixed ability classes throughout his primary career, and, by the time I met him, when he was twelve, he could not write by hand, counted on his fingers and did not know his tables. Two years of more or less weekly individual tuition, in which I went right back to whatever he did not know and carefully built up his skills, have got him to a level slightly above the nationally expected standard in maths, given him a shot at GCSE Spanish, and taught him to write cursively, though GCSE English is still what is known euphemistically as a challenge. We are both up for it. The key has been matching the teaching precisely to what he needs to learn next, and building up his skills in small steps.

A headteacher last week defended mixed ability teaching on the grounds that he did not want children to judge themselves by their attainment, and did not want to put most of them into sets they would never get out of. These are both understandable aims, but what is the outcome? The  broader the range of skills in a class, the harder it is for the teacher to match work to the needs of all. This is not a question of differentiation, either - the teacher has only one voice, and can only explain one thing at a time. None of us can explain very basic points and more advanced ones at the same time, or even in the same lesson, without some of the class turning off. The idea that children learn from each other, or independently, does not solve this problem. Independent work will not explain a concept a child does not understand, and the benefits to children of learning from each other are in some respects very limited - yes, it can help clarify thinking, but not necessarily advance it. The pupils who come into mixed ability secondary classes with limited skills do not have concentrated and consistent - I almost wrote persistent - teaching they need to build them up. One of the reasons Labour abolished national tests at 14 was that they were showing up this fact, yielding grades that were blatantly false, and creating riduculous problems when these pupils did not sustain their "progress" to GCSE.

In languages, where the earliest stages are the most difficult to learn, mixed ability can now be said to have failed. Most words that are shared between languages have Latin roots, and so are much easier to spot for children who have more advanced literacy skills. Put these children in mixed ability classes, where they cannot apply these skills to the full, and they achieve less than they otherwise would. Put children with very weak literacy skills in the same class, and they will not understand the work at all, fail and drop out. The pupils who are not persisting with languages to GCSE are overwhelmingly those with lower attainment at 11.  "Including" them leads to drop out and is a false hope. Giving them good teaching in groups of children with similar learning needs gives them a chance, as HMI showed in its examples from special schools in Modern Languages, Achievement and Challenge. Some headteachers are so indifferent to languages that they solve the problem - their problem - by not teaching languages at all to low-attaining pupils. The god of mixed ability is more important than learning.

What to do about it is simple. First, grouping should be according to learning needs. Learning needs and ability are two different things - some people learn more slowly than others, but just as well, given the right teaching. Second, the temptation for heads to put their best teaching in the top sets should be reversed. Advanced skills are most urgently needed with lower attaining pupils, who should have their share. Third, all advances in grades should be recognised by Ofsted and the government, so that a D from a lower attaining pupil who would otherwise have got an F is recognised as an achievement, and a C from a pupil who should have had an A is seen as underachievement. 

Mixed ability gets children through school, despite weak literacy and maths skills, and contains poor behaviour by spreading it about. It is a failure on every count. The chldren's weak skills are not developed, and the behaviour contaminates the learning of the other pupils. Most Academies do not use mixed ability, but some do. The headteacher's academy was what is known as a "converter" - a way of getting more money while persisting with the old ways. So is my pupils, and fewer than thirty pupils obtained a grade C or better in a modern language, out of an intake of almost 200. I worked with a group of around 70 languages teachers last week. I asked how many were using mixed ability, and 55 hands went up. How many would choose to do it? Five.  Mixed ability teaching is being forced on languages teachers against their wishes and professional judgement. It should cease, but with the proviso that good teaching should not be confined to the top set.

 

Phonics Check second year report, National Foundation for Educational Research 2014.

The NFER's report on the second year of the government's phonics check  is worth reading. It shows a generally positive impact of the check on schools' approach to early reading, combined with a feeling among half of the teachers of young children that there is too much emphasis on phonics, which, they feel, should be used alongside "other methods to teach children to decode words". The problem is that they do not say what these other methods are. Only one per cent of teachers surveyed said that phonics needed to be taught in a way that did not pay attention to meaning - look at Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc and you will find meaning emphasised from the very beginning.

But meaning in an alphabetic language is communicated through the use of letters, predominantly, but not exclusively, to indicate the sounds of words. The only way to "decode"  a word is to use the letters that make it up. Once we have identified the word and remembered it, we do not need to "decode" it again - we know what the letters are telling us about this word and identify it from what we have learned. In English, an are of our brain adapts itself specifically to the identification of variations in what the letters tell us, in a way that is not required in languages such as Italian, where the correspondence between sounds and letters is almost entirely consistent. Professors Utah Frith and Sarah Jane Blakemore have called this the "word form area".  

The alternative "methods", which are not described anywhere in the report, are guesswork, either from pictures, context, or the first letter of the word. Guessing from pictures, as I demonstrated in Susan Gets Stuck (TES 1992) depends on picking the right clue from the picture. In the example I quoted, a picture of children helping in the garden of a house was accompanied by the text "Biff and Chip liked the new house."  "Susan" read this as "Biff and Chip were in the garden" - a mile away from the original meaning. The unreliability of contex clues was demonstrated by Schatz and Baldwin in 1986, and later by an experiment in which undergraduates were asked to predict the next word of a text, and usually got it wrong. The definitive research on this point was Dr Morag MacMartin's thesis, Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in Primary Pupils, 1992,  which showed both that pictures could put entirely the wrong idea into pupils' minds, and that they were also liable to misread subsequent words to try to make sense of an error they had made earlier. Guessing from the first letter is so obviously unreliable as to be virtually incredible as a teaching technique - I've known pupils read "the" as "ten" on that basis, and to read every word beginning with f a "fish". The inferiority of this approach was demonstrated clearly in the early Clackmannanshire studies.

This does not, of course, mean that phonics are everything. Roughly a third of English spelling does not correspond to patterns in modern English speech, for reasons set out by Professor David Crystal in Spell It Out.  Children need to learn to deal with this, and the best way of teaching them to do so is to explain why things are as they are. This is the source of my success in work with people with reading and spelling difficulties ranging from complete non-readers, to the highest attaining pupils who have problems with spelling - my latest in that area, from a university town in the north, achieved an A* in English that she wasn't expecting after just three lessons by telephone. She had this grade in everything else except English, and it was spelling that was inhibiting her writing. What I didn't tell her to do was guess. Ever.

Sydney Morning Herald, Dyslexia

Interesting article on provision for dyslexia in Australia, including reference to a PhD in progress by Victorial Levi on parents' experience. A former colleague, Karina McLachlain, has returned home to Australia, and has observed my teaching techniques. Any Australian parent or adult who has been assessed as dyslexic is welcome to free teaching over Skype. Contact details top right, and see the endorsements for my teaching on Linked-in. 

Reading Conference papers are now online.

The Reading Primary Languages Research conference has now published its papers on line here. Conference report is here.