John Bald/language and literacy

End Game: Winterreise, Sir Thomas Allen and Joseph Middleton, Frant Church.

The village of Frant is a small and peaceful community just south of Tunbridge Wells. It is the kind of place that could have featured in Schubert's Winterreise, a setting 24 short poems by Wilhelm Müller describing a desolate personal journey, beginning with rejected love - clearly by himself than the girl or her family - and ending with a vision of a pathetic, barefoot old man playing the hurdy-gurdy, derided by people and dogs, with no money in his plate and surviving only through his own persistence. Winterreise is end-game for Schubert, barely completed before his death at 31, and also for Sir Thomas Allen, whose own end game is increasingly reminiscent of late Beethoven.

Winterreise is not for laughs. If few words appear more than once, the German  "Elend", which combines misery, suffering and wretchedness, certainly does, and an hour and a quarter of uninterrupted and unrelieved "Elend",  delivered with Sir Thomas' wonderful combination of sound, expression and posture, demands great concentration even to listen to. The piece poses extreme technical demands, and there is only so much that the human frame will take, and the voice give.

This is the ultimate for both. Sir Thomas' publicity still tends to show him as a younger man than he is, and the photographs do not do him justice. One in The Times, some years ago, of him as the Count in Cosi Fan Tutte, did manage to catch the full power of expression he concentrates in his older face, and televsion got it right in the close-ups of his performance of Lover Come Back To Me with John Wilson in the Proms. Sustained over this length of time, and exploring the full range of Schubert's Elend, it is as much a part of the performance as the perfectly controlled, communicative and expressive singing and Joseph Middleton's perfect, selfless accompaniment, one of the finest examples of piano playing one will ever hear.

All, of course, in context. Winterreise is not for everyone, and, Mr Middleton's artistry notwithstanding, not for most of the young, for whom there is more to life than misery. And yet, as in Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, the soul will clap its hands and sing, the traveller take hold of his stout staff and continue on his way, room at the inn or no. Long may Sir Thomas' journey continue.

Free Spanish Schemes of Work, Y3-9, Dr Rachel Hawkes.

Dr Rachel Hawkes  has generously published a complete scheme of work for Spanish from Y3 to Y9, with a stunning array of attractive resources that enable children to build up their knowledge, skills annd understanding in small steps, with plenty of practice. Very highly recommended, not least for the downloadable Libro de Estudio, which provides a continuous record of each child's work.

Readers might like to consider Dr Hawkes' toolkit alongside that on this site.  The main feature of my toolkit is the early introduction of writing via finger tracing, so that children never copy. I'm still sure that this is the best way to do it, but Dr Hawkes has some excellent use of pictures to allow children to record understanding, and uses modelling to enable them to construct their own sentences.  

Overall, this site is brilliant - a free goldmine. I've started digging, and suggest you do too.

How long till we get a properly research-based approach to dyslexia teaching?

Or will we ever do so?  After forty years in the field, I seriously doubt it, for these reasons:

1. Public policy in the field of literacy is dominated on all sides by people with different forms of blinkers. On the Left, and sometimes far Left, progressive, side, we have the critics of "neo-conservative phonics", most of whom have never taken responsibility for teaching people to read, and who have no research evidence for their views. On the other, there are those who think that the connections between sounds and letters are the whole story, and who try to force English spelling into this viewpoint by banging it with their fist, like the piece in a jigsaw that doesn't quite fit. The most frequently-occuring word in English,  "the" , is irregular, its spelling the product of monks who did not like Anglo-Saxon letters, and to pretend otherwise, or to teach it by colouring it in, is simplistic. David Crystal's Spell It Out gives the whole story.

2. Specialist dyslexia interest groups have their own priorities, self-interest and blinkers. The chief psychologist of one, for example, told me that "it had been found" that children made better progress in pairs than individually. I'd never seen any evidence for this, and he didn't have any. It did, however, allow this expensive organisation to pocket two fees for one teacher's time, and so pay high salaries to its national officials. Some of these institutions put children through a grinding programme of additional phonics that does not discriminate between what they already know, and so don't need to learn, and what they don't know. Others are on a mission to prove that people assessed as dyslexic are, in politically correct terminology, "differently abled".  Some certainly are - eg Jamie Oliver.  Others are not. This does not affect the need for most people to learn to read and write to a good standard.

In the lead posting to this site, I quote the parent of a pupil I recently taught, who had been suffering for years from ineffective teaching, and whose school offered her, surprise surprise, yet another phonic grind. I could have cited several others, beginning with Sue Palmer's TES piece of 1996. This not only seems a long time ago - it is a long time ago.

Effective teaching of people for whom learning to read and write is not straightforward begins with a clear understanding of the English language and the reasons why it is as it is, and with the discoveries of brain research over the last twenty years. Both of these are more recent than the thinking on which current practice on all sides has been built, though some important developments in earlier teaching, such as the work of Fernald, Vygotsky's Thought and Language, and Bruner's insight into the need for adult ideas to be presented in ways children can understand, are consistent with it.

History is full of examples of new thinking coming up against old ideas backed by authority, for which I have proposed the word "ignocracy".  Some of these have involved major shifts in the way we see the world - Galileo, Lister, John Snow - others, like Braille and Helen Irlen, have benefited smaller groups. The problem is the same in all cases - those in authority and positions of influence have their own agenda, and didn't get there by questioning it. Money and power talk. Intellect walks.

Toby Young's Multiplication War - Good Game!

Shuffle a pack of cards. Turn them over one at a time. Person who calls out the correct product of last two cards keeps them. Thanks, Toby.

(I also use Pelmanism. Blank cards, multiplication on one, product on the other. Eg 2x3 on one, 6 on the other. As many pairs as you like, but I prefer to use 6 at a time to start with, and then to focus on ones the child finds tricky. Blank cards from Amazon.co.uk, around £10 per 1000 last time I looked)

Foreign Language Learning and Autism: Vivienne Wire.

Vivienne's site contains a link to her MA dissertation on language learning for children on the autistic spectrum disorder (2002). There is very little published work in this area, and I'll be grateful to hear of more. 

UKCAT. A poor way to select medical students, and an alternative.

The United Kingdom Clincal Aptitude Test (UKCAT) is used by a wide range of medical schools in the UK, though not by Oxford and Cambridge. It's difficult to say how it has grown up, as some of the testing techniques bear no relationship to the requirements of medical study, but one factor must be the plethora of top grades at GCSE and AS in relation to the number of students who want to do medicine. 

Cost is an issue. The test costs £65, but few people would take it without a prep course, typically costing £370 - as the subject matter is not related to any A level syllabus, a pupil taking the test straight from school would have very little chance of success. This is partly because time is a key element.

Verbal Reasoning Practice Test A, for example, requires 44 answers in 21 minutes. There is only 1 minute to read the instructions. Some elements are deliberately confusing, and anyone who stops to weigh things up is at a serious disadvantage. This is the greatest objection to the test - anyone who reflects on nuances, some of which are questionable, may not complete it. Anyone who is a slow, but accurate reader, has no chance whatsoever, whatever their intellectual ability. Do we want to encourage hasty guesswork from medical students (and guesswork is encouraged, as uncompleted questions are marked wrong) as opposed to careful reasoning? The practice speed reading test is also strongly biased towards people with a good knowledge of English history, and astrology - none of the questions test scientific ability. Why is speed reading a criterion for selecting medical students?

The situational judgement practice test is mostly concerned with ethics, and would require training in that area that many candidates would not have had. How to handle an inappropriate joke is a difficult one for a seventeen year old, important as it is. Candidates should not be asked questions of this nature they have not been trained to answer - common sense will get a low score.

Finally, the test is used by Nottingham University as a sole criterion even for applying. You could be the best qualified candidate on earth, with a stack of relevant experience, and still not even be allowed to apply because of a low score on this test, which could be the result simply of slow and thoughtful reading.  Birmingham requires 10A* from all applicants, and Cambridge goes on raw scores in AS, an equally arbitrary criterion, but which saves time. Oxford has its own exam, which some are frightened to take because it's Oxford, but that can't be worse than UKCAT. All in all, rough justice. A medical studies A level or AS option might be a better alternative.  

 

Progress and Preparedness For Secondary School: Website

This website is the final version of the research into primary languages at Reading University, supported by the Nuffield Foundation. My report on a conference presenting the work earlier this year is here. 

Progressive Education versus Research.

Anthony Crosland once commented in an interview that “you don’t want your priorities set by research”. He was not the first to think so. Lady Plowden, whose committee on primary schools was set up by the Conservative Edward Boyle, but most of whose work was carried out under Crosland, had already performed mental gymnastics to ignore research evidence that grouping pupils according to their abilities led to improved academic performance. Her reasoning closely reflects that of our opponents today. Here are some examples:

Schools which treat children individually will accept unstreaming throughout the whole school. When such an organisation is established with conviction and put into effect with skill, it produces a happy school and an atmosphere conducive to learning. (819)

Streaming can be wounding to children… No more certain way can be found of alienating children from school or of creating irresponsibility. (823)

Compare this with a Scottish comment on mixed ability teaching in languages from 2008.

“Grouping pupils according to their ability would seem a logical way to allow all pupils to achieve their potential. However it makes very transparent the differences in the academic ability of pupils and is therefore not a very inclusive approach. Setting can lead to stigmatisation, low self-esteem and disruptive behaviour in pupils in lower sets. A mixed ability class allows for more of a social mix…”

This line of thought has clear consequences for research. Research generates evidence, the bulk of it in terms of advances, or lack of them, in children’s knowledge, skills and understanding.

Most of us think of this as achievement or standards, but in educational circles it is usually called attainment, a term with fewer positive implications. If the central goal of education, in the context Sir Anthony Seldon’s ideas of balance and aptitudes, is to advance standards and achievement, then research is an important tool.

If the goals are those of Lady Plowden, Anthony Crosland, and the London Institute of Education, research is dangerous.  I have been unable to locate any research whatever into the effects of mixed ability teaching in modern languages, despite its being imposed on languages teachers, against the will of most of them, since the days of Crosland and Plowden. Mossbourne and some other schools, such as Dereham Neatherd, generated vastly improved results in languages by setting and fast-tracking – the latter taking advantage of the dumbed-down GCSE, though in a way that was not in the long-term interest of the pupils.  Mixed ability teaching brought modern languages close to meltdown until Michael Gove’s Ebacc stopped the rot at GCSE, though they are still in intensive care at A level, about which more next week.

One response to unwelcome research evidence has been to throw the academic kitchen sink at any piece of research that does not fit the progressive book, and I’ve described the ill-informed attacks on phonics research here.

Central to the argument is the notion that the only way to find anything out is by randomised controlled trials, which play a key role in the introduction of new drugs, but which are by no means the whole story in scientific research, any more than in education.  Their main limitations are cost and scope. Cost is important, as you need a very large sample to produced a result in an educational context – the excellent ESRC-funded study that showed the value of teaching grammar to secondary pupils cost £750,000.

Scope is important, as these trials can only test one element against another. Unless both are carefully chosen, they can yield no useful evidence at all, and the study carried out by Professors Carol Torgerson and Greg Brooks in the link above is a prime example.

A fully effective programme of educational research should include the following:

1. Case studies. Properly conducted case studies have played a crucial role in the development of surgery. They allow very close observation of individuals, and highly detailed tracking of progress over time. It is fashionable to dismiss them as “anecdotal”, which avoids considering them on their merits. Major medical developments, including vaccination, anaesthesia and antisepsis began with close consideration of cases.

2. Small-scale school-based studies. Careful sampling allows the progress of different groups to be tracked in ways similar to those used with the pupil premium. Control groups can be selected with confidence that unknown factors are not going to appear – such as different teachers – and historical control groups can be used with previous year-groups. As with case studies, the cost is minimal beyond the time of the people carrying out the research.

3. Studies with matched control groups, followed up over time. “Washout” effects are a permanent problem in educational research, and bedevilled early work on Reading Recovery, where children not receiving the extra teaching were found to have caught up over the next year with those that had received it. Matched control groups ensure that we are comparing like with like, and that groups receiving extra teaching do not start at a higher point than comparison group. Research into children’s awareness of sounds in the eighties used an additional comparison group, using another form of extra support (grouping words according to their categories) to guard against the possibility that any improvement was just due to extra personal attention to the pupils. The Clackmannanshire study is the largest model using matched control groups.

4. Long-term statistical studies and trends. Not all research evidence comes from experiment, and national statistical evidence can be very valuable, provided we look at its basis. The national reading test, NS6, abolished by the Bullock committee after it showed a fall in reading standards (to make sure that such a thing did not happen again!) should be restored.

5. The place of randomised controlled trials is to investigate big issues that have been clarified using the forms of research described above. They are the equivalent of what General Patton called “a reconnaissance in force”, and using them to investigate ideas that might or might not work is a waste of time and money. So far, the grammar study described above is the only RCT to have yielded useful evidence, and RCTs with completely inadequate research design have been given too much credence just because of the randomisation factor – a link to Professor Rhona Johnston’s view on the subject is here.

Royal Marines Training and Reality Television in Schools.

“Gents, straight in please,” says RSM Ginger Booth to “diamond” recruits in 169 troop in the recent television documentary series Royal Marines Commando School.

“Stand at ease, please,” says Lt Col Mike Geldard to the two candidates for the King’s Badge, “We’re all Royal Marines, just like you two.”

“Please,” indeed. Until this point we had heard more of what my father used to call “the army adjective”, yelled in recruits’ faces to get an immediate response.

Most teachers understand that raising the voice makes people respond to tone rather than the content, and this switch from command to request, and the colonel’s cordial briefing before the assessment, show that the Marines understand it too.

It’s not so new in army training – a documentary of Parachute Regiment training in the eighties showed the same change in tone when recruits were suddenly placed on first reserve for the Falklands war. “I’ve not taught you to do that,” (fire one shot instead of two) was the nearest the trainers came to a rebuke.

Crack troops like the Marines and Paras – they enjoy a friendly game of rugby, with ambulances in attendance – are paid to think as well as fight, and their peak physical condition puts them in a position to do this. Just to show there's no real ill-feeling, RSM Booth has a parachute training badge on his sleeve.

The Royal Marines appear on an education site because the producers, Twofour, are the same company that produced Educating Yorkshire and Educating Essex. Two of the four “diamonds” candidates have degrees, and the overall CO, Col Dave – not “call me Dave” - Kassapian has a degree in English literature. The company’s goal was to show the individuals involved rather than just the process of transition from civilian to Marine, and they combined this with a very clear demonstration of the process itself.

This is brilliant television, making the best of every insight multiple cameras can offer, with the full co-operation of all concerned – filming schedules were published to recruits, so they knew when they were on camera and when not, but it did not seem to make much difference. The determination of the two recruits in episode seven who pushed themselves to the very limit – one succeeded, one failed because of a broken leg – was astonishing, and I recommend this episode to anyone who didn’t catch it first time around.

What made this series compulsive viewing, and re-viewing, was its totally accurate portrayal of the full picture. The trainers, mostly corporals, had to ask themselves the question, “Would you go to war with this man beside you?” Sgt Matt Howells adds that, while they are competitive, “There’s very little in-fighting…we want outward-fighting”.

The two diamond recruits who did not go to the final selection panel spent the night helping those who did with their revision. The essence, getting to the right standard, was never out of sight. There was no question of certifying incompetence, or making the tests “more accessible.”

By contrast, this is where the two school series lost the plot. The focus on the misbehaviour of a few pupils wrecked Educating Essex and gave a poor impression of the work of schools. I visited the school in question at the invitation of the head shortly afterwards and, while I was treated to his party-piece of an immaculate fire-drill, I was fairly well convinced that what was going on bore no resemblance to the series. This was a well-disciplined working environment, and poor behaviour was managed in a way that did not wreck other pupils’ learning. I did not see anyone walking on tables on their way out of the room, or unanswered questions from pupils.

Educating Yorkshire showed courage equal to that of the Marines in Mr Steer, and captured an astonishing piece of brilliance in Mr Burton’s adaptation of The King’s Speech to help a pupil with a speech difficulty, but also homed in on the worst behaviour, as if it were something teachers should be expected to deal with.

The follow-up episode featured an amazing turnaround from the pupil with the most serious behavioural difficulties, but also showed the head defending his decision to exclude a bullied pupil “for violence”, when in fact, like a poor football referee, he had ignored the initial abuse, laughing and joking with the bullies, and focused only on the inappropriate response. Mr Mitchell is a big man, and would doubtless resent the idea that he was a bit of a bully himself, but his “I can’t change my mind, and I won’t,” was pure authoritarianism.

The boss is right because he is the boss. If he did or said something else, that would be right for the same reason. QED. The atmosphere in the Marines training team was much more open, if not necessarily democratic. “That is a fair and just vote,” was RSM Booth’s conclusion on his team’s King’s Badge selection process.

The producers get a third bite at the educational cherry in their series in Walthamstow. We can only hope that they come to understand the work of schools as clearly as they understood that of the Marines. I'll post on the new series when it's finished.

Walker Road Primary School, Aberdeen. A primary semi-immersion project.

This report  by Professor Richard Johnstone and Robert McKinstry on the results of "partial immersion" in an Aberdeen primary school is important evidence the immersion approach to primary languages. Professor Johnstone is former director of Scottish CILT, and Robert McKinstry a former Scottish Staff Inspector for Languages. Their report on the standards reached by transfer to secondary school includes evidence of pupils understanding a La Fontaine fable and the film, Au revoir les enfants. It deserves wide readership, and we can only wonder why it was never picked up outside Scotland.

There are, thoug, some snags with the report. Three supernumerary teachers were employed to teach one class out of the two form entry, and the evaluation was based on the work of average and above-average pupils only - ie twenty pupils. This would be a very expensive proposition on a national scale, and it is highly likely that headteachers would want to spend the money on other things. The report notes that the pupils were split up on transfer to secondary school, and that, apart from an attempt to teach maths in French for three lessons a week - unsurprisingly, not seen as the best choice - there was little evidence of further immersion. I am trying to contact the evaluators to see if there has been any follow-up, and to find out what happened to the below-average pupils, as it seems strange just to leave them out of the report.