John Bald/language and literacy

Lesson 4, seven year old pupil, Kettlewell School

 This was lesson four by Skype from Linton, Cambs, to Nettlewell, Yorks. Previous lessons are below.  None has lasted more than 30 mins, and today's just 18. We continued to read from the DK reference book on the Humpback Whale. Jodi Storey's note first, then mine.

Jodi: I was completely and utterly surprised to listen to JH’s progress with you this evening. He is now: 

• Remembering words like ‘ancient’, ‘myths’ ‘Trident’ and ‘flukes’ for a whole week.
• Able to work out words from their combinations of letters and contexts- before we can come up with similar formations – e.g. clouds, thread and these
• Able to remember words as tricky as ‘through’ and sight read them – almost
• Willingly read and re-read for perfection (those tricky plurals)
• Differentiation between ‘breaths’ and ‘breathes’ ! (JB - he worked this out for himself before I had a chance to explain it!)
• Despite and above my use of the tracking pen – start to self – correct and read for meaning!!

 THANK YOU!

John This was excellent progress after roughly an hour and a half's teaching. I would add to Jodi's points

• In addition to remembering Triton, JH was able to use his knowledge of the first i to read Titan, and then Titanic, changing the point of emphasis appropriately between the two words. He knew about Titanic, and was interested in the story of the lifeboats (only carried in case she had to aid another ship).
• JH had to work hard on prononuncing s a the end of a word, and on keeping himself from adding s where there was none, but he read two pages without this error by the end of this short lesson.
• JH is beginning to work words out and correct himself, sometimes so quickly that he had worked out a word, notably through, spray and mist, before I had time to explain it to him.
• Jodi considers this reference book to be above the expected level for a seven year old, and I agree, though we still have work to do before he can read it with full confidence. 
• JH said last week that he was dyslexic. From the way he was working out new words on his own this evening, and generalising from his new knowledge of letter patterns, I suspect he may change his mind in a month or two.

 

Guardian Debate on Languages.

The Guardian has started an excellent debate on the state of language learning, here, and here. I've contributed to the discussion as Quaestor. These tables on pupils' attitudes should be  an enticement to read the articles. 

Wellington College Festival of Education, 2015. Using Brain Research to Inform Teaching.

A sentence that jumped out to me from the letter below was that "the intellect develops naturally, without forcing."  This is made possible by teaching that is consistent with what we know about the development of neural networks in the brain. I'll be presenting some thoughts on the issue, and showing one way of putting the idea into practice, at next year's Sunday Times/Wellington College Festival of Education, 18-19 June.

A third lesson with a pupil assessed as dyslexic, and following up on the breakthrough.

 

The first pupil, aged seven, had his first lesson three weeks ago, described here (second example). The pupil refuses to read things that he considers too easy, so we worked on the  Journey of a Humpback Whale, (DK) J. read the cover, including "journey" and the first two pages. The text reads:

A humpback whale jumps out of the sea. 

He is called Triton (Try-ton)

after a sea god in ancient myths.

 

Triton has a very powerful tail.

The fins at the end of his tail are called "flukes".

Triton has special markings under his flukes. 

Every humpback whale has different markings.

Do the flukes of these humpbacks look different to you?

 

This passage has several words that would stump a reader at J's starting point of three weeks ago (including one week of half term holiday), and we had to work hard on Triton, lfukes, ancient, markings and after. Where possible, we used my normal approach of working hard on very similar words before returning to the word that had caused the problem - J's teacher had to write them for me on a mini board.    However, J read different and special without help, and by the end of the lesson had read the two pages accurately and with full understanding. We spent some time discussing the ancient world, in which James was interested. The lesson, vi skype, lasted half an hour, and J decided then that he was tired, so we agreed to meet next week. 

The pupil in the first example above had not had a formal assessment of dyslexia, but had been making very slow progress in reading before the lesson described here. Since that time, she has read and understood Alice in Wonderland. In this lesson, we discussed what to do next. As her elder sister was interested in dystopia, as the opposite of utopia, we decided on Thomas More, and discussed his real role in Henry VIII's affairs, as well as the cinema picture in A Man for All Seasons. We discussed Henry's character change after his jousting accident, and Elizabeth I's ring, with a picture of Ann Boleyn inside it. We discussed the difference between Utopia as "nowhere" and the way the word was adapted to signifiy an ideal state, and decided both girls would read the book. We finished with an introduction to grammar.

A quick check on tables showed that the original pupil, S, had learned them up to 7x, with only a couple of hesitations. We decided that she would practise these and we would finish them next week. Once again, stunning progress, but from an exceptionally intellgent pupil.

Some Characteristics of People Assessed as Dyslexic.

As Professor Julian (Joe) Elliott has pointed out, it is extremely difficult to state objectively what distinguishes a person assessed as dyslexic from another who has reading and spelling difficulties. This makes the issue difficult for teachers who don't have time to go through the huge number of books and articles written on the subject and judge for themselves. Here are some brief notes on characteristics that can lead to a person being assessed as dyslexic, and the proportion of pupils who might realistically fall into this category:

1. Brain scan evidence indicates that one to one and a half percent of pupils have patterns of brain activity that are different from those of fluent readers. Unfortunately, brain scan evidence is not available in the normal process of assessment, which leads most assessments to be based on inference from test scores, which are inherently unreliable - eg a person may know where to obtain a low score deliberately in order to gain an advantage in examinations. The number recall test is a good place to start. Recall of numbers is also a poor indication of the use of memory in readng.

2. Visual stress is common, and made worse by fluorescent light. It makes reading difficult and can be considered a dyslexia look-alike.

3. Most people assessed as dyslexic have weaknesses in working memory that make it difficult them both to process new information and to transfer it to long-term memory. 

4. Most people assessed as dyslexic process new information more slowly than others. Because of this, they have more difficulty than others when irregularity makes processing this information more complicated. I define irregularity as a letter indicating a sound that is not the most frequent one it indicates, and on this basis around one-third of English words have an element of irregualarity. Spanish, Finnish, Italian and German have almost none. 

5. People are unlikely to be assessed as dyslexic if they have serious general learning difficulties. This is a tricky point, as people with general learning difficulties often have similar difficulties with learning to read and write. It is nevertheless true that most psychologists look for anomalies in test scores when making these judgements - a person with consistently low scores will rarely be assessed as dyslexic. One high score - for example on verbal or "non-verbal" reasonong or on vocabulary, is often enough to provide the basis for a judgement. 

6. Many judgements are fudged - eg a person may be said to have "mild symptoms" of dyslexial, or to have a profile that is "consistent with" it.

In practical terms, people assessed as dyslexic almost always have trouble understanding the way print conveys information. They do not make the connections between print and meaning that fluent readers make automatically. Teaching must therefore aim to enable them to make these connections - see foundation lesson below - and then to build on them. It needs to incorporate subtle and frequent reinforcement of memory, so as to provide reinforcement and build a base of knowledge that the person can use to work out new words. The teacher needs to know and understand the patterns of irregularity in  English and their causes, in order to chart the pupil's way through them rather than leave the pupil to work this out for him or herself - failure do to this is a catastrophic weakness in almost all schemes designed to help people with dyslexia. Do this alongside practice in using the regular information contained in letters, and pupils will succeed.

 

 

Interlude: Digby Fairweather, great British jazz.

 

 

Digby Fairweather is my knd of jazzman - clear, melodic, swinging as high as it will go. Click on the pic to reach his website, with all kinds of information on his career, gigs etc.  Anecdote - Edinburgh Festival, around 1980, Digby on stage with a pick up group of big American stars, just flown in, no rehearsal, and standing around on stage sorting out who was going to do what. Not the best, and upstaged by a good bunch of local chemists, the Apothecaries of Jazz.  Next morning, Digby was booked with some local players in a pub. My companions decided they'd had enough. I remembered going to see Max Wall three times in London in the seventies, the first two ok-ish, and the last the funniest evening I've ever had, at the Greenwich theatre, his home ground. Max was teling each joke before you'd finished laughing at the previous one - it was actually painful.   

Digby blew the roof off the pub, lifting his local band as he did so. Best British jass I've ever heard  I bought him a drink, and he had an orange juice. I was disappointed, but now understand that musicians need a clear head.