John Bald/language and literacy

More speed, less understanding.

Guardian has an excellent report of a survey of speed reading techniques, showing a loss of understanding when people try to read more quickly than their brains can process the information. I've never believed in speed reading, or skimming and scanning, except when something is not really worth reading properly - typically, the morass of policy documents produced under New Labour's strategies. What is worth reading is worth reading either at the pace of the human voice, or at the pace of our own inner speech, which is faster, but takes shortcuts we can control.

Learn Golf in a Day. Saffron Walden Golf Club

Rob McNicholas, Aaron Howard and Sarah Smith, PGA golf professionals, are offering introductions to golf for £20 on Sunday afternoons on 7th Feb, 6th March and 3rd April.  Golf is no longer the snobbish game people sometimes think it is, and is excellent exercise for people who are perhaps past the age at which they can enjoy fast ball sports. These three are top-flight teachers, expert and patient. Equipment supplied, and highly recommended. Details.

HMCI's annual report, and the neglect of subject inspection in schools.

Matthew Coffey told the House of Commons Education Select Committee earlier this year that Ofsted did not inspect "every single subject." This is an understatement. Ofsted is not inspecting any subjects at all, and no subject reports are included in HMCI's annual report. All it says about modern languages is that some pupils are dropping out at 14 because they don't enjoy them or find them difficult.

Ofsted's job is, or ought to be, to say why this is the case, and what should be done about it. It can't answer the questions, because it is not inspecting langauges. In fact, it is not inspecting anything in any detail except management, and has only a handful - less than a handful - of inspectors with the skills that would enable them to do this. The recently-appointed MFL inspector has just sent out an email to primary schools asking what they are doing. This is a dereliction of duty - it is her responsibility to find out what they are doing - not what they say they are - and to evaluate it.

There is not a word about this or any subject in HMCI's annual report. HMCI and his senior colleagues - I only just stop short of the term henchmen - are basing their reports on behaviour, management and data, and do not realise the extent to which data under the current system are corrupt to the extent that they enable cheats and bullies to prosper and penalise honest people. They are, in short, not doing their work properly and have lost all credibility with teachers. Not that that matters to them, as they are all headteachers. The organisation's motto should be changed to reflect the reality. Oderint dum metuant. Let them hate, so long as they fear.

Mathematical Mindsets, Jo Boaler. A review.

Professor Boaler has become a standard bearer for progressive education in mathematics.  She believes in mixed ability teaching and is opposed to textbooks, “procedures” (standard methods of calculation) and homework, which she considers inequitable as some children don’t have anywhere quiet to do it. She has been quoted as saying that multiplication tables cause  “crippling anxiety”, and is opposed to testing them, though she does not say that they are “not worth knowing”. This is an important point, to which I'll return. If they are worth knowing, how should we teach them?

 Many of the teaching tasks in this book are quite brilliant, and I have started to use them. They are interesting and challenging, promoting mathematical reasoning and the flexible application of knowledge. Her criticism that textbooks interfere with this by presenting only the most simple examples – eg only hexagons that are regularly shaped – is often true. She is also correct in saying that school systems too often put sheer speed before understanding, and that this penalises some gifted mathematicians, including the Fields Medal winner Laurent Schwartz. It also penalises slower-learning children in mixed ability classes, as they do not receive the additional guidance and practice they need in order to learn effectively. Professor Boaler tries to combat this by using tasks with a low starting point and a great deal of extension - "low floor, high ceiling". This is a good idea in itself, and worth developing, whether the groups taught are of mixed ability or not.

Professor Boaler's politics are expressed in her reply to emails, Viva la revolution, and her methods are based on the Hollywood principle, "first simplify, then exaggerate". She starts in the introduction, where she describes the OBE as the “greatest honor bestowed in England, given by the queen”. It isn't, and Professor Boaler must know this. The OBE is third in rank out of four in the Order of the British Empire, and at least two other civil honours - Companion of Honour and Order of Merit - rank higher than any of these.

The same fast and loose attitude applies to the presentation of studies and data. A UK school dubbed Phoenix Park is compared with another, Amber Hill (amber – slow down and stop) on the basis of work that took place in the 1990s, though the dates don’t appear in the text. An interesting critique of this study is here. Professor Boaler’s flagship “Railside School” in California, is equally controversial. Her account of the work has been attacked for selective use of data by a group of California academics, whom Professor Boaler has in turn castigated on her university website for alleged bullying and intimidation. I hate bullying, but in a 2008 paper cited in a US Supreme Court case, she concedes her critics’ main point – Railside pupils did very well in algebra, but not so well in other aspects of maths. Professor Boaler says that this may be because of the pupils’ lower attainment in “language arts” – English, to us – but the available evidence suggests that it might equally well be the result of paying more attention to algebra than to other aspects of maths, particularly calculation.

On reflection, this is the basis of Professor Boaler’s “revolution”. She wants to replace arithmetic with algebra, and a little geometry, as the foundation of school mathematics. The trouble with this is that the mathematics of civil society. politics, law and everyday life, from the annual budget to a gym subscription to a supermarket offer, are based on arithmetic, and every citizen needs to know how to use it. So why has she not devoted her considerable ability as a teacher to ensuring that everyone has these skills?

A final point on brain research. Professor Boaler cites the well-known study of London taxi drivers, showing enlarged hippocampus in London Black Cab drivers following the knowledge of London test, a finding that was not repeated in bus drivers who had only learned simple bus routes. She also points out that neurons fire when children make mistakes, and concludes that making mistakes is a positive thing. This is misleading. Kandel's Nobel Prize winning research shows that repetition results in the growth of new connections in cells, while it is established that repeated activity, such as learning music, results in layers of myolin being deposited or formed along connections that speed things up. The fact that neurons are firing indicates no more than that the person is alive and that the brain is active. Some mistakes are, no doubt, creative. Mistakes on simple number facts, such as the 2x table, are anything but.

Multiplication tables are a good example. If they are worth knowing, they are worth teaching, and most schools do not do this well.  Some schools teach children to count in multiples instead of teaching the table, and some as a preparation for it. In either case, I have always found that this makes learning the table more difficult, and see it as an problem of co-ordination rather than maths, as nearly everyone can add two to a given number. What they can't do without practice is get used to one column advancing one step at a time, while another advances in multiples. My approach is to build the necessary co-ordination by teaching 2x very carefully, with plenty of extra practice where needed to make it automatic. I don't move to 3x until 2x is very clearly in place, as this provides a template for the others. I then find I can teach the remainder in three to six months, and that they help pupils enjoy maths.

 

Lost in a Fog - how not to teach languages. Updated, 5th January 2016.

To SOAS for the ALL London branch's excellent morning conference - certainly the best forum for London languages teachers to meet, and great value at £15 for members. The main theme was using the new (aka "target") language in the classroom. There were lots of good ideas for doing this, but I found myself disagreeing with Dr Colin Christie over this quote from Keith Johnson's Language Teaching and Skills Learning (1996):

One learns to land in fog by landing in fog, not by landing in clear skies.

Anyone sending a novice pilot to land in fog should advise them to write their will first. 

In teaching terms, there are at least two paths here. The path of the toolkits on this site, and of Michel Thomas with adults, is to make the early stages of learning very clear indeed to learners by linking them to what they know already, and by making each adjustment in thinking very easy in itself. The skies are as clear as the teacher can make them.  

The second established path is to "expose" them to language, in the hope that a lot of practice and encouragement will enable them to use it. There has to date been no attempt to compare one approach directly with another, but all I can say from experience is that the second results at best in short exclamations, and does not achieve the goal of enabling the learner to express their thoughts clearly - if with the mistakes we all make when we are learning - in the new language. For a fuller discussion of the issues, Dr Colin Christie's PhD thesis is downloadable here.

It does not do to underestimate the importance of these two alternatives. In order to speak in a new language, we need to be able to call up the words we need, and put them together in a way a native speaker can understand, in real time. This is demanding, and is not generally achieved in school language learning. Michel Thomas approached the challenge with adults by beginning with slow and accurate sentence formation, using shared words (aka cognates) for vocabulary, a very few verbs in a wide range of tenses, and pronouns instead of nouns wherever possible, so that pupils could focus all of their attention on grammatical structures rather than learning vocabulary. The approach set out in Dr Christie's thesis does not explain grammatical structures. The examples of pupils' language that he gives are almost all short, formulaic exclamations such as "Changez le prof", and there is some evidence of a small number of pupils dominating the exchanges. There is no hiding the contrast and even conflict between this approach and the full understanding which I see, and the late Michel Thomas saw, as essential.  

In his talk on Saturday, Dr Christie mentioned a Year 9 pupil, who said he could do nothing in French. Dr Christie said that what the pupil meant was that he could not say what he wanted to in French. The pupil was right, and he was wrong - if we are not teaching people to say what they want to say, we are not enabling them to communicate. Dr Christie's path leads to failure, frustration and ignorance. It is a scandal that it remains a key element of teacher training. 

Update 1.  In a conversation after the Reading conference, reported above, Professor Theodoris Marinis told me that he had been able to detect differences in brain functioning after learning new languages by means of brain scans. Further details as soon as the work is published, but this appears to be the first time that the idea that learning languages changes brain functioning has been demonstrated directly. 

Update 2. Keith Johnson's Language Teaching and Skills Learning does not contain any direct evidence of the effectiveness of his approach in British schools, but instead hopes "to show that there is much to be learned about the business of language teaching by considering what teachers in other subjects areas have to say."  This is followed by an endorsement of the idea that we learn a second language as we learn our first - a cardinal error, as the neural networks in our first language are already established by the time we come to learn another, and do not go away.

This book is based on the errors of Chomsky and Krashen. Neither of these writes has published any evidence based on language teaching in schools, and Chomsky's rejection of the need for evidence to support his theories is his greatest error, making him a modern-day Casaubon, the pompous cleric in  George Eliot's Middlemarch who spent his life searching for "the key to all mythologies".  The one piece of evidence I could find Keith Johnson's book is a paper from the German researcher Raupach (1987) in which he found a substantial increase in the number of syllables German university students of French could utter without hesitation after they had spent a whole term in France.  Interesting, but not surprising, and completely useless in the context of children starting to learn a language in a UK classroom. The book predates modern brain research, and the idea that it continues to contribute to teacher training is disturbing - it is, quite simply, obsolete.

Update 3.

Variatio: An Excellent Scholarship Latin Course by Ed Clarke.

Language teaching in the UK has for fifty years suffered from errors based on the work of Professors Eric Hawkins, Noam Chomsky and Steven Krashen, none of whom has or had any sustained experience of teaching languages in schools. Eric Hawkins had a little, but not enough, and did not support his assertions with research evidence, despite having the means to obtain it. The errors are founded on theories that languages are acquired rather than learned.

Ed Clarke's 2 part Scholarship Course (£12.99 each) is the exact opposite of these theories. Pupils' knowledge and understanding of Latin grammar is carefully built up from the outset, with each new point clearly explained in a cordial, conversational style, and supported by exercises that ensure that they understand the work fully, without turning it into a grind. The A4 format helps with this by allowing a generous, spacious layout that makes the material much easier to absorb. Although there are other good traditional Latin courses on the market, this one would now be my first choice, whether for its initial audience of prep school teachers, or state school teachers looking for a challenging course for higher-attaining pupils. Its scope extends well beyond the requirements of GCSE and would make a good transition to A level.

Apart from the cover, there are no illustrations. This concerned me a little until I looked at another recent publication, Mary Beard's excellent SPQR, and saw how limited the illustrations were in comparison with those easily available on the internet. There is every reason to encourage pupils to make their own collections, and indeed to explore Roman culture and artefacts using all available resources. Here, for example are items of Roman glass from Cologne.  Mr Clarke is no killjoy, and his Highfield School Classics page has a splendid picture of pupils enjoying dressing up as Romans.

The Amazon reviews come from tutors and students, and are well worth reading, as is Ysenda Maxtone Graham's masterly and entertaining survey of the history of Latin teaching in the last century in The Spectator.