A Guide to Learning English and other languages. Introduction and contents.

Introduction.

This is the third of three books charting my developing understanding of the processes of language and literacy development since an eleven year old boy “bunked off” my lesson in Holloway School in 1974, and I found he could not read. No-one was doing much about it, and the Deputy Head, who spent much of his time in the staff room playing chess, told me that “lots of boys in the first year can’t read”. I felt obliged to try to do something about that, and have spent the rest of my working life in the attempt. I began by moving to the Faraday reading unit at Beaufoy School, Lambeth, headed by Mike Burton, which allowed me to work with small groups and individual pupils, and to discuss work in detail with experienced colleagues. I have valued both of these test beds ever since.  

I began to read as much as I could about teaching techniques, and was soon immersed in what came to be known as “The Reading Wars.” A colleague had told the very first class I ever attempted to teach that phonics – the links between sounds and letters - was “the science of reading and writing”. By contrast, two American writers, Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman, were saying  that reading was a “psycholinguistic guessing game”, in which we did not track letters and words closely, but guessed what was going to come next, checking the guesses by light sampling of the text. Smith’s argument was based on the idea that, as most people cannot hold more than a small number of items in memory at a time, we could not possibly read the whole of long words by paying attention to every letter. This sounds convincing until we consider the organisation of words into syllables, which corresponds to the limited capacity of what is now known as “working” memory.

Modern eye-tracking technology, also used by military pilots to guide bombs by focussing on the target, has shown that we do indeed track every letter of every word as we read. When the reading wars began in the sixties, only the large eye movements, known as “saccades”, were known, and Smith and Goodman, like the rest of us, were limited by the scientific knowledge available to them. The guessing game theory was further demolished by Schatz and Baldwin (1986) who found that context was a poor predictor of subsequent words, a finding confirmed by Roger Beard in experiments with undergraduates, who were unable to guess what was coming next when a text suddenly stopped. Morag MacMartin went further in 1991, showing that children often allowed an impression given by a picture to override what a text actually said. In my own work, I found that children would often try to make sens of word they had misread by misreading the next few words, until meaning broke down – rather like banging a piece of a jigsaw with one’s fist when it doesn’t quite fit.

I wrote about these issues, and reviewed reading research, extensively in The Times Educational Supplement during the 1980s, and they sent Sue Palmer to observe my teaching of her daughter, who had been assessed as dyslexic. She described the effect as “miraculous”, and her article, As Easy as ABC Really , led me to write The Literacy File, joint winner of the United Kingdom Reading Association’s Donald Moyle Award in 1997. Dissatisfied with the miserable royalties offered by a publisher, I produced and published it myself, receiving, after costs, roughly the same amount as I’d been offered in the first place. A key feature of this book was that phonics were an essential basis for reading, but limited in English by the influx of French following the Norman conquest, so that many words – eg table, centre, fruit – have put an English pronunciation on top of French spelling.

I had found a straightforward way of explaining the difficulties this causes, but had not yet extended it to Spelling.  Slimmed Down Spelling (TES 2003) made a slight adaptation to the explanation used for reading, and also proved effective. One 15 year old who had been assessed as dyslexic by a highly academic private school, found that it quickly removed a writing block and enabled her to reach the same high standard in English and English literature as in her other subjects. This, with additional case studies, was the main new feature in Using Phonics To Teach Reading and Spelling (Sage, 2007).

The present book extends the approach to learning new languages, and to the evidence provided by brain research, which was just emerging at the time of the Sage publication. I had studied French at university, and my early attempts to teach it at Holloway had been disastrous – the pupils did not understand what I was trying to do, and I did not understand why they did not understand. By the late 1980s, it was clear that pupils with reading problems were failing abjectly in learning foreign languages, so I returned to teaching them, this time with a better idea of the nature of their difficulties and how they could be tackled. Beginning with work with two Essex secondary schools, I developed a sentence-building approach that enabled them to say what they wanted to say, and was able to work on this further some years later as languages consultant with The Learning Trust, Hackney.

The most important new element in our understanding of language is the evidence of brain research, that shows how brain cells make, consolidate and extend connections with each other. This begins as we learn our first language, and continues as we add others to it, so that we do not learn a new language from scratch, but adapt our understanding to new ways of working. This is consistent with Standislas Deheane’s view of learning from infancy onwards, and reflects the current state of scientific understanding of the operations of the brain, which will, no doubt, continue to be extended in future decades.

John Bald, Linton, Cambridgeshre, May 2021.

Contents

1. The Early Development of Language and Evidence from Brain Research.
2. The Transition to Literacy.
3. Reading in the junior and secondary school
4. Writing in the junior and secondary school
5. Tackling problems with reading and writing
6. Learning new languages – the early stages
7. Learning new languages – GCSE and A level.