John Bald/language and literacy

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.

Some poems and literature for early language learning.

Julie Prince has posted some super Spanish poems here, and Janet Lloyd a lovely poem in French, with ideas of how to use it, here. The Association for Language Learning has a substantial selection of ideas for using literature, here. Janet's selection is from Anne-Marie Chapouton, who has written lots of lovely books, available on Amazon. Duvet is a great name for a little rabbit. The great advantage of the written word in learning langauges is that it will stay still and let us look at it as long as we like and as often as we like. Each time we do, the electricity courses round the new connections in our brain, reinforcing them and speeding them up. Click on the book below, and once again when you reach the Amazon site, for a preview.

Oxford comma. An optional extra.

We use commas to help the reader with phrasing. The Oxford comma is used in lists, and I suggest that it is sometimes helpful and sometimes not.  

If the items in a list are single words, the comma creates an unnatural gap, and so does not help. I went to the shop and bought some apples, bananas, beans and pears.  No advantage to inserting a comma after beans'

If the items are phrases, a comma can help.  He found the argument lacking in substance, unsupproted by evidence, and internally inconsistent.  Comma after evidence helps phrasing,

So, a judgement call, depending on the phrasing we want.

 

Grouping Pupils in Primary Schools: A Brief Note.

In a primary school in Essex, 30 yrs ago, we grouped Y5-6 together for English, and taught in two sets. I taught the lower set, and Y6 teacher the higher. I focused on reading and spelling difficulties that the other set did not have, and the Y6 teacher on more advanced work that my pupils couldn't do because of their difficulties. No more than a small experiment, but highly satisfactory to all concerned.

 

Children for whom learning is not straightforward need work closely matched to their learning needs, or they can't understand it, and so make little progress. They also become frustrated. It's no co-incidence that behaviour problems predominantly affect lower-attaining pupils and those with SEND, as they are getting no satisfaction from their work, and are frequently faced with a daily round of failure. Attempts in Essex, by the primary inspectors, to replace literacy as the basis of education with first-hand experience, simply led to lower standards of literacy.

 

The kind of streaming that was prevalent at the time of the Plowden report in the 60s - over 90% of primary schools streamed - has been replaced by a mixed ability dogma that is putting huge strain on teachers, and is meeting no-one's needs. An alternative is in Learning without Limits' approach to maths. Classes offer different levels of difficulty/challenge, and pupils are allowed to choose. This should be developed. As people may know, Dame Alison Peacock, head of the school that used this approach, is CEO of the Chartered College of Teaching, of which I am a Fellow.

Complaint to ITN and Ofcom re broadcast on Hackney New School, 30th April, 1st May (ITN Website)

1. The artificial tone is calculated to convey concern and anger. The reporter does not question the comments of complainants, but acts as their advocates, rejecting school leaders’ comments all but one issue – that of previous poor behaviour – which is minimised in final interview with ITN colleague.  
2. 26 the reporter does not question the claim of “behind closed doors”. The school is open to visitors. If there were restrictions due to COVID, this should have been made clear.
3. The CEO’s notes on effective behaviour systems and harmony are confirmed in a second Ofsted report of a monitoring visit https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/provider/23/147653. This is not mentioned, making it appear that the CEO’s comments were an unsubstantiated assertion, which is not true.
4. The July 2029 Ofsted report is fairly presented – 3.01 – but the November follow up, above, is not. This is unfair.
5. 27. The school is not responsible for headlines in the Evening Standard, but the reporter used this headline as if it were evidence of a claim by the school itself, which is clearly untrue. The headteacher’s comments, below, are contained in the article. Furthermore, the reporter conflates the headteacher’s comments on fighting bullying during lockdown, with the effect of changes in breaktimes, which cannot be an issue during lockdown. The statement by a member of staff that lunchtime and breaktime clubs “don’t exist” was neither challenged nor investigated.  The sequence shows that the reporter has set this up as a claim by the school and then attacked it. The CEO says that “It would be foolish of a school to say that they had ever eliminated bullying”. The reporter says, “Which is what you did say,”, though the headteacher’s words are clear in the article.

“Headteacher Charlotte Whelan said there have been just five incidents of bullying reported       in the last year, including cyberbullying during lockdown, and there have been no permanent exclusions.”

For the avoidance of doubt, that does not constitute a claim of elimination.

6. The number of detentions may well indicate action to enforce proper discipline following lockdown. Its presentation and tone indicates the view of the reporter on sanctions, rather than an error on the part of the school. There is no discussion of the reason for detentions, or of the pattern. The CEO noted a reduction in the use of detention as the term progressed.   The reporter’r selective use of evidence, and her suggestion 5.50 “surely that disrupts children’s learning” – emphasis on “surely” – shows bias and a lack of balance.  
7. The student sending an email to staff – it is not surprising that she did not include the Trust CEO – was not asked for evidence of her allegations or questioned on them. “I have an opinion, and it matters” should be set alongside the opinions of other pupils, which the reporter did not seek. A visit to an assembly does not constitute a fair evaluation of the work of a school, and we did not see any of the content of the “sermon”. Was it a purely religious presentation, as this word implies?
8. The expression “dangerous school, as he puts it”, and “he believes” minimise the evidence of actual danger – the school had an emergency closure for three days as staff had lost control (Ofsted, June 2019). “He believes” further ignores the evidence of Ofsted’s second visit (November 2019), which showed evidence of improvement beyond the CEO’s belief.
9. This news item was presented from a point of view. It is unbalanced, selective of evidence, unfair, and an abuse of the authority provided by a news programme. The broadcaster should apoligise and provide a right of reply.