John Bald/language and literacy

Intelligent children with reading difficulties: two progress reports.

Bright seven year old, who could not read just over three weeks ago, as she tried to sound out each word one letter at a time, and so became confused and frustrated every time she met the word the.  The immediate progress once irregularity was explained has been noted below, as has her wish to read Alice in Wonderland, which we started on Monday, once we had finished Good Little Wolf. GLW is an excellent teaching book, as it introduces longer words, such as comfortable and unfamiliar, in the context of simple sentences, with plenty of excellent illustrations, and not too much text on a page. The only edition I had of Alice was in a paperback complete stories, about three inches thick.

Beginning at the beginning, I used a paired reading approach, with BSY joining in - I waited for her to read each word - and then going back and trying to read each new paragraph on her own, with me joining in again once she got stuck. (This is a variation on the original paired reading approach, but has some of its key principles - support is immediate an unobtrusive, and the child does as much as he or she can, with the security of knowing that they won't be allowed to fail.). This worked very well. I noted and picked out any words BSY struggled over, and she made rapid progress in identifying them and in phrasing her reading. A very satisfying page and a half later, we called it a day.

An adult who was observing noted BSY's determination to read the book, which was itself a huge jump from the previous one, and one I'd hesitated before using. Parent's verdict was "brilliant," and BSY left greatly satisfied. We'll go over the beginning again next lesson, and I've recommended the fantastic pop-up picture book as a Christmas present. BSY had made good progress with the two-times table, but the school had moved to counting fives in multiples. This remains in my view an error, as it makes the table harder to learn. We started on threes.

With the seven year-old boy in London, I plugged a small microscope into my laptop, and left it where he could see it while we did the 2 and 3 times tables. A lot of work needed to stop him from losing his place, but good progress, particularly when he'd worked out the questions I was likely to ask him and had his answers ready in advance, to beat me.  We looked at coins and his little finger through the microscope - What was that black speck on his little finger? Surely not dirt? - and then started to read the title of the accompanying book - Usborne Science and Experiments. The world of the Microscope, which he learned to read very quickly.

Using conversation to build up understanding of meaning around the text was crucial in both cases. BSY found unfamiliar easier once I had explained the link with family, and similarly could read helium and hydrogen after we'd discussed their properties. Phonics alone could not explain why helium is pronounced differently from hedonist (or indeed hydrogen from hystamine), but unpacking the use of vowels in English, and the reasons why we can't always be sure whether a vowel is long or short, enabled her to try both versions and read the words. The young man found science much easier to understand and read once I'd unpacked the Latin scio, and was pleased to tell his dad abou the influence of Norman French on English. 

In order to teach more advanced reading, we need to do much more than just teach the reading. We need to open up the world for the child, in terms he or she can understand. 

Afterthought on the phonics of hydrogen and hystamine - the phonics tell us much of what we need to know, but not all of it. We need to know which of a limited range of possibilities applies in a given word.  Hydrdogen is like hydrangia, dehydrated and others. Hystamine is like hysterical, hystrionics etc. Once we make a small group, each word in the group reinforces the others.

A Sore Hand. Updated, September 08

If you've already read the first three updates, please scroll down to Update 4

Let's call her Michelle. She was referred to me by a friend who knows her, and who noticed she had a heavily bandaged hand. Michelle had become so frustrated at not being able to understand her work that she had smashed her hand right through a stud partition wall. She told my friend she was useless.

I went to see Michelle's parents, and her mum brought her to see me on a Sunday afternoon. Michelle has a slight hearing impairment, but is an exceptionally good lipreader. Still, her mother had been told, she would always be below average in her school work because of her hearing problem. When I asked Michelle to write something, she held her pen in her left fist, in a way that prevented her from seeing what she was writing. Michelle thought glasses and a hearing aid did not look good, so tended to avoid wearing them.

Michelle's primary school has a good reputation for work with special educational needs, and yet no-one, in seven years of school, had taught her how to hold a pen. This meant that much of her mental capacity was taken up by having to hold things in memory, creating stress and limiting her ability to focus on meaning. I explained to Michelle the ways in which you could adjust pen grip, the angle of paper, and the height of your seat to give you a clearer view and more control. Not rocket science, but why had no-one told her before? She quickly made adjustments, and by the end of our session, the fist grip had been left behind.

How can a series of teachers have such limited knowledge and understanding as to tell a parent that a child will always be below average because they have a hearing impairment? I explained the spelling system to Michelle, using the techniques in my books. She understood immediately, and we discussed the effects of her hearing difficulty on her understanding. Michelle was, to my surprise, quite comfortable with French, but a look at her books showed that she was spending almost all day copying from boards, with no-one checking that she understood. Elfnsafety, of course, were dealt with - she has support in lessons where not hearing might lead to an accident - but her intellectual needs were being ignored. With the consequences we have seen for health and safety! She was interested in history, and I started to explain some of the terms she'd copied - criteria, motte and bailey.  Michelle's quick learning and understanding convinced me that she is a potential university student. She seemed surprised to hear herself say she had enjoyed her lesson, and left with a smiling face and a copy of the Compact Oxford Dictionary on CD ROM, which would let her check the pronunciation of new words without the embarrassment of asking someone each time. She got her dad to install it straightaway and brought the disk back.

So, how does this situation arise? It's easy to go into a rage at the lack of knowledge and understanding that were blighting Michelle's future and making her so unhappy, and on my Ofsted weblog I note that Ofsted's current procedures are incapable of picking up and tackling these issues. Shame on Ofsted. The government's system of paying managers more and more money while trying to do everyone's thinking for them is also a factor - more money means more authority, more self-confidence and, often, more complacency, on the "because I'm worth it" line of thinking. Categorising, controlling and assessing has been a government tool since the beginning of time, but it doesn't work with individuals. We need a system of training that teaches teachers to think, and to make professional judgements on the basis of a full assessment of all available evidence. We manifestly haven't got it.

Three days later - Michelle is going past me on her bike, and brakes hard. "I've learned a new word. Catastrophic. And I love that thing you gave me (the OUP talking dictionary). Love it."  

An afterthought is that the dictionary isolates a difficult word from the run of speech and text. Focusing on it probably helps Michelle to hear it really clearly, repeating it as often as she likes, so that she can learn it. I'll ask next week. The teaching is free. If you think I can help you, or a child of yours, get in touch.

Update 1. Michelle's parents are delighted with her progress - she hasn't stopped working all week, and keeps calling out to her mum the new words she's learning. She comes for a lesson on Friday afternoon. Pen adjustment is still there, and we work on words with double letters - I explain why some words have them, and we start collecting examples. Michelle picks up the principles very quickly, and surprises herself by spelling words such as exaggeration accurately. She is interested in archaeology, so we start on the first book of Sharma's History of England, with the Orkney stone village. Michelle uses phonics very well to work out unfamiliar words, which, in this context, are pretty regular in spelling. She borrows the book. Tbc.

Update 2. Third lesson. Michelle is getting used to the new pen grip after two weeks, but is still inclined to slip back, so we practise. She is beginning to understand that her excellent lipreading was contributing to some small slips in spelling from aspects of language that were not clear from the lips alone, and to see how to counteract this. Michelle brought her glasses this time, but admitted that she did not always wear them. Hearing her read from Harry Potter, she was jerky, though accurate, with a lot of double takes. I decided to try an Institute of Optometry (IOO) overlay, and there was an immediate improvement in fluency. We tried the whole range, using the IOO screening kit, and Michelle decided she preferred purple. She was so keen that she wanted to pay for the overlay out of her pocket money (the cost price is £5). Her mum wouldn't let her, but the thought was very touching. We cut an overlay in two, half for school and half for home.  

Update 3.  16.7.08  Conversation with Michelle's parents. Dad had left school at fourteen, hated his English teacher for making him read aloud in front of the class when he couldn't do it - this in the mid-eighties, when that kind of humiliation was becoming rarer. Had taught himself to read properly after leaving school. Michelle's overlay a great success - she had read a complete Harry Potter book in two days. The kind of thing bright twelver-year-olds might be expected to do.

Come the lesson, and parents had exaggerated a little. Michelle had in fact read 106 pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which was fine, and the hesitation of last week had vanished. She had made excellent progress with her pen grip, and was writing more comfortably, with better control and fluency. The work in her books over the year, though, was shameful. Almost all copied and frequently inaccurate, the English not marked - Agent greek (for ancient Greek) was one error, and was all she had written. Most of what Michelle had written, she could not read back. But the school's ok. The head wrote another article in the local paper saying how good it was, and how educational standards had improved so much from the "very poor" teaching that had been prevalent in the nineties. Surprising no-one notices.

Update 4.  3 September, and Michelle goes back to school today. We've arranged that she and her mum will see me weekly, that Michelle will use her planner to note anything that she doesn't understand, and that they will phone me between lessons if they need to. Michelle is taken with the idea of going to University, and last week gave me a tremendous boost by encouraging a friend of hers to come for lessons, and explaining how hard she would need to work, and why, and what she would learn if she did.

For our lesson this week, Michelle explained to me that she was to start Spanish as well as French. This struck me as a thoroughly bad idea, and she then said she would do German next year too. There is a pattern in language teaching, in which schools try to compensate for lack of progress by switching children between languages, so that they are always in the initial stages, until they give up. Ignorance.

However, I gave Michelle a lesson on the similarities and differences between Spanish and French, and she made surprisingly good progress in both. She held simple sentences in her mind and wrote them accurately, and was pleased to see that you could make a negative sentence in Spanish just by adding No. I loaded Little Tails and Zim Zam Zoom onto her laptop for her to practise, and we will see how she is doing on Saturday. Despite her hearing difficulties, Michelle showed good pronunciation in both languages, though she had to work hard on accentuating one syllable in Spanish words. I was surprised to see how easily she adapted to not pronouncing t at the ends of French words, writing and reading J'ai un chat accurately. Michelle also understood the use of the apostrophe to avoid a clash between vowels. She is clearly a very clever girl.

We finished with some tables. Twos were accurate, with only one hesitation. Threes were fine except for a glitch on  5X3 to 7X3. Michelle is to practise these for Saturday, then do some work on 4s.

Michelle's mother was very pleased - "She really wants to go back to school and show them what she can do," she said. She read an letter I'd written to the local paper taking issue with the headteacher. I said I wasn't expecting a Christmas card. Michelle was beside me like a tiger. "If she has a go at you, you just write straight back, and keep on and on and on," she said. It's not just a cliché that we learn from our pupils. There's just a small mark left on her hand from where she hurt it.

 

 

If you've already read the first three updates, please scroll down to Update 4

Let's call her Michelle. She was referred to me by a friend who knows her, and who noticed she had a heavily bandaged hand. Michelle had become so frustrated at not being able to understand her work that she had smashed her hand right through a stud partition wall. She told my friend she was useless.

I went to see Michelle's parents, and her mum brought her to see me on a Sunday afternoon. Michelle has a slight hearing impairment, but is an exceptionally good lipreader. Still, her mother had been told, she would always be below average in her school work because of her hearing problem. When I asked Michelle to write something, she held her pen in her left fist, in a way that prevented her from seeing what she was writing. Michelle thought glasses and a hearing aid did not look good, so tended to avoid wearing them.

Michelle's primary school has a good reputation for work with special educational needs, and yet no-one, in seven years of school, had taught her how to hold a pen. This meant that much of her mental capacity was taken up by having to hold things in memory, creating stress and limiting her ability to focus on meaning. I explained to Michelle the ways in which you could adjust pen grip, the angle of paper, and the height of your seat to give you a clearer view and more control. Not rocket science, but why had no-one told her before? She quickly made adjustments, and by the end of our session, the fist grip had been left behind.

How can a series of teachers have such limited knowledge and understanding as to tell a parent that a child will always be below average because they have a hearing impairment? I explained the spelling system to Michelle, using the techniques in my books. She understood immediately, and we discussed the effects of her hearing difficulty on her understanding. Michelle was, to my surprise, quite comfortable with French, but a look at her books showed that she was spending almost all day copying from boards, with no-one checking that she understood. Elfnsafety, of course, were dealt with - she has support in lessons where not hearing might lead to an accident - but her intellectual needs were being ignored. With the consequences we have seen for health and safety! She was interested in history, and I started to explain some of the terms she'd copied - criteria, motte and bailey.  Michelle's quick learning and understanding convinced me that she is a potential university student. She seemed surprised to hear herself say she had enjoyed her lesson, and left with a smiling face and a copy of the Compact Oxford Dictionary on CD ROM, which would let her check the pronunciation of new words without the embarrassment of asking someone each time. She got her dad to install it straightaway and brought the disk back.

So, how does this situation arise? It's easy to go into a rage at the lack of knowledge and understanding that were blighting Michelle's future and making her so unhappy, and on my Ofsted weblog I note that Ofsted's current procedures are incapable of picking up and tackling these issues. Shame on Ofsted. The government's system of paying managers more and more money while trying to do everyone's thinking for them is also a factor - more money means more authority, more self-confidence and, often, more complacency, on the "because I'm worth it" line of thinking. Categorising, controlling and assessing has been a government tool since the beginning of time, but it doesn't work with individuals. We need a system of training that teaches teachers to think, and to make professional judgements on the basis of a full assessment of all available evidence. We manifestly haven't got it.

Three days later - Michelle is going past me on her bike, and brakes hard. "I've learned a new word. Catastrophic. And I love that thing you gave me (the OUP talking dictionary). Love it."  

An afterthought is that the dictionary isolates a difficult word from the run of speech and text. Focusing on it probably helps Michelle to hear it really clearly, repeating it as often as she likes, so that she can learn it. I'll ask next week. The teaching is free. If you think I can help you, or a child of yours, get in touch.

Update 1. Michelle's parents are delighted with her progress - she hasn't stopped working all week, and keeps calling out to her mum the new words she's learning. She comes for a lesson on Friday afternoon. Pen adjustment is still there, and we work on words with double letters - I explain why some words have them, and we start collecting examples. Michelle picks up the principles very quickly, and surprises herself by spelling words such as exaggeration accurately. She is interested in archaeology, so we start on the first book of Sharma's History of England, with the Orkney stone village. Michelle uses phonics very well to work out unfamiliar words, which, in this context, are pretty regular in spelling. She borrows the book. Tbc.

Update 2. Third lesson. Michelle is getting used to the new pen grip after two weeks, but is still inclined to slip back, so we practise. She is beginning to understand that her excellent lipreading was contributing to some small slips in spelling from aspects of language that were not clear from the lips alone, and to see how to counteract this. Michelle brought her glasses this time, but admitted that she did not always wear them. Hearing her read from Harry Potter, she was jerky, though accurate, with a lot of double takes. I decided to try an Institute of Optometry (IOO) overlay, and there was an immediate improvement in fluency. We tried the whole range, using the IOO screening kit, and Michelle decided she preferred purple. She was so keen that she wanted to pay for the overlay out of her pocket money (the cost price is £5). Her mum wouldn't let her, but the thought was very touching. We cut an overlay in two, half for school and half for home.  

Update 3.  16.7.08  Conversation with Michelle's parents. Dad had left school at fourteen, hated his English teacher for making him read aloud in front of the class when he couldn't do it - this in the mid-eighties, when that kind of humiliation was becoming rarer. Had taught himself to read properly after leaving school. Michelle's overlay a great success - she had read a complete Harry Potter book in two days. The kind of thing bright twelver-year-olds might be expected to do.

Come the lesson, and parents had exaggerated a little. Michelle had in fact read 106 pages of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which was fine, and the hesitation of last week had vanished. She had made excellent progress with her pen grip, and was writing more comfortably, with better control and fluency. The work in her books over the year, though, was shameful. Almost all copied and frequently inaccurate, the English not marked - Agent greek (for ancient Greek) was one error, and was all she had written. Most of what Michelle had written, she could not read back. But the school's ok. The head wrote another article in the local paper saying how good it was, and how educational standards had improved so much from the "very poor" teaching that had been prevalent in the nineties. Surprising no-one notices.

Update 4.  3 September, and Michelle goes back to school today. We've arranged that she and her mum will see me weekly, that Michelle will use her planner to note anything that she doesn't understand, and that they will phone me between lessons if they need to. Michelle is taken with the idea of going to University, and last week gave me a tremendous boost by encouraging a friend of hers to come for lessons, and explaining how hard she would need to work, and why, and what she would learn if she did.

For our lesson this week, Michelle explained to me that she was to start Spanish as well as French. This struck me as a thoroughly bad idea, and she then said she would do German next year too. There is a pattern in language teaching, in which schools try to compensate for lack of progress by switching children between languages, so that they are always in the initial stages, until they give up. Ignorance.

However, I gave Michelle a lesson on the similarities and differences between Spanish and French, and she made surprisingly good progress in both. She held simple sentences in her mind and wrote them accurately, and was pleased to see that you could make a negative sentence in Spanish just by adding No. I loaded Little Tails and Zim Zam Zoom onto her laptop for her to practise, and we will see how she is doing on Saturday. Despite her hearing difficulties, Michelle showed good pronunciation in both languages, though she had to work hard on accentuating one syllable in Spanish words. I was surprised to see how easily she adapted to not pronouncing t at the ends of French words, writing and reading J'ai un chat accurately. Michelle also understood the use of the apostrophe to avoid a clash between vowels. She is clearly a very clever girl.

We finished with some tables. Twos were accurate, with only one hesitation. Threes were fine except for a glitch on  5X3 to 7X3. Michelle is to practise these for Saturday, then do some work on 4s.

Michelle's mother was very pleased - "She really wants to go back to school and show them what she can do," she said. She read an letter I'd written to the local paper taking issue with the headteacher. I said I wasn't expecting a Christmas card. Michelle was beside me like a tiger. "If she has a go at you, you just write straight back, and keep on and on and on," she said. It's not just a cliché that we learn from our pupils. There's just a small mark left on her hand from where she hurt it.