John Bald/language and literacy

Progress report from a teaching assistant, and from last Saturday morning.

Barry had been given an award a school for "academic achievement", particularly in reading. This is good news, though we still have a huge amount of work to do. Barry was tackling new combinations of letters more confidently than when we started, and his spoken language is beginning to develop, with more sentences rather than fragments, and the use of "because". We had a discussion on whether insects were animals, which we'll continue next time. There are, though, big gaps in his vocabulary - he did not know what royal meant, or who might be royal, and did not recognise the Queen from a coin, though he did recognise her from a banknote. 

The teaching assistant who asked for help has sent me this update, which I've edited slightly. 

It is going well. Several children are becoming very fluent and confident. I've had to (re)train all of them to look thoroughly at what the letters/blends of letters are telling them, rather than just  desperately guessing. Soft 'c', soft 'g' and words derived from French have caused problems for most of them. I've got your book, which has been very helpful. One thing I have noticed with at least two of them is how much their reading varies from session to session. I can have one session that goes badly, when they are continuously getting stuck, and another when their reading is very fluent. It is almost as if their brain switches tracks.

What I love about this method is that it uses real books and the student naturally becomes a more self-sufficient reader over time. It isn't a 'quick fix' by any means but it does encourage them not to be phased by difficult words. One habit they all seem to have developed is of 'getting' a difficult word right just as I'm in the process of writing it down to be studied further!

I can see a point coming when I will have to swap the more fluent ones from those very short chapter books with lots of pictures onto 'proper' long books - they are already shocked that they can tackle 60 page long books with relative ease - and very proud too!

Best wishes

RD

"I'm quite excited for them!" Notes from a teaching assistant on first trying my approach to teaching struggling readers. Updated.

My work with struggling readers helps them to use the information contained in letters, particularly but not only the phonic information, by reinforcing each word they find difficult through further, similar examples. I found Professor Usha Goswami's discovery, in the early nineties, that pupils find it easier to note similar patterns at the ends of words rather than the beginning, extremely helpful, and the effect seems similar to that of the worked examples in geometry in the posting below. 

A teaching assistant took up my offer of free advice last week, and sent me this, two working days later:

 

Hello John,

Thank you for your time on Friday. I've run your ideas past the head and deputy and they are very happy for me to adapt ......... (existing scheme) to whatever I think will work, rather than feeling I need to stick exactly to the prescribed course.

I had my first trial run today. I've been thrilled to discover lots about how these very individual children read that I didn't know before and to slow down the reading so there is time to look properly at words they don't know.

All of them can 'get' an unknown word through looking at known words, although I sometimes had to go backwards eg but/butter/flutter. I'm lucky enough to have an i-pad at work - so we could look at pictures of muesli, pliers and people fencing and the etymology of the word 'electricity'.

They only have 15 minutes twice a week with me, but it is surprising what we packed in. They worked very hard and seemed to enjoy this new style of learning. Sometimes just writing the unknown word on a card was was enough. I'm ordering your book and some blank cards too.

It feels much more comfortable to me, as it is tutoring rather than literacy intervention. So thanks again for your help and your website. I'm quite excited for them!


Best wishes,

 

Update - after a week.

It was good. The children had remembered an impressive amount of what
we covered in their previous session. Only two (out of the dozen or so
that I have) had enormous trouble in blending adjacent letters together,
often inserting letters that aren't there in the word at all or taking
letters from the end of a word and inserting them at the beginning. For
those two I'm going to go very slowly.

  There are such surprising gaps in their knowledge. One was perfectly
happy with 'although' but couldn't do anything with 'spoil' and had to
be taught 'oil'. So I think I'm giving them the rest of the pieces to
the jigsaw. I'm really enjoying the fact that I can tailor each session
so precisely to each child. I can't wait for your book to come. I'm not
trained in phonics and have learnt lots this week. I have noticed that
some of the words they have trouble with are French - 'saucer' and
'voyage' or difficult - 'aught' endings have come up a few times.
Fifteen minutes is just about enough time for each session.

Technical Paper: Notes on a foundation lesson and assessment for people assessed as dyslexic or as having problems with literacy.

The foundation lesson gives the teacher a clear idea of what it is in a person's thinking that is holding up their progress in reading and writing, and starts the process of adjusting their thinking so that they can succeed. This allows the teacher to make an immediate impact on the problem, replace confusion with confidence, and to change the pupil's life for the better. This foundation lesson has been developed for use with individual pupils over thirty years, and was featured by Sue Palmer in The TES, here. 

Download Foundation Lesson For People With Literacy Problems

Download Assessment.

 

 

Teaching Assistants' Edufax - A Manual for In-house training. Free download.

In the early 1990s, I ran a DFE pilot scheme for teaching assistants. It had a self-contained handbook, designed to allow schools to train assistants on their own site and in the context of their own work. The main emphasis was on teaching techniques. References to national strategies, current at the time of writing, should be revised in the light of the school's current curriculum. 

An updated version was published in the Edufax series, but is no longer available. I'm therefore making the full text available here, for free download, and will add some "in a nutshell" pages in a subsequent posting. I retain the copyright, but individual schools may download and use the material within their own institution. Correspondence is, as always, very welcome.

Download Classroom Assistant's Edufax, Third Edition

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.

The private world of dyslexia, and a term that has run its course.

Who exactly is dyslexic, and who is to say?

To begin with, very few people are actually assessed as "dyslexic". It is more usual for a psychologist or other assessor to come up with an opinion that a pattern in test results, at times combined with an analysis of actual performance, is "consistent with" such an assessment. This is a phrase widely used in the medical profession when a doctor can't be sure. 

Virtually every test score that meets this vague criterion includes a weakness in memory. Most include a weakness in recognising words, and in recognising words presented at speed - also a weakness in memory, as the words need to be built up from their constituent parts.

The point at which a combination of weaknesses leads to a "category" judgement is never certain. Categories bring supposed benefits, and, some people say, comfort, in that they understand the issues more clearly.

But do they? And, in particular, does the category of dyslexia (hereafter dx)?

I no longer believe it does. Dx is a concept of the late nineteenth-century, when our knowledge of the brain and its operations was far less developed than it is now. At the time, it served a useful purpose in isolating particular difficulties with reading from general learning difficulties that had their own categories, usually socially and intellectually pejorative. More recently, it has come to be used as an umbrella term, which can be extended to cover just about any difficulty with reading except those caused by visual stress - which is itself confusing, as visual stress can cause symptoms that are closely associated with dx.

But let's get back to the hard evidence. If someone has a weakness in short term memory, they can learn to use their memory more effectively, for example by learning to group similar words, and so form artificially the neural networks that immediately successful readers form naturally. If they have difficulty in reading fluently, the task can be broken down and rebuilt, like a music lesson, so that the obstacles to fluency can be identified and tackled. If they have problems with spelling, which is perfectly natural in English (see D Crystal, Spell it Out, for the reasons why) then they can be taught to spell. 

In each case, the hard evidence of a particular cause of difficulty is more descriptive of the problem, and more indicative of its solution, than the umberlla term. This is important, not just because the term creates a sense of victimhood and helplessness, but because, against all intention, it actually gets in the way of designing the teaching that the individual needs. At present I never use the term dx unless someone else does first. We would have a much clearer view of the situation, and the action that is needed, if this practice were adopted by everyone else, and dx seen as a historical, rather than a modern scientific concept.  

"I just wanted to grow things..." Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh is to gardening as Jamie Oliver to cooking, and less of a commercial operation. He is excellent, here, on promoting gardens and horticulture in schools, and does equally well in Country Life, even admitting on occasion to an error. Titchmarsh was no academic in school, but he has the gift of clarity, and writes well. His work should be studied.

Framwellgate School, Durham - read it and weep. (Or laugh)

Framwellgate School, Durham, is adertising, here, for a "director of corporate services", at £55k (ie roughly £65 with NI and pension costs). Read the details of this unbelievable piece of bureaucracy and ask yourself just how much money is being blown away on top heavy administration. The school was last inspected in 2008, for two days (it has 1250 pupils), and rated good overall, with the sixth form rated satisfactory. We don't know how many lessons were seen on this visit - David Bell made sure this information was not included in reports. The school's 2000 inspection involved 15 inspectors over 5 days, and provided a detailed report on each subject.. A visit to assess maths provision in 2011 found it satisfactory.  But since when is a school a corporation? And is a school with only satisfactory provision for maths and in its sixth form not due for a proper inspection? 

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy.

This is a disciplined and clearly-written account of an investigation into the links between early language development and literacy problems that is the culmination of over thirty years of research, and contains within it the germ of a solution. For all of that time, Professors Snowling and Hulme have taken a practical and controlled view of the issues involved in early literacy and have made significant discoveries, chief among them the link between problems with speech in early childhood and subsequent assessments of dyslexia. They have worked patiently and hard, with respect for the limitations of evidence and the constraints of research methods. I hope that all of the authors of this excellent book will forgive me for putting Maggie and Charles first - I declare a bias, indeed an interest, in a disinterested sense of the word, having followed the research since their first publication

In this book, they and their co-authors have set up random allocated controlled trials of teaching, provided by trained teaching assistants, designed to promote the development of spoken language and to tackle problems that put children at risk of failing to learn to read and write properly. Professor Snowling has described the organisation of the study, which involved 29 schools, as “a logistical nightmare”. However, she and her colleagues have woken up in bright sunshine, with statistically and educationally significant outcomes that are an important breakthrough, not only in literacy, but in the training and deployment of teaching assistants. At the York conference presenting the work, the authors were full of praise for the work of the assistants and quite rightly - this is the first fully documented account of what assistants can achieve, and for that alone is very important. 

The two key programmes, phonology plus reading, and oral language, are described in great detail in the book and should be read by everyone concerned with early literacy. I have a couple of quibbles, the most important of which is the suggestion on p2 that “by the time children go to school, they typically have an oral vocabulary of 14,000 words”.  As Professor Snowling and many others have shown great disparities in the pre-school language experience of children, it is impossible to know what is typical, or to put a figure on it.  

The research was supported by a grant of £212k from the Nuffield Foundation. It has demonstrated that randomised controlled trials are possible in education, though to me this is still one criterion among many for evaluating research. Focus on the right groups of pupils, clear design and consistent monitoring of teaching techniques, and long term follow up are all just as important (technical paper here).  This study followed pupils up after 15 months, which is good, though follow up to 11, as in the Clackmannanshire studies, should be undertaken if possible. There is no quick fix here, either real or implied - as with Reading Recovery, the social and intellectual conditions that are part of the cause of literacy problems are still in place once the intervention has finished. But life is short. This research is the best we have had to date in this area, and much better than most of that surrounding Reading Recovery.

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy. Wiley-Blackwell, Nuffield Foundation, ISBN 978 0 4707 1185 9

A lovely day at the Institute of Education

The course was a small one - five teaching assistants from state schools. and a teacher of children with autism from the private sector. The great thing about a group this size is that people can ask as many questions as they want without feeling they're disturbing the group, and that we can discuss them fully.

We started with the idea that dealing with literacy problems - the course was Using Phonics to Tackle  Literacy Problems - involves helping people to adjust their thinking so that they don't keep running into the same snags, but have a way round them. In English, the fuzzy logic of the spelling "system", in which letters behave regularly about three quarters of the time, is the key issue, and one that the government, with all its tons of paper, has never faced up to. In regular languages, learning difficulties slow people down, but fuzzy logic adds a new strand to the problem, so that children need to learn to think flexibly, and to be prepared for letters not to do as they expect.

We discussed the analysis of English spelling in my books, and course members felt that they provided a way in. We considered the issue of light sensitivity, and, as usual, it affected one of us quite strongly, to the extent of getting frequent headaches under fluorescent light. This person benefited immediately from putting a blue overlay over a text, using the British Institute of Optometry's screening kit. We looked at materials and resources from Mantralingua's Talking Pen and John Crick's Clicker, to Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc, with its excellent use of questions to ensure children understood what they were reading, and considered training and assessment. We discussed snags - assistants not being kept fully informed, for example - and ways round them. We even shaved a few minutes off the lunch break to make sure everyone could get home easily on Friday afternoon. 

Everyone enjoyed the course, and several people asked me if I could repeat it in their schools, "as everyone would benefit". Of course - and the cost per head is very cheap if you run the course in a cluster, or offer places to neighbouring schools. You can download the core presentation from the course here:

Download IoE Phonics