John Bald/language and literacy

Technical Note. David Crystal and Lindsey Thomas: Making Sense and Teaching Grammar.

David Crystal's series on spelling (Spell It Out), punctuation (Making a Point) and now, grammar (Making Sense) demonstrates his gifts as an intellectual historian as well as a linguist. Unlike most such  historians, who deal with what is seen as the best that has been thought and said, Professor Crystal is more often concerned with exposing follies that have become entrenched across the centuries, and are sustained by force of habit and snobbery. Fortunately, this latest book also contains important ideas for teaching, centred on the Bucks Grammar Project, led by Lindsey Thomas.

Professor Crystal's demolition of the flaws in grammatical thinking is impeccable, and his encyclopaedic knowledge enables him to identify unsung heroes, notably Professor John Wallis FRS (1616-1703), who was the first to write a grammar of English without basing his description on Latin, with which English grammar has very little in common, The real link between English and Latin lies in vocabulary, as it does in all European languages.

Professor Crystal’s key idea is that the sentence is the unit that enables us to make sense of the words we use, hear or read. What constitutes a sentence is a matter of debate, and Professor Crystal offers the useful idea of "minor sentences" such as "Yes.", which do not contain the conventional structure of a subject and main verb. Professor Crystal draws a distinction between this time of sentence and an elliptical sentence, in which something has been left unsaid. To me, though, the idea can be extended to any that do not conform to the conventional structure. If we accept this this view, the single words and verbless sentences at the opening of Bleak House are sentences, beginning with capitals and ending with full stops. In any event, the idea of "minor sentences" allows us to focus on major sentences, which will be used almost all the time, while admitting occasional, deliberate, alternatives. This is one of the best ideas in the book.

Professor Crystal accepts his young daughter’s early, single-word utterances as sentences in their own right, when a great deal of the meaning is left unsaid. This is controversial, as so many children have to learn to add additional words to what they say in order to make and write understandable sentences. I also have trouble with two technical terms. English often requires nouns to be accompanied by what I describe as "companion words", such as my in my book, and a  in a table. Linguistics has coined the word "determiner" to describe these words, even though some of them are indeterminate.  I suggest that my alternative is more accurate and more understandable to children, though it may need further explanation to distinguish these, generally short, words from adjectives. The issue of tense, which I describe in terms of time zones, is another that needs further development, and Professor Crystal’s idea of integrating semantics – meaning – with the study of grammar offers a useful way forward.

The Bucks Grammar Project integrated grammatical teaching into the teaching of spoken and written language in a group of Buckinghamshire primary schools, with one project in a secondary modern school. The work at each stage is carefully matched to children's understanding. They study the construction of sentences, and experiment by varying structures in the course of their work, analysing their effects and improving the range that they use in their writing.  The principles are described in the Appendix to Making Sense, and in a series of free downloads, including over 100 pages of case studies, illustrated with children's work showing consistent evidence of progress.  I recommend these wholeheartedly.  Lindsey Thomas is now working independently, and can be contacted through her site.

What works and why - some thoughts on educational reading, and French.

Asked last month for advice on eduational books to read, I had to think hard.  Most writing on education is very poor, usually because it starts from a political rather than educational perspective, and so does not get to the nuts and bolts of how children learn.  A trip to Cambridge University Library - a most friendly and efficient organisation - to read a recent book on the languages debate, was a typical waste of time. I looked, as always, for evidence of the effectiveness of teaching methods in enabling children to make progress, and found none at all. How these authors,  who are not lefties, can have got into a mode of thinking in which they can cut out the issues of progress and learning, continues to baffle me.

So, what could I recommend?  Doug Lemov's  Teach Like A Champion is probably first on the list, as a guide to planning and managing learning in the modern classroom.  It answers the teacher's old question, "What will I do on Monday morning?" with an array of practical examples covering everything from lesson design to the best way to give out books and get the chairs put away afterwards. Illustrated with video clips of outstanding teachers, the book is a mainstay of  Teach First, and most of us will find something new in it, as well as confirmation of what we know to work.

I said probably, because we also need something deeper on the processes of learning taking place for each child, and my recommendation here is Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory, published only in the US, but easily available over the internet - I use www.bookfinder.com.  Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his discovery of the ways in which brain cells make connections with others that are not immediately adjacent, and his book is both a personal document and an illuminating history of brain research since the late nineteenth century, beginning, surprisingly enough, with Sigmund Freud. 

The Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his isolation and drawing of brain cells through his microscope, and his description of them as seeming to reach out and try to make contact with each other is the most persuasive description of learning I've heard. Nearly everything we do as teachers is designed to promote this process, which builds memory and knowledge,  integrating these with our immediate thoughts.  Very few teachers have heard of it, and I was delighted with the response of the young Teach First participants when I presented it at their conference in Leeds.  Kandel´s work is as important as the discovery of DNA in enabling us to understand the basis of human life, and it will revolutionise education once it becomes more widely known. If not first book on the list, this is the most important.

The work has serious implications for politicians.  Educated parents pour their own education into their children from birth, fostering neural connections and networks that can't develop in children who do not have such stimulus.   Tristram Hunt, Labour's education spokesman, has offered a guesstimate that children in his constituency are two years behind by the time they start school. This makes Labour´s goal of promoting equality impossible, and they have no alternative.  Mr Corbyn's proposed return to the old ways is based on the illusion that Academies have failed. They haven't.  Mossbourne  is reality, and so is the successful Academy in his constituency, Highbury Grove.

Conservatives, committed to an idea of equity rather than equality, have a lot of work to do to make this a reality.  Getting rid of Labour´s folly of fake "vocational" qualifications is a start, but they have to develop and deliver an honest and valid alternative. These new apprenticeships need to be made to work, and should be integrated with options in the last two years of school. I've seen successful courses involving bricklaying, plumbing, electrical installation and driving , and we need more of them, alongside, of course, improved teaching of basic skills.

Some existing educational writing is consistent with the brain research evidence. Montessori's planned intellectual development for young children, and L S Vygotsky's description of the transition from spoken to written language in Thought and Language are both examples of the growth and development of neural networks.  Grace Fernald's approach to a range of problems with literacy and maths in her classic Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects in which she developed understanding by finding the right starting point for each child and then building from there, has similar foundations.

I offer an example of the approach in the form of a result in French GCSE this summer. A bright pupil was being "taught" French by the current method of exposing her and her classmates to language they didn't understand, having them copy things out, and making them try to learn everything parrot fashion. These practices, including the chopping back and forth in copying, could be calculated to prevent the formation of neural connections, and hence understanding. They were very effective - this bright young person was in distress and could seen no way forward.

 I'd helped her mother, a primary teacher, with a reading problem in her class, and she asked me for help with French. In just three lessons over the internet, I showed her daughter how French spoken and written language work, how and why they use  grammatical markers that we no longer use in English, and how to use the shared features of both languages. I introduced some features of French usage that went beyond the obvious, but always with full explanation. Languages are human constructs, with human weaknesses as well as strengths. We say we have other fish to fry, and the French that they have other cats to whip, though I've never seen a Frenchman whip a cat. The goal was to bring her fragments of knowledge together to build understanding, and so to give her a degree of control.  I'd forgotten all about it until she sent me an email on Thursday night, thanking me for helping her get an A.

 

 

 

Todd Risley and Betty Hart. Research into young children's language, and a gap in university library provision.

Dr Todd Risley and Betty Hart researched differences in the spoken language experienced by young children over a period of forty years or so. Dr Risley's account of his work (click on the picture above), is an excellent summary of their findings, which are very litte known inthe UK. I found them through a reference in Sir James Rose's report, cited in Ros Wilson's Big Writing, which I will review shortly. Well worth listening to. Copies are not held in either of two major university libraries which I've just checked, and this seems an attempt at academic censorship - if books are not in the library, students have no way of knowing about them, and in some cases this is not an accident. Dr Risley died in 2008.

A summary of the research in their first book, Meaningful Differences, is here. 

A left-leaning progressive critique is here . It criticises Risley and Hart for their evaluative analysis of the quality of interaction, but does not address the key question of whether or not this analysis is accurate. It certainly is accurate. If the main use of speaking is controlling behaviour and getting through the business of the day,  there is no room for language to operate to develop thinking and understanding. There are three UK sources of corroborative evidence. Tizard's Young Children Learning found that less educated mothers tended to take a more negative attitude to children's questions than more educated ones, the Bristol Child Development Study found that the least successful child in school had had no recorded experience of stories before starting school, and Ward and Ward, in Manchester, found that children in a council estate were being assessed as deaf because they had not learned to respond to the human voice. 

The final paragraph of this critique contains two key points:

But, in our view, the language differences Hart and Risley reported are just that—differences. All children come to school with extraordinary linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources, just not the same resources. It is the responsibility of teachers to draw on these resources in support of
school learning, including teaching the language practices valued in school. If there are crucial language experiences needed for school success, then teachers must provide them. The remedy
for disproportionate levels of failure among children living in poverty is a school curriculum that
respects their background knowledge and experience and builds on students’ linguistic, cultural
and cognitive “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) to teach them what they
need to achieve success. As Gloria Ladson-Billings’s (1994) research reminds us, respect is
the key to successful teaching. Ultimately, this is about respect for students’ knowledge, who they
are, and where they come from.

The first is an error. International evidence shows clearly that these children are not receiving from home the intellectual element that educated parents give their children. Tizard's evidence on questions is a key point here, and more important than whether a request or instruction is given directly or indirectly.  The second is true, and the foundation of the stronger elements in Reading Recovery, and of the Big Talk in Ros Wilson's work.

Finally, the first author of this critique, Professor Curt Dudley-Marling, could find food for thought in his own CV, which contains frequent references to "learning disability". Most of the people he describes as disabled are not disabled at all - their problem is that they have not been taught effectively, and putting the term disability on top of this makes the situation permanent.

Robert Coe, Daisy Christodoulou and Doug Lemov. Reviews.

Commercial pressures have virtually elminated book reviews from educational journalism, which is a pity. Teachers have too little time to research new books for themselves, and most journalism amounts to a fist-fight between competing views of the purpose of education. I used to review books for The Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian. Occasional reviews will appear here. 

Click on titles or illustrations for a link to Amazon, which is usually the fastest way to obtain a book. Though I share reservations about the company's practices, there is no point in spending half a day going to a bookshop and then finding they haven't got what you want. Commercial pressures again.

Professor Robert Coe’s What Makes Teaching Great, sponsored by the Sutton Trust, is an interesting piece of work, and its main conclusion, that traditional methods of teaching are more effective than leaving child to work things out for themselves (akas constructivism and FOFO – find out for yourself), is entirely in line with the government’s programme of reform.  It raised a storm in The Guardian.   

However, progressives pointed out his endorsement of the Sutton Trust’s line that ability grouping, or setting, has a negative effect, a point that requires examination of Professor Coe’s methodology.  To put it bluntly, his paper does not contain any research at all.  It is merely a survey of many other papers, with the unspoken assumption that any shortcomings will cancel each other out.  This is a mistake.  Birds of a feather flock together in the academic world, and shared assumptions and shared errors sustain and reinforce each other, much as they did with astronomy before Galileo.

In the case of setting, the only UK study that can be called recent was published in 1999, with a follow up in 2005.  Although it  found consistently higher scores from schools that used setting, the regression analysis technique, that strips out correlations with various factors, allowed the authors to claim that it made no difference whether schools set or not.

The finding that children made better progress in set groups in English and maths up to the age of 14 was misrepresented in the summary of the first study, and then ignored. The data also are out of date. Mossbourne Community Academy was not even open when it was collected, and its success, repeated in other ARK and Harris academies, is due in large measure to setting and banding.  Accuracy, though, does not greatly matter in reports whose main aim is to media coverage, and it is no accident that a Blairite is in charge of the Sutton Trust’s publicity.

Seven Myths About Education, by Daisy Christodoulou, ARK’s R&D manager, covers similar territory, but gets to the heart of the matter more quickly, and with less jargon – pedagogy, for example, does not even appear in the index.  The first myth – that facts prevent understanding – is the most important. Without facts, and without memory to organise them and enable us to retrieve them, we can’t think.

Ms Christodoulou’s argument that much of what teachers are taught about education is wrong, and they are encouraged to teach in ineffective ways is at the heart of the present government's challenge to progressivism. Her approach is based on close analysis of real examples, from Rousseau onwards – give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone – and of their practical consequences. She does not argue against analysis and understanding, but points out that they are only possible if children have something to bring to the task. I’m not sure quite what to make of Hirsch’s idea that the relationship between knowledge and skills is “like a scrambled egg”, perhaps because I don't like scrambled eggs.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion, based on analysis of videos of very successful teachers, is packed with ideas for getting and holding children’s interest and managing classes. These range from subtle ways of bringing children back when their attention wavers, to faster ways of giving out books. Each idea is presented in full detail, with a superb accompanying video, and is in this respect better than Ofsted’s (alas, discarded) practice of including cameos of excellent teaching in inspection reports.  We see teachers picking up on points of detail  in a way that encourages pupils while helping them to understand and correct their own mistakes, for example,  just by repeating something they say in a way that makes them think about it, so that It gots to is willingly changed by the pupil to It has to. The principle that praise has to be genuine should be applied throughout education, and is worth the price of the book in itself.

The downside is that this video evidence is occasionally taken at face value. For example, a unit on note-taking compares a detailed copied note with a much sketchier version a pupil wrote for himself, and concludes that the former is better.   An HMI report of 1979 examined the same issue, and found that copying could mask a very serious literacy problem that only appeared once the pupil had to write independently. The snapshot does not always tell the whole story.  That said, this book can be recommended to any education student or newly qualified teacher as an unrivalled source of practical ideas.