John Bald/language and literacy

National Languages Conference 2022. Introduction to panel comments, extended version.

This is a more detailed version of my introductory remarks to the panel presetation, 19t Oct 2022. 

 

Download National Languages Conference 2022

Language Show Live - Alternatives to disapplication for pupils with SEND - Success and enjoyment in learning languages.

Wonderful to have 330 people sign up for this webinar, and so many positive comments.  

Download Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for pupils with SEND. Languages Show 2021

Languages Show Live: Success without tears in the early stages of language learning. Sunday 13th October,10.30, Business Design Centre, Islington.

Apologies. This talk has been moved to 3pm on Sunday.

 

The head of languages at a celebrated specialist school told a conference I attended at Wellington College a couple of years ago that, "We have a lot of tears in the first term." Observation of lessons over the last thirty years, my own and other people's, confirms this. Failure in languages usually starts right at the beginning, and becomes increasingly difficult to reverse. 

This is not necessary. Brain research has given us valuable insights into the formation of the networks in the brain that are the physical manifestation of learning, and into ways of promoting them. In particular, it has shown that the areas of the brain involved in spoken and written language are located very close to each other, and often overlap. If we tap into this capacity from the first days of learning a new language, without overloading children with more information than their developing brains can handle at one time, we can replace tears and failure with smiles and success. 

This presentation, which draws on previous presentations on brain research, will show how to do this for beginning learners in primary and secondary schools, and will feature the toolkits for French, German and Spanish available on this site. Once the basic approach shown in the toolkits is established, we can move outwards in any direction we choose, in order best to meet the needs and interests of our pupils.

Download Languages Show 2017

http://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2017/10/brain-research-how-myolin-lets-us-think-faster.html

 

Directors of Studies Conference, Port Regis

Delighted to take part in this year's annual Directors of Studies Conference, a real conference, in the sense that everyone came to confer, rather than to sit and listen. The ppt for my talk is Download Port Regis. It includes previous work on evidence from brain research, this time in its application to literacy, languages and basic maths.

Two cases of mis-teaching rectified in months.

Misteaching takes many forms, but they all result in failure, frustration and misery. In the English-speaking world, misteaching usually takes the form of hopeful reliance on incidental learning, introduced as a reaction to the teaching typified by Dickens' Mr M'Choakumchild, based on his own experience at school in Camden Town. In much of continental Europe, the old ways persist, with, for example, a heavy emphasis on exercises in English that prevent people from learning to speak the language. The late Francis Holmes, who taught me French, was acutely aware of the problems involved in drill and skill methods, which, he said, prevented "even the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive," from learning to speak. His solution was to run supplementary exchanges between schools in Essex and Paris, with lessons in the morning and shared free time in the afternoon. It worked for some of us, but not all, as many of the English pupils kept together in their free time and spoke very little French. We learn from mistakes - on my first trip, I ordered a Perrier, thinking it was Perry, and un exprès, in the fond belief that it was beer.  

What all forms of misteaching have in common is a failure to understand how the human brain functions, and how to develop it. Much progressive education is based on the idea that failure should be eliminated, and that the way to eliminate it is to redefine success, so that academic achievement is no longer its main criterion. Kenneth Clarke's recent memoir, Kind of Blue, has a succinct account of his encounters with progressive officials at the UK's frequently rebranded Department for Education and Science in the nineties. Their centrepiece was mixed ability teaching, which relies above all on incidental learning, as it is impossible for a teacher to focus personally on the range of needs in a class in which some pupils are reading Dickens, while others can't read the texts easily managed by children of six and seven. The grinding approach - M'Choakumchild, unlike Gradgrind, was misguided, rather than vicious - was taken apart by Truffaut in Les Quatre Cent Coups, and I saw it in Germany in the early nineties. I was asked to help a nine year old with his German homework, at which he was failing, largely because he was given endless exercises in German grammar without any explanation of its purposes and function. Unpacking the terminology - he was a German national - enabled him to make sense of the work and begin to succeed. The approach is consistent with current research findings on the formation and extension of neural networks in the brain. Whatever does not promote this process does not work.

The way to correct misteaching, from either source, is very simple - unpack, explain, and practise. 

Two recent cases, with apologies for the clumsy phrasing in the interests of preserving anonymity:

M, in the Spanish school system, had been assessed as dyslexic in England and Spain, and could not read in English at all. She was not dyslexic, but did not know how to adjust her thinking to move from the regular Spanish system of Spelling to the English system, in which the letters tell us most of what we need to know, but not everything. In about half a dozen lessons over the internet, in which she chose to read a book appropriate to her age, rather than a primer, I taught M to adapt to English spelling so that she was pleased when letters helped, but not surprised when they didn't. Whenever she met an irregular or unusual word in a text, I would move to another with the same pattern, explain its origins, practise it, and have her father revisit it between lessons so that she understood. M's father brought the family over from Spain to take my wife and me out to dinner to celebrate, and yesterday he sent me an email saying that P was now doing much better, and didn't need any more help for the moment.

S required an A in a modern languages A level for university entrance, had top grades in other subjects, but had been "taught" the language to GCSE with little or no explanation of the finer points of its grammar, in the spirit of the "tolerance of error" advocated by the late, well-intentioned, Eric Hawkins. This had produced an A* at GCSE, but left S with no preparation for A level. Moving to a new sixth form, S was required to pay attention to things that were beyond his/her understanding, because they had never been explained. The teacher marked work thoroughly, but did not explain why things were as they were. Rectifying this in the months before A level got S the required grade, but after a good deal of anxiety that should have been avoided by accurate teaching in the first instance. A sixteen year old I'm currently teaching has the same problem in German. Approaching GCSE without any introduction to German grammar, the pupil writes what s/he thinks is German, emails it to the teacher, who enters the correct inflections and improves the phrasing. Pupil then learns by heart these, to him/her meaningless collections of letters, and reproduces it in what is known as "controlled assessment", without understanding a word. Once again, the approach is to unpack and explain everything, and pupil is much happier as a result.

I recommend Rachel Hawkes' Stimmt series of German textbooks as a way of avoiding such problems in the future. The reading problem will not be solved by a textbook, but by improving teachers' understanding of English spelling and how to teach it.

 

 

 

Bedtime stories aid reading - brain scan evidence.

Eleanor Harding of The Mail has a succinct account of new evidence from brain scans, from Dr John Hutton of Cincinnati Children's hospital, showing that regular bedtime stories increase brain activity in areas associated with understanding meaning. Well worth reading, and a fine example of educational journalism, seeking out new evidence - in this case from a conference in San Diego - that most of us would not otherwise see. 

 

Dr Hutton owns the delightfully-named Blue Manatee children's bookstore in Cincinnati (click on the manatee to visit the site) and below is a screen shot from his video urging parents to "unplug" children and return to human communication. Click on the picture for a link to the video on Cincinatti Children's Hospital's site.

Dr John Hutton reading a story to children and a parent at Blue Manatee Bookstore, Cincinnati.

The brain research confirms the wide-ranging evidence in the UK of the benefits to children of active interaction with their parents, and perhaps also the consequences of its absence. In the early years of the last century, widespread malnutrition led to rickets. Modern intellectual neglect has similar consequences for the mind. I must admit, I love manatees - the ultimate in peaceful creatures. So here is another pic...

Wellington College Festival of Education, 2015. Using Brain Research to Inform Teaching.

A sentence that jumped out to me from the letter below was that "the intellect develops naturally, without forcing."  This is made possible by teaching that is consistent with what we know about the development of neural networks in the brain. I'll be presenting some thoughts on the issue, and showing one way of putting the idea into practice, at next year's Sunday Times/Wellington College Festival of Education, 18-19 June.

Interesting report on brain research in Guardian

Swedish research showing that learning languages develops areas of he brain that other forms of study don't touch, and also that Japanese learners of English use different areas of their brain from those used by native speakers. Brilliant, ground-breaking work.

Brain power - use it or lose it.

A quick note before my piano practice. New Scientist has a piece with a new angle on language learning and ageing, showing that people in their seventies who had learned a new language did better on tests than would have been predicted from their previous scores, indicating that the language itself was a factor in their improved performance.  

Another NS piece on brain waves shows how monkeys sorting groups of dots moved from dealing with each situation as a one off, to seeing underlying patterns. There is a parallel with the piano practice. I'm beginning to move from having to work out each chord one note at a time and transfer this to my fingers, to seeing patterns in the chords and inversions that let me respond more quickly and anticipate what will happen. I had similar issues with ballroom dancing, but that is perhaps for another time...

Coding in the Brain: Update from MIT

Thanks to Jack Grimston for this article from MIT, outlining progress in identifying the brain's coding systems, which are in some ways more complex and varied than those in DNA, as they adapt to various inputs that operate in different ways to handle differences in the information they transmit.