John Bald/language and literacy

Draft Protocol for small-scale research in introducing writing in French, German and Spanish.

The protocol is designed to investigate the initial stages of writing in these languages, without copying, based on the primary toolkits on this site. Correspondence welcomed.

Download Draft Protocol for small

Getting rid of copying in subjects

This, with apologies, is a short posting that may lead to a lot of work.

Copying in the early years of secondary school is concentrated in the following areas

• Science notes

• Maths notes

• Copying out "learning objectives"

• Copying chunks of writing frames

• Gap filling exercises which involve copying either the answers or the whole text

• Comprehension exercises that can be answered by copying sections of the original text

• Languages exercises

If they can, some children will copy, however much we ask them, or tell them, not to.

If the basic case is accepted, that the jerking backwards and forwards involved in copying interferes with the development of networks in the brain, and hence of children's powers of personal expression, there is only one solution:

1 Identify the tasks that involve copying, and pin down exactly where and how the copying takes place

2.Redesign the tasks so that they can't be completed by copying.

As I said, a lot of work. I'm happy to help anyone carry it out by email.

Sentence building and brain activity

Download sentence_modelling_language_learning_and_brain_activity.ppt

Here is the powerpoint presentation I made at BETT in January 2008, based on work in Hackney primary schools. The final slide has an example of writing from a higher attaining pupil in Year 4. This was carried out in a short session taken by the class teacher, the day after her lesson. There is no copying, and the work shows that the pupil has begun to generalise positive and negative sentence construction. All but one of the pupils in the class were able to write at least one sentence accurately. The proportions of pupils with English as an additional language, and with special needs, were both very high. I'll add more examples as time permits.

Copying - a better way

The writing in the books of the two Year 8 pupils I saw on Saturday morning was almost all copied. One had copied science notes, geography notes, English notes, Spanish and maths. The only maths that were not copied were in figures. She has worked hard on her reading, and understood most, but not all, of what she'd copied. She didn't understand some of the English - on the Greek theatre - and didn't know what a factor was in her maths.  The second had copied history, science and Italian. Both made errors in copying, and the Italian was interesting. 

On the fourth line, the child has copied two items of weather on to one line as he has switched back and forward. As he did not understand the Italian, he had no way of identifying the mistake, and so copied the wrong definitions for the next few items  before getting back on the right track.

The jerking back and forth during copying not only allows children to write without understanding what they are doing, but leads to errors that cannot happen if writing is taught by other means. The mind was not designed to jerk backwards and forwards between two points, and can't always be relied on to do it accurately. The most professional and careful copyists, medieval monks, made errors known as homoteleuton - they would jerk back to the same word, but in a different position in the manuscript, and hence leave a bit out. This can be used to date documents.

This little piece of Italian is a small example of writing without understanding (the corrections, and any errors in them, are mine rather than the class teacher's). There are larger examples in HMI, Aspects of Secondary Education, 1979, Chapter 6, and indeed in this child's history book, in which he had copied out information about monasteries, but did not know what a monk was.

But how, you may ask, can we teach children to write in a foreign language without copying, when they don't know any words? The answer is to demonstrate how words are put together in the new language - Clicker 5 is best for this, but it can be done with words on cards - not, though, with groups of words or whole phrases, as the child needs to understand each element of the writing. Model sentence building a few times, ensure the children understand, and begin by having them look away from the model and "write" phrases or sentences with their finger on their arm.  Encourage them to pay attention to detail as they do so. Once they're confident, have them do the same thing on a small whiteboard or in their book.

This writing will show you what they do and don't understand in a way that copying never will. Once you have a basis of one or two sentences correctly written, practise will allow you to extend the technique as far as the children's interest and growing understanding will take them. You will also find it improves their use of memory, by opening up new channels in the brain to link the written and spoken word. I've used it with children from Year 1 to Year 8 in French and Spanish, and it has helped those with special needs, including many who have been assessed as "dyslexic" to write accurately and confidently. It should replace copying as the method of choice in modern languages. A later posting will show how copying can be removed from other subjects. Its time has gone.