John Bald/language and literacy

International Case Studies of Dyslexia Peggy L. Anderson and Regine Meier-Hedde.

This book seeks to restore the systematic case study approach to dyslexia, the beginnings of which the authors trace to Grace Fernald, whose Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (McGraw-Hill, 1943) was the pioneering text on multisensory teaching, and has been misrepresented and neglected to the point that it was not even considered as part of the recent English review of dyslexia. Fernald’s work was recommended to me by the late Dr Margaret Peters of Cambridge University, and remains an inspiration. I have two copies, one from my review of the book in 1981 for the Times Educational Supplement, and one I rescued from the skip at Cambridge Education Department’s library. Old texts, a librarian explained, were being weeded, and Dr Peters had died. You might find a copy on Bookfinder.com, but don't buy the reprint, which does not have the case studies.

The 18 case studies here come from virtually every developed country in the world,  except, for some reason, the UK and are chosen by the  “single criterion of dyslexia diagnosis as verified by the researcher from that particular country.”  The studies are more limited than Fernald’s, as they are based on interviews with parents and children and do not go into detail on teaching techniques – in so many languages, this would have taken a whole series of books. They demonstrate that, irrespective of the writing system used,  there are people the world over who, in spite of sound intelligence, struggle with reading  for no visible reason, and identify a common strand in the  experience of children with dyslexia, who are often made to feel that those who could help have instead turned their backs on them. Children’s and parents’ voices come through strongly.

 Most have to wait a long time for their difficulties to be recognised and treated, but there are good as well as bad points in individual systems. Felix in France is assessed orally and not in writing. This reflects a long tradition of oral assessment in France, which is not a soft option.  Hassan in Egypt is learning English, Arabic and French at the same time. His mother reads to him for 28 hours  a week to help him study, and he has extra oral explanation from teachers at breaktimes.  All of the pupils have problems with homework, which is much heavier in most countries than in the UK.

There are some familiar themes  - João from Brazil has  recurring bouts of ear infections. Most of the children have parents or relatives with similar problems.  They tend to work slowly, and are punished for it  –  Felix is not allowed out to play, and Christian in Germany is called stupid in front of his faster classmates, who are praised. Anxiety is universal – Christian – If  I mess up first grade, I will mess up my whole life – also depression. Christian’s slowness reflects Uta Frith’s finding of the effects of dyslexia in Austrian pupils – they could read, as the language is very regular, but excruciatingly slowly.  Christian’s salvation also strikes a chord –  his former clinical therapist explains to the school board that he was participating in a international study, in which his lack of progress would be reported.  Lo and behold, an immediate and comprehensive individualised remedial programme.

Insights abound. Hassan understands better than Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman that words matter - …if I was trying to read I wound up skipping over a hard word and nothing made sense after that. And a study by Mousa, 2006 shows children  learning Arabic and English experiencing more difficulties than children just learning Arabic. 

I don’t pretend to have read all 18 studies yet, let alone the copious references to research and teaching techniques. A pity that Fernald’s own work is not described in more detail, but this is still a book I will return to with pleasure and interest, despite its hefty price tag.

 

Another casualty of guessing game and multicue theories of reading, and a solution.

For the last two weeks, I've been teaching a perfectly intelligent young man who had reached the age of 17 without being able to read at all. All the way through school, he had been told to guess rather than taught how to use the information contained in letters. He had then, of course, been assessed as dyslexic, an assessment that indicates a failure in the schools he attended - the last of them consistently rated outstanding by Ofsted - rather than any disability on his part.

I say that because, as usual, a clear explanation of how English spelling operates had him beginning to read complex and simple words by the end of our first session. Working on the materials for his FE course brought predictable problems from residual guessing - eg reading assignment as assessment - but that had gone by the end of the second session. This particular error in education has North American origins - Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman - and I thought we'd got rid of it. Apparently, there is still work to do.

I'll post more fully on this case, which was referred to me by my MP, as the work progresses. For the moment, I'm particularly interested in any comments from colleagues in North America and other parts of the English-speaking world in which guessing game and multicue theories of reading persist. They are a cardinal error, but are not to be replaced by the other error of pretending to children that phonics is the only game in town. Phonics are the basis of learning to read, but without explanation of how and why they vary, they cause problems with individual children that are nearly as bad - try to sound out the word "the" one letter at a time, and you'll see what I mean.

PS. For friends who have not seen the explanation of "th", it was introduced by William the Conqueror's scribes as a Latin alphabetic alternative to the Anglo-Saxon þ, that denoted this sound.

Simple Gifts. Brief case notes from two pupils.

"Do you still think you have a reading problem?"   No.

"Do you still think you're dyslexic?" No.

Six weeks and four lessons earlier, the answers would have been different. Sheila, as we will call her, is 14, and attends an English school in Spain. Until our first lesson, her reading had been hesitant and inaccurate, and she didn't enjoy it. She had never been able to learn multiplication tables, despite assistance from a highly-qualified family member. Sheila had been assessed as dyslexic by a British educational psychologist, and the examinations clock had begun to tick.

How Sheila, and her younger schoolmate Rachel, turned this situation round in a short time provides some insights into the particular issues of learning to read in English, as well as the outdated and unreliable techniques used to assess people who don't find it straightforward as "dyslexic".

Sheila was reading the David Walliams novel "Mr Stink," and had reached Chapter 6. Reading it to me, she soon met words in which the letters did not indicate their most frequent sounds - giant, pulled, emblazoned, jewel-encrusted - and which she could not work out using the regular sound to letter correspondence that worked for her in Spanish. I explained to her why we could not always rely on what letters told us to read every word, and that, as has been known for almost twenty years, there is an area of the brain that interprets the information from letters in English, so that we can distinguish "please" from "bread", and "should" from "shoulder".

Put simply, in order to read fluently in English, we need not only to use the information contained in the letters, but to know what they are actually indicating in each word. Children can be helped to learn to blend information from letters in the early stages of reading by giving them highly regular texts, but this is of no value to a fourteen year old who has to handle the full range of the language in her school work.

The operation of letters in English is based on four main functions. Around two-thirds of the time, a letter indicates its most frequent sound - cat, hat, rat, etc. Sometimes, a letter gives us information about another letter, changing its most frequent sound. In "giant", the i has a softening effect on the g - this happens a lot of the time but not always, as in "girl" and "get". Sometimes, because we have only 26 letters and over half a million words, letters work in groups. "Station", for example, has a sound for each letter, then the group "tion". Finally, we have variations in pronunciation for historical reasons, beginning with the Norman conquest, which flooded English with French for around 200 years.

The consolation - that reversing the process makes it relatively easy to learn French - comes later. The immediate task is to explain why things as they are and to engage the area of the brain, described by Professors Blakemore and Firth (The Learning Brain, 2005) as the "word form area" that enables them to interpret the full range of information conveyed by letters, and so read whatever text they have before them. My technique is to treat the text as if it were a new piece of music, perhaps with some unfamiliar flats and sharps, and not to expect perfect reading at sight first time round. Instead, each new pattern is explained by moving to another word with the same pattern, discussing it, adding more examples, and inserting the word that has caused the problem once the pupil is confident with it. Once the pattern behind the error is secure in the child's mind, we return to the text and read it again, as with a piece of music that has been practised. The whole process builds and reinforces the key skill of blending the information contained in the letters to build up words by giving intensive and constructive practice with each individual example.

The government, in the National Curriculum, has come very close to endorsing an extreme form of phonics, in which the whole of language is reduced to "phoneme" (sound) and "grapheme" (letter or group of letters) correspondence, with no explanation of the other factors in reading, including phrasing and the development of spelling outlined by David Crystal in Spell It Out. The one thing that has prevented this is that the glossary of terminology is "non-statutory" - ie, there is no obligation to use it in teaching, provided the material is taught. The terminology, like that of grammar, is included in the Key Stage 2 tests, but can be added as an extra after the material is taught, at which point it is much less likely to do damage.

To return to the two cases. Sheila, after six lessons, had read the whole of Mr Stink, and found it progressively easier. She read to me a science test she had just taken, with perfect understanding an no errors. As a teenager rather than a saint, she had not practised tables, but could say 2,3 and 4x with only one error, which was encouraging as she had previously not got beyond 2x2 without hesitation and error. Sheila could also apply the principles of Slimmed Down Spelling to spell chaos, infatuation and chaotic. Rachel, who had chosen The Vet Fairy, had to work very hard to read even the first few words in her first lesson, but in the second, on Monday, was brimming with confidence and managed a paragraph with full understanding. Her parents' comment - "It was amazing to see the way you work...you've given us hope." 

A French lesson by Skype, and progress in reading in Yorkshire.

I gave a French lesson to the 10 year old girl from Falkirk last week, and we moved to a first Clicker demonstration this week. The young lady had read Utopia in a little over a week, and we had a discussion on positive and negative points she had picked out. Her sister was ill. Here is her mother's comment on the French.

John

 

Thank you for another inspiring lesson.

 

Going through these fundamentals of French with S. has been really useful.  Surprisingly, I had never thought to mention to her that the French like their language to flow and so will use apostrophes and silent letters at the ends of words to allow that flow to happen more easily and naturally.  Somehow it was so obvious that it didn't occur to me to think about it - until you pointed it out.  Actually, without this grasp of the basics - what makes French a language distinct from English, it is impossible to progress beyond a certain point.  I found this out myself when attending French university and struggling to understand this 'flow' when engaging in conversations.  It made life much harder than it had to be.  So for that, and your continued development of my daughters' intellects, I am wholly grateful.  

 

Here is the first Clicker 6 grid I used with S. After the pupil has composed a sentence, an excellent French speech engine says it back to them.

 

 

Here is an extension suggested by a very bright eight year old in a Hackney school.

 

 

 

Reading Update.

 

The seven year old pupil from Kettlewell had another very successful lesson, lasting just 18 minutes. He reread everything he had previously read, without any errors he did not correct himself, and two further pages with several unfamiliar words. His sharpness in working out words he did not know already, and in correcting errors - he made only one error on plurals in the whole lesson, and corrected it after a prompt - indicate that he is changing the way he thinks, and reading much more effectively as a result. We now need to work on his writing, but progress so far is exceptional.

Lesson 4, seven year old pupil, Kettlewell School

 This was lesson four by Skype from Linton, Cambs, to Nettlewell, Yorks. Previous lessons are below.  None has lasted more than 30 mins, and today's just 18. We continued to read from the DK reference book on the Humpback Whale. Jodi Storey's note first, then mine.

Jodi: I was completely and utterly surprised to listen to JH’s progress with you this evening. He is now: 

• Remembering words like ‘ancient’, ‘myths’ ‘Trident’ and ‘flukes’ for a whole week.
• Able to work out words from their combinations of letters and contexts- before we can come up with similar formations – e.g. clouds, thread and these
• Able to remember words as tricky as ‘through’ and sight read them – almost
• Willingly read and re-read for perfection (those tricky plurals)
• Differentiation between ‘breaths’ and ‘breathes’ ! (JB - he worked this out for himself before I had a chance to explain it!)
• Despite and above my use of the tracking pen – start to self – correct and read for meaning!!

 THANK YOU!

John This was excellent progress after roughly an hour and a half's teaching. I would add to Jodi's points

• In addition to remembering Triton, JH was able to use his knowledge of the first i to read Titan, and then Titanic, changing the point of emphasis appropriately between the two words. He knew about Titanic, and was interested in the story of the lifeboats (only carried in case she had to aid another ship).
• JH had to work hard on prononuncing s a the end of a word, and on keeping himself from adding s where there was none, but he read two pages without this error by the end of this short lesson.
• JH is beginning to work words out and correct himself, sometimes so quickly that he had worked out a word, notably through, spray and mist, before I had time to explain it to him.
• Jodi considers this reference book to be above the expected level for a seven year old, and I agree, though we still have work to do before he can read it with full confidence. 
• JH said last week that he was dyslexic. From the way he was working out new words on his own this evening, and generalising from his new knowledge of letter patterns, I suspect he may change his mind in a month or two.

 

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.

 

 

How long till we get a properly research-based approach to dyslexia teaching?

Or will we ever do so?  After forty years in the field, I seriously doubt it, for these reasons:

1. Public policy in the field of literacy is dominated on all sides by people with different forms of blinkers. On the Left, and sometimes far Left, progressive, side, we have the critics of "neo-conservative phonics", most of whom have never taken responsibility for teaching people to read, and who have no research evidence for their views. On the other, there are those who think that the connections between sounds and letters are the whole story, and who try to force English spelling into this viewpoint by banging it with their fist, like the piece in a jigsaw that doesn't quite fit. The most frequently-occuring word in English,  "the" , is irregular, its spelling the product of monks who did not like Anglo-Saxon letters, and to pretend otherwise, or to teach it by colouring it in, is simplistic. David Crystal's Spell It Out gives the whole story.

2. Specialist dyslexia interest groups have their own priorities, self-interest and blinkers. The chief psychologist of one, for example, told me that "it had been found" that children made better progress in pairs than individually. I'd never seen any evidence for this, and he didn't have any. It did, however, allow this expensive organisation to pocket two fees for one teacher's time, and so pay high salaries to its national officials. Some of these institutions put children through a grinding programme of additional phonics that does not discriminate between what they already know, and so don't need to learn, and what they don't know. Others are on a mission to prove that people assessed as dyslexic are, in politically correct terminology, "differently abled".  Some certainly are - eg Jamie Oliver.  Others are not. This does not affect the need for most people to learn to read and write to a good standard.

In the lead posting to this site, I quote the parent of a pupil I recently taught, who had been suffering for years from ineffective teaching, and whose school offered her, surprise surprise, yet another phonic grind. I could have cited several others, beginning with Sue Palmer's TES piece of 1996. This not only seems a long time ago - it is a long time ago.

Effective teaching of people for whom learning to read and write is not straightforward begins with a clear understanding of the English language and the reasons why it is as it is, and with the discoveries of brain research over the last twenty years. Both of these are more recent than the thinking on which current practice on all sides has been built, though some important developments in earlier teaching, such as the work of Fernald, Vygotsky's Thought and Language, and Bruner's insight into the need for adult ideas to be presented in ways children can understand, are consistent with it.

History is full of examples of new thinking coming up against old ideas backed by authority, for which I have proposed the word "ignocracy".  Some of these have involved major shifts in the way we see the world - Galileo, Lister, John Snow - others, like Braille and Helen Irlen, have benefited smaller groups. The problem is the same in all cases - those in authority and positions of influence have their own agenda, and didn't get there by questioning it. Money and power talk. Intellect walks.

Phonics Check second year report, National Foundation for Educational Research 2014.

The NFER's report on the second year of the government's phonics check  is worth reading. It shows a generally positive impact of the check on schools' approach to early reading, combined with a feeling among half of the teachers of young children that there is too much emphasis on phonics, which, they feel, should be used alongside "other methods to teach children to decode words". The problem is that they do not say what these other methods are. Only one per cent of teachers surveyed said that phonics needed to be taught in a way that did not pay attention to meaning - look at Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc and you will find meaning emphasised from the very beginning.

But meaning in an alphabetic language is communicated through the use of letters, predominantly, but not exclusively, to indicate the sounds of words. The only way to "decode"  a word is to use the letters that make it up. Once we have identified the word and remembered it, we do not need to "decode" it again - we know what the letters are telling us about this word and identify it from what we have learned. In English, an are of our brain adapts itself specifically to the identification of variations in what the letters tell us, in a way that is not required in languages such as Italian, where the correspondence between sounds and letters is almost entirely consistent. Professors Utah Frith and Sarah Jane Blakemore have called this the "word form area".  

The alternative "methods", which are not described anywhere in the report, are guesswork, either from pictures, context, or the first letter of the word. Guessing from pictures, as I demonstrated in Susan Gets Stuck (TES 1992) depends on picking the right clue from the picture. In the example I quoted, a picture of children helping in the garden of a house was accompanied by the text "Biff and Chip liked the new house."  "Susan" read this as "Biff and Chip were in the garden" - a mile away from the original meaning. The unreliability of contex clues was demonstrated by Schatz and Baldwin in 1986, and later by an experiment in which undergraduates were asked to predict the next word of a text, and usually got it wrong. The definitive research on this point was Dr Morag MacMartin's thesis, Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in Primary Pupils, 1992,  which showed both that pictures could put entirely the wrong idea into pupils' minds, and that they were also liable to misread subsequent words to try to make sense of an error they had made earlier. Guessing from the first letter is so obviously unreliable as to be virtually incredible as a teaching technique - I've known pupils read "the" as "ten" on that basis, and to read every word beginning with f a "fish". The inferiority of this approach was demonstrated clearly in the early Clackmannanshire studies.

This does not, of course, mean that phonics are everything. Roughly a third of English spelling does not correspond to patterns in modern English speech, for reasons set out by Professor David Crystal in Spell It Out.  Children need to learn to deal with this, and the best way of teaching them to do so is to explain why things are as they are. This is the source of my success in work with people with reading and spelling difficulties ranging from complete non-readers, to the highest attaining pupils who have problems with spelling - my latest in that area, from a university town in the north, achieved an A* in English that she wasn't expecting after just three lessons by telephone. She had this grade in everything else except English, and it was spelling that was inhibiting her writing. What I didn't tell her to do was guess. Ever.

Learning Multiplication Tables Builds Number Sense.

My pupil is nine, and in Year 5. When he came to me at the beginning of December, he knew no multiplication tables at all - he could count in multiples of two and five, but when he tried to say a table, he got lost beyond 2x2. Asked to make any kind of calculation beyond counting, he repeated the question as if it were a great surprise, guessed wildly and laughed, an unfortunate trait that led his teachers to think he was being cheeky when in fact he was nervous - he knew that he would get things wrong.

I've taught him using the approach to tables set out below and published by The School Run. The approach is very simple. I explain how tables work, and why we need them - the alternative is counting, which is slower and less reliable, as we can easily lose our place when counting to larger numbers.  We practise saying the 2x table carefully, concentrating on not losing his place. This takes more work than anything else - saying the table is an exercise in co-ordination, so that he does not count on from the wrong column. This issue is the key to multiplication tables, but it is not resolved by grinding. Instead, we isolate an error, explain it, go back a couple of places and practise in a focused way, as we would if we were learning music. 

Yesterday at 5pm, not the best time for a nine year old, my pupil said the tables from 2 to 5 with only an occasional hesitation, and did very well in answering questions about 3x, which he had struggled with last week. I've been thinking about the order in which pupils learn tables. They usually count in multiples, beginning with 2x and then 5x, in an attempt to build a sense of number, leading quickly to place value. I now think this is wrong on three counts. First, counting in multiples makes it harder to learn to say a table, which involves switching between columns. Second, makes it more difficult to learn to pick a particular item from a table, which is needed once we begin to use them for calculation. Third, the leap from 2x to 5x is too big - building up through 2,3 and 4x builds up a sense of gradually increasing numbers and intervals that makes 5x and later 10x, the key interval, easier to understand.

I don't often do this, but the success in tables to 5 resulted in the award of a small bar of milk chocolate. We then returned to larger tables. I'd tried nines before, using the declining final digit as a guide, and this time he got them right with just a few hesitations. Similarly 8x, the final digit going down by 2, and starting again after 5x. I was pleased with the way he'd picked up this pattern - he needs a name, so I'll call him Adrian, after an old friend. Adrian then managed 11x and 12x, with trouble only over 11x11 and 12x11. Skipping the tens for the moment, we moved to 7x, which he said he didn't know at all, but which he did know up to 3x7.  We practised it together, and Adrian picked it up quickly. He then announced that he knew 6x. He did up to 6x6, and we said and practised the rest.

So, he has the makings of a full set after two months' work. We'll practise and move to applying tables in calculation. He made only two or three wild guesses in the course of this session, and the nervous laugh was under control. He and his grandmother left with big smiles, and we'd also done some reading and made a start on French - he wrote Je m'appelle Adrian accurately after I'd explained why it was spelled as it is. Harry Potter had fallen out of favour after around 90 pages, but Adrian had shown himself that he could read it, which was the main thing.

Slow and steady...

Bright seven year old in a happy mood yesterday afternoon, and our lesson was spent consolidating rather than taking great leaps forward. She read the last three Read Write Inc green books, which she'd been using at home, paying attention to everything the letters told her rather than guessing. Had, for example, was not the same as has, and we flashed back to this several times, as well as making it the last thing we looked at. Did she understand why we were doing this?  So I'll remember it, she smiled. We did a little on longer words, including readng the title of a book on microscopes and the parts of the reading scheme written for parents, but not too much this time.

Two times table was much improved - the hesitation at 3x2 was postponed to 7 x 2, so we practised the second part of the table, and moved on to threes, which bsyo knew up to 3x3, but then got lost. A sort of paired table ensued, saying the table slowly with me, and returning to 4x3, which was clearer by the end. We'll get there. The very basic words that she did not know in the first lesson - the, for example - are now clear, and we just have to practise to iron out little slips like lots for lost, dad for bad, and the difference between on and no.