John Bald/language and literacy

Some Principles of Small-Scale Research Design.

The weaknesses of randomised controlled trials are described in several postings, beginning here. These large-scale studies are outside the scope of teachers, and indeed of individual university researchers, even at doctoral level. Thses notes, which take account of the experience of reading researchers over several decades, are intended to help colleagues plan practical and effective approaches to research in their own context I welcome correspondence, and am happy to help pro bono. I am a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching. 

1. The aim is not to establish absolute truth using the methods of the physical sciences, but to apply the principles of John Locke to establish the best available evidence, and where possible to answer the classic teacher's question "What can I do on Monday morning?" though on a longer time-scale. The closest medical parallel is not the randomised controlled trial, but the development of surgery, which has been based on individual observations, including the papers published in The Lancet by Joseph Lister in 1867. It is also impossible to have a blind trial in an educational context, as the teacher needs to know what he or she is doing. There is no scientific basis for a partially-sighted trial, and many recent oncology trials are open, rather than blind. The idea of a single, gold-standard research method in education is supported by assertion rather than evidence, and is an illusion.
2. The limitations of each study need to be identified as part of the planning, in something akin to a risk assessment. Some issues, such as follow-up to ensure that results are sustained and not washed out, need to be considered in all studies. Others reflect the methodology and goals of individual studies. There is no single correct answer.
3. Sampling may be:

• A class taught by a teacher, compared with a similar class taught by the same teacher, either in the same or a previous year. Any differences between the classes should be noted and taken into account in evaluation. If there is a need to compare classes taught by different teachers, this should be carefully considered, as other factors than the issue under investigation may be very important, and indeed invalidate results.
• A year group, compared with earlier year groups. Again, differences in teaching staff should be noted.
• A small group, compared with a similar small group given a different form of additional provision, and a third given no additional provision. Differences in teachers should be noted, and more than one experimental group used if possible.
• A case study. Comparison in this case may be to pupils with similar patterns of learning, or to the same pupil's earlier work.

4. Timing needs to be long enough to allow teaching to have the desired effect. I suggest an interim review after half a term, and a term and a year as likely to give a useful result.  Follow-up should be planned after one, two and five years.  This allows us to detect both short-term washout, and long-term benefits.
5. Assessment needs a clear measurement of starting and finishing points. It may take any form appropriate to the issue investigated. Standardised tests are not available in the field of languages, and existing frameworks may need to be defined more precisely for research purposes. It is therefore essential that assessment should be a key part of research planning, and that it should be described and explained as part of the research report. Assessment needs to be carried out in "clean" conditions - pupils must not have access to extraneous material from which they might copy or which might give them hints that would not be available to other pupils in the study.

An approach to assessing writing that I have used is to have pupils write all they can, from memory, words, phrases or sentences, in five minutes in a clean room, before and after. The work can then be scored on the basis, of words recognisable, words accurate, meaningful groups and sentences.

For listening, the system used in the British Picture Vocabulary Scale could be applied directly in French. The pupil has to pick  the correct picture from four, and the test stops after six errors. It may be possible to use the original pictures, or we might need new ones.

Speaking could involve responses to set, open questions, presented in context and related to the work the pupils have been doing. I have not yet tried to assess this.

Reading assessment is perhaps better established, and could involve picking correct responses in English (or the new language - discuss!) from a range.

Note: Problems that have arisen in the field of reading research include:

• short-term gains that are not sustained
• no follow-up, or inconsistent follow-up, of results beyond an intervention period
• unfair comparisons (eg by comparing the effect of extra provision solely against the work of pupils who have had no extra help)
• biased samples and poorly-matched control or comparison groups (eg gender-imbalance, unequal starting points)
• intervention periods that are too short to show any results
• samples that are too small to show statistical gains, but lack the detail to show qualitative ones ( Very small samples require an unrealistically large effect size to reach statistical significance.)
• assessment systems that do not test gains fairly, or that over-generalise benefits
• statistical manipulation in such samples that disguises the effect of the results of one or two pupils
• descriptions of teaching methods that are too vague to be used as evidence
• grouping together the results of large numbers of studies, in the hope that this compensates for flaws rather than accumulating them, then presenting the results as authoritative
• variations in the quality of teaching, either in areas studied, or in other areas (eg class management) that are not accounted for
• statements of principle that are not substantiated by evidence and are not capable of investigation
• leaving negative findings unpublished
• bias in editorial panels and peer review

In foreign language research it is also unfair to compare

• pupils learning English as a second language with that from learners of other languages, as English is so widely available to the first group, who also have stronger economic motives
• adult learners with children

and

• evidence from people learning a second language as residents in the country speaking it with evidence from those learning a language in school only.

Contact.

[email protected] 

References will be added prior to publication.

 

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

 

Eliminating Copying in Language Teaching - it works! Letter from a teacher.

Since 1980, I've been campaigning against the practice of copying in schools. Switching the eyes back and forth between the original and the child's copy interferes with the development of understanding, and is anti-educational. I've just had this from a teacher who tried it.

Dear John

 

Some time ago I was in contact with you regarding the possibility of carrying out some research.  The sticking point as I remember for me was your insistence that children should not be copying off the board.  Again if memory serves me well I did not at the time understand how, from a practical point of view in an ordinary classroom with 30 challenging youngsters, it could be achieved.  I just wanted to up date you with the fact that I did not forget what you have written about copying from the board, and my pupils no longer copy from the board apart from the date and title which they are obliged to do in the school I now work in. 

It has been a good decision and freed up time for more productive activities.  I have moved to a school where I am the only teacher of French and so have a certain amount of autonomy as to how I teach French.  It is a high school so the children begin in year 9 and much of my work is building confidence.  Thank you for your blog it really makes me think and change my practice for the better .  I am just about to look at the material on teaching phonics (French).  I already do this but feel I need to so more extensively.

Kind regards

 

S.

 

Assessment in language learning - the key skill, and how to focus on it.

As we learn a new language, we adjust and extend our thinking from the structures we have learned while learning our first language. These involve, in the initial stages, big changes in pronunciation and in our understanding of the use of letters to represent sounds in words. The primary toolkits on this site show how these can be introduced and explained in the first few lessons - and in particular in the very first lesson, where colours illustrate most of the main changes, in a context that is self-evident.

To communicate using the new language, however, we need to know how to put our words together to make a sentence, and to understand sentences that we hear or read. This can be achieved by building up sentences based on personal experience and preferences, and gradually extending these to encompass as much of the scope of the language as a learner wishes, or is able, to know. This sentence construction uses grammar for communication, rather than as an end in itself.

The techniques in the toolkits, if possible supported by the teacher's own resources using Clicker,  enable each child to learn to compose and understand sentences, without the illusions created by copying. The approach is very easy to use, and builds assessment into the teaching, so that there is no extra work for the teacher. Any system of assessment that does not focus on sentence construction is giving a false picture of a child's ability to understand and use the language.  I'm happy to discuss this further.

Dyslexia and Foreign Language Learning: Futurelearn, Lancaster University.

This course makes balanced and innovative use of the internet to present teachers with a balanced and challenging introduction to a field that is almost wholly neglected. Most children who are assessed as dyslexic are either withdrawn from most of their lessons, or given no chance at all to learn a language. Others are placed in mixed ability classes with no special help, in the sure and certain knowledge that they will fail. Participants on this course are not expected to agree with every word of it, and are given opportunities to comment, argue and interact with instructors and other course members at every stage, using the comments board. There are video demonstrations, research references - on which I'll post separately - recommended reading, and assignments.  A certificate of participation is available for £39, though this is not a strong point, as participants to not need to complete the course in order to receive it. Otherwise the course is free.

Participants are invited to submit a lesson plan for discussion by their fellow-students. Mine was a little too long to post on the site, so here it is:

Spanish, Lesson 1.

From experience and observation, failure in language learning often begins in the first lesson, where pupils are not expected fully to understand the language they are given. My approach ensures complete success in this first lesson and begins the process of adjusting the learner's thinking so that they can say what they want to say in their new language. An outline of the whole approach, and its consistency with the emerging evidence from neuroscience, is on my site johnbald.typepad.com, beginning with the ppt downloadable from http://johnbald.typepad.com/language/eliminating-failure-in-language-learning.

This assignment demonstrates a multisensory approach to a first lesson in Spanish for speakers of English. I vary the content of the lesson according to the needs of the class or student, but I introduce colours at an early stage, using the ppt at this

http://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2013/06/new-national-curriculum-first-steps-in-spanish-free-toolkit-for-primary-schools.html

Many of the features of Spanish pronunciation that are new to English speakers can be learned and explained in this first lesson.   One way to start is to write rojo on the board, and go round the room pointing at red things and having children repeat the word. Then have them study the word. What letter is not giving us the same sound as in English? They will notice j. Then look away from the board and trace rojo on their sleeve with their finger. Who got it nearly right? Who got it completely right? Who remembered j?  They will probably all have got it right first time, as there is only one new thing to remember. Once they've done this with finger tracing, they can write on a miniboard or in a notebook. I repeat with these further colours, unpacking the new feature, explaining and practising until the pupils have it completely right, and have the satisfaction of knowing that they can write it as well as say it.

The key features are:

• rojo   Stress on first syllable, j giving h sound.
• azul  Stress on second syllable, z giving th sound.
• amarillo,   stress on penultimate syllable, 11 giving  a distinctive, y sound.
• verde,  Spanish v sound, very light touch of the lips. Have pupils say very, and feel their top teeth touch their bottom lip. The teeth don't touch in Spanish, but the sound is not a hard plosive as in bad.
• marrón   Ask if children can see anything here they wouldn't see in an English word.  They might call the accent a line or something similar. Explain that the accent is our friend, and tells us what to stress

 Once something is learned, I use it as a starter in the next lesson. For colours, I might pick up three pencils of different colours. I'll say three colours, one or two of which will be wrong, before giving the right combination. At each stage, I'll ask if I've got it right. Children find this amusing, and soon recognise colours.

 At an early stage, and sometimes in the first lesson, I use the same approach to sentence building using tengo. I explain that Spanish people usually take a shortcut by not putting in the companion word (pronoun) that we need to use in English. I'll ask if they can see the two English words in tengo - ten and go - and they'll write it on their sleeve.  I'll then explain hermano and hermanas, pointing out the final letter as a useful guide - but not an infallible one - and they'll trace and write some sentences saying how many brothers and sisters they have. Finally, no tengo to indicate a negative.

Around half of the children can learn to write sentences in this way, without copying, from the age of seven, and I've had no failures from the age of eight onwards. Eliminating Failure Slide 33 shows the result from a pupil assessed as dyslexic, in an ordinary class, after one lesson.

 

Wellington College Presentation, Eliminating Failure in Language Learning, February, 2013

Here is the presentation on eliminating failure in language learning I made at Wellington yesterday.

Download Eliminating-failure-in-language-learning-2

I was most interested in Dr Seldon's modification of Howard Gardner's "multiple intelligences" idea into a series of eight aptitudes, which he has built into the architecture of the school in the form of a fountain and garden at Princes' Court. Not all of the elements characterised by Gardner are forms of intelligence, but they are all desirable characteristics, and this is an ingenious and effective solution to the problem.