John Bald/language and literacy

Literacy and Language Policy at Gateway Primary School, Marylebone, 2005.

This cameo from the Ofsted report should I believe be a model for primary education.The full report is here. 

 

Example of outstanding practice

Exceptionally detailed planning and provision for English, including English as an additional language, makes a key contribution to effective learning in all subjects.

The school has a range of policies, action planning and guidance which are based on specific analysis of its own pupils’ needs and progress, and which are backed by support by the co-ordinator while another teacher takes her class for mathematics. Policies have a very clear balance between speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, each of which is considered in detail, both in terms of its own development and for its contribution to the overall development of language and literacy. They include all provisions of the national literacy strategy, with three or four additional lessons each week devoted to aspects of literacy – such as handwriting, hearing children read, and the use of literacy in other subjects, that the school sees as needing attention beyond the normal literacy hour.

The main policy is supported by detailed policies for speaking and listening and learning, handwriting, and assessment of writing. The policies are followed by teachers across all subjects. Guidance on grouping pupils flexibly for particular purposes makes a key contribution to learning by ensuring that work is matched to individual needs, and that pupils’ work throughout the day equips them with the English skills they need to succeed in secondary school. The policy for the assessment has very effective arrangements for setting targets for groups and classes, and for involving pupils, so that they have a clear view of their own targets and progress.

Policies and guidance are based on extensive knowledge of all areas of the subject. The policies demonstrate have a very clear vision of effective structures for planning and teaching, couched in an economical and understandable way for teachers to follow. They pervade the whole school and are a key factor in its success

Two more results - reading and A level French - modest progress in music - and why the approach here works.

Some things are priceless, and having parents bring their family from Mallorca to Cambridge to take my wife and myself out to supper was one of them. Their daughter, aged 9, had been assessed as dyslexic, when her problem lay in moving from the regularity of Spanish spelling to the fuzzy logic of English. As usual, I explained the patterns in English spelling, and how they had come to be as they are, before moving to a text of her choice and explaining them further as they arose, using the technique of not teaching a word that had been misread, but another with the same pattern.  The pupil was soon reading complex vocabulary with ease, and learning to work out new words for herself. 

The latest success, a A in A level French, was based on the same principles of making things very clear, and then practising. The pupil had suffered from teaching in the early stages that tolerated errors rather than using them as a basis for teaching, and did not focus on full understanding of the language and its use. Going back to first principles, and combining these with very detailed study of the set text and film, brought together grammar, idiom and vocabulary in a way that gave the pupil enough knowledge to succeed, though it would have been much easier without the original misteaching.

The link between basic reading and A level French is simpler than it might appear. In both cases, we are building, extending and consolidating networks of brain cells in ways that enable people to adjust the way they think, and so succeed in what they are trying to do. The principles are simple, and explain the success of mastery approaches across a wide range of subjects. They also explain the failure of teaching methods that expect people to work things out for themselves when they do not have the means to do so, or rely on a mystical quality known as "talent" that enables people to makes sense of instruction and build on it.

The modest progress in music - I can just about play simple tunes on the piano after decades of struggle - has come from the same source. Instead of having to work out each chord from scratch, particularly in the bass clef, I've begun to see the principles behind their formation, why discords occur, and perhaps most importantly, to know enough chord positions in both hands to be able to focus on the music rather than battling to fit in each individual component. I am by no means a good pianist, or even advanced enough to be considered a bad one. I'm still learning. But it's getting better, and I understand why.

All of education should be based on this understanding of the operation of the brain and how to promote it.

 

Clare Balding: My Animals and Other Family.

 

I'm teaching a Bulgarian student English, and it is most instructive. As with all languages, there is a need to focus on vocabulary, grammar and usage, all of which are beautifully exemplified in Clare Balding's writing.  

Learners of English, however, also need to put stress and intonation in the right places, in words, phrases and sentences, and we have been practising this using Clare Balding's book. Clare's reading of it (Penguin, £20, but I found it for £10 on Ebay) is wonderful for this purpose. Clare reads rather more slowly than some, and the intonation is perhaps a little more stressed than in her tv commentating. This makes the phrasing and stress patterns crystal-clear to a person learning English who is no longer in the foothills.  Altogether admirable, and my student loves it. I mean, really loves it. Dancing with joy loves it.

Read on Get On. Why a child can't read "the", and how to teach him (...or her).

Read On Get On is is based on an understanding of all dimensions of the issue it seeks to address. In particular, it takes account of the underlying weakness in language experience and development that makes it extremely difficult for some children to make the transitions, first from spoken to written language (see Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Ch6) and then to the more advanced vocabulary that is central to study and public life, but is not current in the day to day speech that is mostly concerned with just getting by.  The approach is summed up in an account on p30 of the work of Teach First teacher Lydia Gibb, who provided individual teaching in school, backed by work with a parent at home. Some parents, unfortunately, won't do this, and in such cases voluntary networks are important. The charity, A Book of My Own, grew out of work with the National Children's Bureau and the Who Cares? Trust to provide books and educational support for children in care, who are clearly those least likely to receive such support.

A child in the Children's Foreword tells us, "I always got stuck on the words. I even got stuck on the word, the. I couldn't even say the words properly."

Getting stuck on the word the is at the heart of what needs to be done in addition to the increased emphasis in schools on using the connections between letters and sound to build words (phonics or, more recently, synthetic phonics). Phonics teaches children that t represents the sound t, as in The cat sat on the mat, or Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. Old English had letters to represent the th sound alone. The most common was Thorn, written Þ or þ, and derived from the runic system.  This letter did not suit the monks who transcribed old English into the Latin script, and was gradually replaced by th, and y, as in Ye Olde Englishe Tea Room. 

The most common way of dealing with th is to call the word a "sight word", perhaps print it in a different colour, and tell children to learn it. This does not tell the child how to deal with th in subsequent words, and this is a major weakness, as the combination is so frequent. The itself is so frequent - Oxford Online and the SUBTLEXT project list it at the most common word in English - that not being able to read it is a sign of a serious reading problem. As the most common word, it receives more reinforcement than any other - count the frequency of the in any text you like to see the truth of this. It occurs particularly frequently in this posting, of course, as it deals with the word itself.

I have taught just three people in forty years who could not read the. They were seven or eight years old, and would try to build the word from the sounds of individual letters, as synthetic phonics had taught them. The solution in each case was to explain that the letters did not always tell us all we needed to know, and that sometimes they had to work in groups. Th is more difficult than sh, as the sound produced by the group is farther from that produced by the two letters individually. It therefore needs practice. However, once the group is learned and understood, it can be treated as if it were an individual letter, making it easy to read all of the other words with the combination. I haven't counted them, but there must be hundreds, and many of them among the most common words - mother, father, brother, this, that, then, think, thumb, thistle...

Teach a child to read a word at sight, and you teach him to read a word. Teach a child the way the letters work, and you teach him to read.

 

 

Bulgarian student Lesson 3.

Paula had remembered what she'd learned last week, and her pronunciation and intonation on Clare Balding's book had improved, with only one error on a past participle. She had taken my advice of reading a little one day, and re-reading it the next, to consolidate, before reading a little more, and is reading to her landlord. She continues to look up words she doesn't understand on Google Translate - quite amazing to have this instant bridge between English and Bulgarian, even if it is not perfect.

The technique of taking things she wants to say, and showing her how to say them accurately, is working. Paula has a large exercise book, which we've divided into three sections - grammar, vocabulary and idiom - and we read over last week's notes at the start of the lesson, to make sure she fully understood. The idiom section is working well - it is also based on things she wants to say, and she is finding she can apply it in conversation. I continued to encourage Paula to ask questions about anything she did not understand, and to explain everything, not knowing a word of Bulgarian, using words, gesture and objects until it was clear. Paula agrees with this emphasis on complete understanding and mastery at all stages - it is the key to all of the teaching on this site, and is possible provided we have the time to do it. Without it, new neural connections can't form and consolidate, and people settle for what they can get rather than what they need.

Paula has been investigating courses at the local college, which does a large trade in English teaching. She is not impressed with the international student officer, who does not speak better English than she does. I'm not sure the course will be of any value to her, but it's difficult to check out.

Next week, we'll start writing.

Bulgarian student, second lesson.

In our first lesson,  we identified some key areas in which Paula needed to adjust her thinking - "companion words", (for those who prefer it, articles or determiners) which are not present in Bulgarian, intonation and vocabulary. For this lesson, we used My Animals and Other Family (Clare Balding) as an example of clear, accurate modern English, and continued practising the first points. Paula had bought a large notebook, and I started to make notes of the correct ways of saying things she wanted to say, under the broad headings of grammar, vocabulary and idiom, by which I meant anything peculiar to English, including phrasing, intonation and ways of saying things, eg that someone was not her "cup of tea".  Paula didn't know the alphabet in English, so I explained the way a voice sound was attached to each consonant so that we could hear it clearly, and she learned to spell her name, which she needed for work. Reading Clare Balding and listening to me reading her helped with phrasing. More consolidation than anything else this time (which shows how stupid Ofsted is to require clear evidence of progress in each twenty-minute observation) but Paula was very happy, and I'll see her again tomorrow. 

An English lesson for a Bulgarian adult student.

I taught my first EAL lesson on Monday, to a Bulgarian student with a degree in electronics, who had begun to get by in English using Google Translate. Bulgarian, she explained, was similar to Russian, though she could not speak or write in Russian. Her spoken English had unusual patterns of intonation, and she omitted what traditional grammarians call articles, and linguistics specialists "determiners".  Her goal was to become a fluent and natural speaker of English.

As in very nearly all cases, my goal was to establish full understanding of the spoken and written language. There seemed to be two main obstacles - spelling and intonation. Once we can spell, we can write with confidence, as we do not need to hesitate over individual words, and can write whatever word we choose, rather than whatever we may be able to spell. It took me about 20 minutes to explain the principles of English spelling and the Slimmed Down Spelling technique. An outline is here, and the full story of English spelling is contained in David Crystal's Spell It Out.  Essentially, English spelling works on these principles:

1. If we can hear a sound when we say a word carefully, without shortcuts, we need a letter for it.

2. Sometimes letters work in groups, eg station, nation. We learn the group as if it were a single letter, and only use a group when we've learned the word needs it. The student made an error, spelling nation neightion. This illustration the principle of only using a group when we've learned we need it.

3. Some words have an extra letter. Face has an e that does not give us a sound in itself, but influences the sound of the two preceding letters. We only use an extra letter when we've learned the word needs it. I always explaln how this has come about.

4. Some words have an awkward spelling because pronunciation has changed over time, or because of a foreign origin. Say table in French, and you can hear the l before the e. Water comes from the German Wasser, and we've changed the way we pronounce the a. Some Scots dialects retain the original. In these words, the letter we need to use is not the one we would naturally pick - fortunately, there are patterns here, that can be learned. Sometimes, as in different, spelling is affected by shortcuts in speech, eg  difrent. The solution is, first, not to take the shortcut and, second, to find another word with the same pattern - eg   suffering.

Next, to deal with leaving out articles/determiners. First, I don't use either term as they do not explain why the words are used. I call them companion words, and explain that they are usually used only in singular - the table is new. Tables are useful. In the plural, the word has other words for company. As companion words are not used in Bulgarian, this is a big adjustment in Paula's (as we will call her) thinking.

Finally, intonation. English uses intonation to reinforce meaning in a way that native speaker are rarely aware of. There is one pulse in each word of more than one syllable, a main pulse in each sentence, and a subordinate pulse in each phrase. Getting these right is probably the most difficult element of spoken English, as we need to put in these pulses in real time, and can only do so if the process of putting the words together is automatic. We practise on things Paula would like to say, such as talking about her new car.

Paula is, as I've said, a very bright young lady. She says that everything is perfectly clear, and shakes my hand with a big smile. I lent her Collins Complete English, though for its examples of usage rather than grammar. The work appears to reinforce the view I've begun to form that language learning focuses on three broad areas - grammar, vocabulary and idiom, the third of which is the particular and unique features of the language in question. In this first lesson, idiom included spelling, companion words (overlapping with grammar) and intonation.

 

 

 

Congratulations to NALDIC

Naldic's comprehensive and tightly edited training videos on using ICT to teach English as an additional language are very useful. I found I was learning from the first minute - I've not used Google World, for example, to help children locate where they lived before and where they live now, right down to street level. I will now, and won't miss an episode over the coming weeks. And, yes, they do include Clicker....