John Bald/language and literacy

Story Cubes - some very good ideas.

Retelling stories is a good idea for beginning writers, but most childen still need prompts to help them produce their own. Rory's Story Cubes is a series of non-verbal prompts on dice, and the fact that they are pictures rather than words means that they can genuinely function as a prompt or frame rather than a crutch. Several versions are available, and all worth a good look. I like the idea of putting things like this on blank cards, too. Cheaper, and a lot less noisy...   

Fixing reading and spelling problems 1. Principles.

To help anyone with a learning difficulty, we need to identify what it is in their thinking that is preventing them from learning as they wish to, and help them to adjust their thinking so that they can learn. This involves close observation of each individual, to see exactly what they are doing wrong, and why.

For reading, it is essential to investigate sensitivity to light as part of the process. People who are sensitive to light find it difficult to focus on the page in the first place, making learning to read more difficult, and sometimes impossible, until the issue is dealt with. Warning signs include frequent rubbing of the eyes, headaches, very short concentration spans,  and losing place or skipping lines. The British Institute of Optometry's screening kit is easy to use and the cheapest option for schools. Arnold Wilkins' Reading Through Colour is a useful, if expensive, introduction to the field - perhaps best read in a library.

The key point in teaching reading and spelling problems is to give the person a clear view of how English spelling functions, and how to use it.  As set out in previous postings, English spelling is an example of "fuzzy logic".  Words share most, but not all, of the chief characteristics of the system, and, generally speaking, consonants are more regular than vowel (voice) letters, as we have around 25 voice sounds in English, and only seven letters - aeiou, y and sometimes w - with which to represent them. With vowels - voice letters - in particular, we have to know what the letters are indicating to us in each word. This creates stumbling blocks at different stages in learning to read and spell, and each of these needs careful explanation.

The key maxims remain those set out in earlier postings.

1. The language is 1000 years old, and if we were 1000 years old, we'd have a few wrinkles.  The main wrinkle is the French connection, which can be explained by means of shared words - table, fruit, centre. The Youtube animation of the Bayeux tapestry is an interesting illustration of the story. The teacher needs to know French to explain this - just the main links between English and French words.

2. We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything. Some things we have to know, and remember. This includes variations in the normal correspondences between sounds and letters. A key teaching technique is to reinforce any new word with others with the same pattern of letters and sounds.

3. We do not use any technical term where the idea can be expressed in normal English. Some children take linguistic terminology in their stride. For others, it is an unnecessary obstacle. Young children do not need terminology derived from Greek.

4. We make everything very clear, and then practise. I'm grateful to Susan Williams for making this point clearly as deputy head at Harrington Hill School, Hackney. When we've learned a new word, we return to the beginning of the paragraph or sentence and read from there, so that the person reads it again in context. If it is not read accurately, we return to the word group for more practice.

For younger, complete non-readers, I usually start by making their name with plastic letters and having them put the letters in the right order. I use a capital for the first letter, and explain why capitals are important. (There is no need, ever, to use the term "lower case", which is derived from obsolete printing methods.) I then use the Ditties from Read Write Inc, as these contain no irregularities, and so provide a very clear introduction to phonics. I then usually work through the reading books in the series, moving to other books once the child is reading regular words confidently and accurately. When introducing the links between letters and sounds, I always qualify these by phrases such as "usually," "most of the time" or "nearly always", so that the child will not be confused when the letters do not behave as expected.

For older readers, from secondary school onwards, I try to use whatever materials they have to read for their school or college courses, or for work. I explain the spelling system in terms of sounds, groups of letters, letters giving information about other letters - eg final -e, soft c and g (with the proviso that some of these do not work all of the time), and then have them read to me. Most older readers have some knowledge of the links between letters and sounds, but do not use these effectively, and often guess, sometimes because they have been told to do so. Whenever a word is misread, we move to another with the same pattern of letters and sounds, unpack and explain it. Then another, having the learner distinguish between the two. I add more until I get a look that says, "This is too easy," at which point I present the original word, which is usually read correctly. We then return to the text as in point 4 above. The goal is to give the learner the satisfaction of reading at least a short paragraph, accurately, by the end of the session. It does not matter much how long this takes - getting the adjustment to thinking in in the first lesson is the key to confidence and future success. My latest pupil, aged 18 and unable to read because of guessing, has made immediate progress using this approach, and is now reading Dickens. So, indeed, has every other student with whom I've used it.

For spelling, I use the Slimmed Down Spelling approach, first published in The Times Educational Supplement in 2003, which considers spelling in terms of sound - if we hear a sound, we need at least one letter for it - groups of letters, extra letters and history. We only use any of the last three categories when we've learned the word needs them. An account of the approach is here.

For handwriting, I use French lined paper Grands Carreaux, which provides more horizontal and vertical guidance than any other, though I use it more flexibly than its inventor, the librarian Seyes, intended. I strongly recommend this for anyone with a handwriting difficulty, including almost all left-handed writers.

The best way for schools to avoid problems arising in children's understanding of English spelling in reading and writing is to use the simple qualifications, such as "usually," "most of the time", "nearly always", in the earliest teaching of reading and phonics. If children are prepared for letters, or groups of letters, not to indicate the same sound each time, they will not be surprised when this happens. Otherwise, they hit serious problems when faced with the full range of English spelling in the books they read.

The best way for primary and secondary schools to develop literacy beyond the initial stages is to build literacy into all aspects of the curriculum from the start, and to use this to extend children's vocabulary beyond the everyday. Katie Ashford's chapter in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers, (Edited by Katharine Birbalsingh) is an excellent starting point.

 

 

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.

Reading Reconsidered, Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway. Plus some thoughts on phonics.

Towards the end of my time with Ofsted, I led the inspection of an unusual primary school in London, where nearly all of the pupils spoke English as a second language. All of them - except for some who arrived just before they took the tests - met the nationally expected standard in English, maths and science,  and two-thirds of them exceeded it. No fewer than seven of the staff were guest lecturers at the Institute of Education, and our report was used as evidence when the school won the Evening Standard School of the Year award.

We were neither the first nor the last to recognise the excellence of Gateway Primary School, but what was really interesting was how they did it. Careful and intensive initial teaching of reading, using the Jolly Phonics scheme, was followed by systematic use of reading in virtually every lesson in the junior school, using texts designed to extend the children's vocabulary and understanding beyond the everyday language that they met outside the classroom. The outcome, in sharp contrast to the "first-hand experience" that I'd seen preached in Essex, was that the pupils developed the linguistic understanding they needed in order to make sense of the rest of their work, and to succeed in secondary school.  They were, as Nicky Morgan has put it, "secondary ready",  at a time when most of the pupils we were seeing in other schools were not.

Behind this success lay brilliant planning by a senior member of staff, who understood paths of language development, guided her colleagues with great clarity, and subsequently became the headteacher.  How, though, could we extend this excellence so that all children could benefit from it?  The guest lectureships were clearly not enough - Gateway's principles needed to be understood and applied throughout the school system, and there was no easy path.

Doug Lemov, managing director of the US group Uncommon Schools, and author of Teach Like a Champion, has provided such a path in his new book Reading Reconsidered. He began with an unsolved problem. The good discipline and hard work of his organisation's pupils were not leading to the "march of triumph" they had expected when they went to college, and their ability to handle the demands of advanced, independent reading, was the main cause. Mr Lemov and his colleagues, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, have tackled it by recognising the importance of all types of sustained reading to the development of pupils' intellect, and putting into their book a very wide range of source material and techniques that make it the most significant contribution to reading teaching since the Clackmannanshire research on early phonics.

 The technique behind Teach Like a Champion was to analyse excellence and present it clearly to teachers in training, with the aim - largely successful - of putting old heads on young shoulders. Reading Reconsidered does the same for reading.  Many of its techniques - for example, on ways to prompt pupils when they are hesitant, on developing phrasing in reading, and in selecting texts that go beyond their immediate experience, are ones I've found valuable myself, though I had to learn by stumbling into them. This concentrates so much outstanding material in the space of a book, plus an excellent DVD showing the approach in practice, that it should be read by every headteacher and English co-ordinator in the country and incorporated into training for new and practising teachers.

Two pupils I've been teaching over the past few weeks bring me back to phonics, and its limitations as well as its strengths.  They are aged 9 and 14, have parents of mixed Spanish and English nationality, and had been assessed as dyslexic because of severe problems with reading in English with, in one case, an apparent weakness in memory. Spanish is one of the most regular languages in the world, with no surprises in spelling and only one silent letter - h, at the beginning of a word. What you see is what you say, and what you say is what you write. English, as I discovered some years ago by trying to have a pupil sound out a word that could not be sounded out, is different. We need not only to know and blend the most frequent sounds indicated by letters - synthetic phonics - but to understand and use the variations between words such as should and shoulder, and interactions between letters that change the indicated sound, such as cat and centre.  Evidence from brain scans has shown that English speakers develop activity in an identifiable area of the brain - (Blakemore and Firth, The Learning Brain 2005) that is not needed in a regular language.

Fluent readers often adapt to these variations spontaneously. Others, like these two girls, need to have them pointed out and explained, and then to practise. Allowing them to choose their own books , reflecting the interests of children of their age, led them to meet the variations in English as they occur in the normal run of writing. Explaining these and their origins, usually by switching to a word with a similar pattern to the word that had caused the difficulty, allowed words such as neighbour, and tinier, to be unpacked, explained and learned. The parents were, as usual, delighted. "I've never heard my daughter read so fluently," said one, and the other, having seen me move from shine, to shiny, to tiny, to tinier, described the process as "amazing".  Not a split digraph or phoneme in sight, and no more mention of dyslexia.

A difficult case, and crucial errors in teaching reading.

K is one of the two or three most difficult cases I've had in over forty years of teaching people to read and write. We had to begin by orienting him towards print, having him understand that letters gave him information, and that he could use this by combining/blending this information to make words, rather than just guessing.  It took almost an hour for K to read the first of Ruth Miskin's Ditties from Read, Write Inc. , that has just four lines with no irregular words.

My diary tells me this lesson took place on 28th March, and K was 8. On 28th November, exactly eight months later, we are working on Burglar Bill, by the Ahlbergs. K has learned to focus on letters and reads a word he has not previously encountered, rubs, by blending the sounds represented by letters. His progress on the Ditties was slow, and interrupted by illness and school trips an holidays, so we have had perhaps 15 half-hour lessons, supported by daily practice with K's mother or father. K has had to work on accurate speech at the same time as learning to read, and his concentration has improved, so that he manages to focus for a little over half an hour rather than having to be refocused by the teacher every few minutes. He is beginning to combine words into recognisable sentences, but still cuts them short, and sometimes omits verbs. He says, for example that he "wants to be ventor scientist".

The word the is the most frequent in English, and also one of the most irregular, the th combination requiring the pupil to move beyond the sound normally represented by t. Knowing the th combination, invented by Norman scribes who did not like the Anglo-Saxon letter "thorn" (þ) requires more than just matching sound to symbol. The child has to know that t can represent more than one sound, depending on the letters surrounding it, and this is a big step for someone who finds it hard to blend the sounds of individual letters to read a word.  Once we have passed the initial stages, to which the Ditties provide such an excellent introduction, much of reading in English requires knowledge of this kind, which is stored in the memory. The Learning Brain has identified an area of the brain, which it terms the Word Form Area, which is active in English but not in more regular languages, and whose function is to distinguish what letters are telling us in the context of a particular word. Once we've learned this, we no longer have to work the word out from scratch, making memory a key element in learning to read, alongside phonics and knowledge of letter combinations.

Saturday's lesson with Burglar Bill had K read Breakfast without hesitation, after substantial work on the word the previous week, during which we discussed its origin, and the shortcut taken in pronunciation. English is full of such shortcuts, and the same principle was applied in distinguishing say and says. The influence of one letter on another - eg the e in piper - is a further refinement, as is the influence of e, i and y on c and g. These patterns occur very frequently, in words derived from French, which shares roughly 30% of its vocabulary with English, thanks, if that is the word, to the Norman conquest. Moving from our first concept of letters and sounds matching each other involves acquiring and applying new knowledge, and is an example of how knowledge frees the brain to think. First impressions are not enough.

Success in this very difficult case, which I approached with some trepidation because of the additional problems in speech and focus, illustrates major and serious errors in the two schools of thought that have come to dominate reading teaching.

First, the error of Dr Henrietta Dombey and others who do not see phonics as the main vehicle for teaching reading. The correspondences between letters and sounds, which may operate for just over two-thirds of the time, are the most reliable initial source of information about a word, and K could not have made progress until he learned to use them.

Second, the error of many phonics proponents that suggests that phonics is the key to the the language, and that everything can be taught in terms of "phonemes" (sounds) and "graphemes" (letters or groups of letters). There is more than one way of representing a sound in English, but simply presenting children with a choice of "graphemes" - I never use the term, and Sir Michale Wilshaw was wrong to endorse it in his recent newsletter on primary education - does not explain to them why things are as they are, or why acsadent is not an acceptable spelling of accident.  The roots of this error lie in ignorance and impulsiveness. Its proponents do not understand the structures of English, or how these came to be as they are. David Crystal's Spell It Out would tell them if they chose to read it. But you don't need to read anything if you have a system that gives you all of the answers - whatever that system happens to be. Until the structures that are needed in addition to letter-sound correspondence are understood and built into teaching, we will continue to have unnecessary failure in learning to read and write, with all of the consequences that we know so well.

Alison Clarke, a new friend from Australia.

Alison is a speech pathologist and member of the Council of Learning Difficulties Australia. She has posted several excellent videos on Youtube detailing the reasons why some children find the teaching they receive confusing, and suggesting ways of unpacking them. This video is a particularly clear illustration of the problems that arise from using the first letter of a word and guessing from accompanying pictures.  How phonics got framed is a very clear explanation of the conflict between "whole language" and phonics. My approach on this site is based on phonics, but with systematic explanation of the elements of English that are not phonically regular, so that children are not confused when letters do not convey the information they expect. 

Many thanks to Karina McLachlain for putting us in touch with each other.

The key and how to turn it, 4. Brief progress report, b and d.

When we started, Barry was regularly confusing b and d, and his mother and the school were worried about this, as it is often seen as a sign of "dyslexia".   Observation showed that this error tended only to happen at the start of a word, and not when the letter appeared in the middle or the end. My approach, when he made a mistake, was to move to another word with a b or d at the beginning, teach that, and return to the word that had caused the problem. I didn't tell Barry he'd got it wrong, but, again borrowing the idea from Sue Buckley's work with Down syndrome, simply indicated that he needed to think again. I didn't put b and d words together and ask him to discriminate between them, but praised him every time he got one right, and worked in the way just described when he made a mistake.

Barry couldn't make this week's lesson as he had a bad cold. However, his mother remarked when she phoned me that his school had noticed an improvement in reading words beginning with b and d. This progress is, I think, consistent with the evidence below on worked examples.

The Key and how to turn it, 2. Building speed by going slowly.

This follows posting 1, here

Barry comes in giggling. I quietly ask him to stop, and he comes and sits down at the table, in his usual position at right-angles to me and on my left, with his mother sitting beside him. I have three main ideas in mind - I want him to distinguish short vowel sounds accurately, to combine/blend consonants at the beginning of words, and to read b and d accurately. Beyond this, I want to engage in conversation on the topic that interests him - bones - and introduce some longer words.

The first ditty we work on contains the words drip and drop. He misreads drip, so I go back to the previous word, rip, then pip, then lip. He does not pronounce the short i sound as clearly as I'd like - it has some e in it, which I've seen before. We practise saying the word, and Barry reads the ditty, hesitantly, but more accurately.  

In lesson 2, I'd used the technique adapted from the Portsmouth Sarah Duffen project (now Down Syndrome Educational Trust) of writing some words on cards, saying them, and having Barry give me the word I say. The words are drip, drop, dress and drink. Barry gives me drop when I ask for drip. I put the card back and ask him for drip, which he provides. He gets the others right. This shows that his knowledge of these letters is still developing, but improving. We return to the ditty, which he reads with some hesitation, but accurately. We have to work hard on drink, which I reinforce by reference to pink, link, and sink.

I notice that he only misreads b and d around once in three words, and then always at the beginning of a word. Perhaps not surprising, as b at the end of a word is less frequent than d. I don't offer him b and d together to discriminate, but, as above, reinforce his perceptions and understanding through a series of similar words, which build a neural network and memory.

Barry misreads "sock" as soak once again, and I have to return to lock, tick tock to demonstrate the correct reading. I explain how vowel letters work, and that the word comes from an old French word for voice (Voix, vouielle, modern voyelle, our vowel). For teaching purposes, I call them voice letters, which means exactly the same thing. I write them in this way 

a	e	i	o	u
		y		w

I explain that we have 25 or so voice sounds, but only these letters to write them with, so that each one of them can give us more than one sound. This is the main reason why reading in English is difficult - we need to know what the letter is telling us in a particular word, and that has to be learned. I write sky, which he reads accurately, and explain the use of y -  we don't  like to have words ending in i, and the downstroke on y helps reinforce the fact that the word is ending. Y near the beginning of the word is usually Greek.  Back to sock, which Barry reads accurately.

We move to the next ditty, which causes fewer problems, and I take the pressure off with some conversation, though it's linked to the vowel issue.  I tap the top of my head, and announce that the bone I'm tapping is the cranium. I ask him to tap the top of his head, which, fortunately enough, is covered with hair. What's the word?   Cranium, he says, and his mum explains that it's part of the skull. He's allowed to laugh at my cranium being more visible than his, but not for too long. Does he like football? A little, but he doesn't really understand a lot about it. I give him stadium, underneath cranium, for the longer a sound, and the group of letters ium. 

Having had his attention well and truly diverted, Barry returns to the first ditty we read, and reads it fluently and accurately. Result.

 

 

Knowledge frees the brain to think.

My 11 year old pupil, who began last summer not knowing the two times table, and reading at a level around that of an eight year old, has just got L5c in a maths practice test, and L4a in English. For readers outside the UK, the nationally expected standard is L4, or 4b to be sure of it. We still have a lot of work to do to build fluency and confidence in writing and spelling, but the improvement began with building up his knowledge of patterns and procedures in basic maths, and of English grammar. We did not accept approximations, but explained everything clearly to him first and then made him practise, even when this was not his idea of fun.

The result is that, faced with, say, calculating the perimeter of a shape, or its area, he knows how to do the additions and multiplications required without expending his mental energy on them, and can instead think about what the question is saying and how to answer it. He knows what verbs are, why simple grammatical terms are as they are, and how they function in writing. In other words, he can do his work with confidence, approach secondary school knowing that he is not set up to fail, and enjoy his football without thinking he should be doing more homework.

Perhaps most important, he now agrees with me that he is an intelligent boy - not necessarily the quickest, but intelligent - and no longer thinks he is stupid. 

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...