John Bald/language and literacy

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The Language of Kindness, Christie Watson; This is going to Hurt, Adam Kay; Under the wig, William Clegg; In Your Defence, Sarah Langford. Four professional memoirs reviewed.

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I recently wrote on Conservative Home that whoever removed bursaries from the training of nurses did not understand nursing. Anyone wishing to do so might begin with the first of these memoirs.

 

Christie Watson spent twenty years as a nurse, beginning in mental health and proceeding through almost all areas to become a specialist resuscitation nurse and mentor to others. Her book starts slowly, taking us through the years of teenage dreams, indecision and dead-end jobs to work as a volunteer with Scope. She found the work worthwhile, and, “although I had nothing, I was happy.” An experienced nurse suggested she take up nursing - “They give you a bursary and somewhere to live.”

 

Christie soon found herself dealing with the extremes of life and death, finding time to talk to an elderly lady with a heart murmur, being taken for ride by a mental patient pretending to be her nurse supervisor, washing the body of a child who has died and propping up her chin so that her appearance would not cause additional distress to her parents, surviving, thanks to her (by then) ex-husband surgeon, a catastrophic mistake when she cut a child’s breathing tube by mistake. Throughout the early years, the voice of experience from midwives and sisters is close by, building expertise and confidence. “You’ll be fine,” says Sister Anna, “I’m here.” Right on both counts. This book goes from the mundane to the searing in the blink of an eye, including a moving and brilliant chapter on Ms Watson’s application of her nursing skills to the task of adopting a child with learning difficulties, greatly aided by her daughter, who immediately accepts him as her brother. In our current context, one thing shines through – nursing and neoliberalism have nothing in common.

 

“This is Going to Hurt” is a doctor’s story with a sad ending – what may, or may not, have been a mistake under extreme pressure, in a very difficult case, led to Adam Kay’s giving up. His career was mostly spent in obstetrics, carrying out as many as 16 caesarian sections in a night. Eventually, the bad times – as he puts it, “recorded in HD” - won out over the many lives he saved, and he left, finding a new career as a comedy writer. A gruelling story, including much medical information, and financial facts of life for junior doctors in the NHS, delivered with a light touch. Well worth reading.

William Clegg QC’s “Under the Wig” describes a journey to the top end of the criminal bar, beginning in 1972 with his “interview” for pupillage – dinner at the home of a friend of his father’s ended with “Ok, you’re in, when do you want to start?” - and concluding, anti-climactically, with a successful defence in the phone hacking trial. Like many such memoirs, it has a good deal of explanation of basic legal procedures, but Mr Clegg’s choice of cases, and his clients, are interesting, and he is frank about the ways in which he sets about a case, constructing arguments, whittling away at the basis of the opposition’s evidence, talking to juries and appeal judges, and indeed how to become a QC. The cases include several well-known murders, including that of the much-loved tv presenter Jill Dando, and fraud, which he manages to make interesting. Mr Clegg’s chambers no longer undertake legal aid cases, a departure from the cab rank principle that is justified by the derisory level of fees in relation to the work required. The situation is, incidentally, now so bad that the only way in which many barristers can earn more than their train fare is the amount they’re paid for reading the case papers, the number of which can run into thousands.

 

Sarah Langford is a barrister whose work has a surprising amount in common with that of Christie Watson. While most of William Clegg’s clients are accused of headline crimes, hers are repeat petty offenders, parents trying to make a life for themselves and their children, gay men facing disgrace, if not conviction, for indecency in public toilets, wives suffering because of loyalty to their criminal husbands, all in all a catalogue of human misery to which she brings hard work, competence and, where she can, kindness. Sometimes she succeeds, sometimes the judge gets it right against her judgement and the wishes of her clients, sometimes she has to walk away, having fought one losing fight too many on behalf of a client who has no intention of giving up burglary and to whom she is is, in effect, one of the tools of his trade. Sarah Langford is not on the gravy train of the legal profession – on my one venture into the High Court as an expert, the QC earned £23,500 for prep and his first day in court, with £2500 refreshers, and his less impressive junior £11,000 plus £1500 per day – and indeed, like many nurses, is barely earning a living, despite her distintion in her law conversion course. Her book pays us the complement of giving full explanations of legal procedures in notes at the end, rather than incorporating simpler ones in the text. I couldn’t put it down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slimmed Down Spelling. Updated, Nov 2020.

New - a commentary to this approach is here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URhQvNvX924

 

Slimmed Down Spelling was first published in the Times Educational Supplement in 2003. It gives a child four possible reasons for writing a letter or group of letters in a word. This cuts irregularity down to size, enables them to make a conscious decision rather than guess, helps them to group words with similar spellings together, and builds understanding of the way English spelling operates, as an example of fuzzy, rather than strict, logic. It is the method used to help the 16 year old, assessed as dyslexic, whose mother's comments are included in the introduction to the site.

1. They can hear a sound when they say the word carefully. This is the phonic link, and provides a little over two-thirds of the letters we use.

2. They have learned that a word needs a group of letters, such as tion or ough.

3. They have learned that a word needs an extra letter, such as a double letter.

4. They have learned that a word has an unusual or awkward element, usually because of a historical change. Eg, warm is a shared word between English and German, where it rhymes with arm.  The way we pronounce this a has changed over time, and a lot of words share this pattern - eg , water (from German Wasser), was.

The technique takes a few weeks to apply, and helps people of all ages - see above for its effect on the spelling of a very high-attaining sixteen year old. Here's how it applies to the SAT spellings above, almost all of which require the child to do more than just apply step one, and write one letter for each sound. Learning is accelerated if children are encouraged to find other words with the same grouping of letters as the one they've just learned. Even in this test, some of the groups recur. New networks and connections form in the brain as we learn each group, so that the more we know and learn, the more we have available for learning to spell new words. Using the approach to spelling from the outset enables children to apply what they know systematically, rather than having to learn piecemeal. Finding at least one other word with the same spelling pattern is the singly most important technique to boost learning - eg transporting, reporting, station, nation, boiled, soiled etc.

1. transporting    Listen carefully to avoid leaving out the second r. Group ing.

2. station            One letter for each sound, then group tion

3. boiled             Know the oi group, and ed

4. stapled           Know the le group, originally from French, and ed

5. future             Know the group ure, which is not pronounced exactly as spelled - we take a shortcut

6. enough            Know the group ough

7. feature            Know the vowel (voice sound) group ea, and ure as in 5

8. mattered         Know that this word has an extra letter (tt) and the ed group

9. produces         Know the ce combination

10. disruptive      Know that we take a shortcut in pronouncing the ive (compare alive). Very very few                               words end in v, which almost always needs an e after it.

11. shipped          As 8 - know that it has an extra letter (pp) and  ed group

12. strength         Listen carefully for the eng group

13. umbrellas       Know that this word has an extra letter (ll)

14. released         Know the ea group, as in 7, and ed

15. variety           Listen carefully - one letter for each sound, and English usually uses y (Greek i) at the                              end of a word. The down stroke gave readers an extra sign that a word was ending.

16. chief              Know the ie group.

17. familiar          Listen carefully to avoid leaving out the second i. I usually make the link with family.

18. physically       Know the ph group, and the y near the beginning of the word. 

19. substantial     Know the tial group.

20. surprised.       Sur  is less natural to modern speech than ser.  We need to know to use this group.

Early Childhood and Neuroscience. Mine Conkbayir. Review

To two key texts for understanding brain science in relation to education - The Learning Brain, and Kandel's In Search of Memory- can be added this excellent introduction to its implications for young children. The development of brain cells and of the connections between them is the physical manifestation of mind and thought, and takes us beyond what can be inferred from experience and from the observation and testing techniques used in psychology. This does not imply that what we know from these sources is wrong, but  that it can be confirmed or refuted by this new source of evidence.

The outcome is not always comfortable. P14, for example, has diagrams showing the development of brain connections from birth to adulthood. I had thought to reproduce this here, but, this would defeat the object of this review, which is to draw attention to the book. The diagrams show a huge expansion in neural networks between birth and 2 years of age, a period during which Hart and Risley, and this recent study, have confirmed that there are vast differences in the language children meet, primarily from their parents. These correlate - something less than direct dependence - with the educational experience of their parents, and give huge advantages to children of highly educated parents. The author has very good, practical suggestions on ways of developing young children's language - the idea of sustained shared thinking between adult and child is particularly valuable - but no-one, anywhere, has yet found evidence that this gap can be bridged.

The issue raises problems for those on all sides of the educational debate. For progressives, and those who believe in equality as a goal, it seems that the task is impossible before they have started - they cannot stop highly-educated parents from pouring their own knowledge into their children even before they are born.  Conservatives, and those who see themselves as traditionalists - not always synonymous - are challenged to provide effectively for everyone, and not to have literacy as a gate through which everyone must pass to have any chance of a successful life.

Ms Conkbayir's book discusses emotional as well as intellectual development. It reflects our developing and still uncertain knowledge of several important aspects of the work, and gives credence to some conclusions - notably those of Kohl (2011) on the capacity for bilingualism in children who are too young for much language to be detected - that are at best speculative. However, this is first-class work, and will benefit everyone concerned with early years education who is not already fully up to date with the research.

 

 

Shaywitz Why some people who have overcome dyslexia continue to read slowly.

We like to think that information travels the world at the speed of light, but this is not the case with books. It took a personal visit and invitation by Dame Rachel De Sousa to make E.D. Hirsch’s work, originally in book form, widely known in the UK. Some key texts, notably Nobel laureate Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory, are still little known here.

The latest example I’ve met is Dr Sally Shaywitz’ Overcoming Dyslexia, based on the work of the Yale Centre for the Study of Learning and Attention.

Yale pioneered the use of MRI scanning, and the evidence in Chapter 6 of this book explains why some highly intelligent people who have overcome dyslexia still read slowly – they rely on frontal areas of the brain, which are used for decoding, rather than on what Dr Shaywitz terms the “word form area”, a form of long-term memory, in which information about specific words – eg the difference between should and shoulder – is stored, allowing us to read words without working them out from scratch. Decoding, which is based on phonics, is the key to the early stages of learning to read. The word form area stores the knowledge of variations that enables us to build on this and develop fluent reading in English.

 

School Inspection is not a Little Extra. How it has been destroyed in the UK, and how we might begin to restore it.

This article first appeared on Conservative Home. It is not, however, political in its intent. Past chief inspectors have come from various political backgrounds, and most - alas not all - have been able to put their views in their pocket or handbag, and do their job properly. HMCI must be given the means to find out the truth, and tell it. 

Amanda Spielman’s appearance before the Public Accounts Select Committee, and her subsequent letter to it, were not unique – Sir Michael Wilshaw once answered on academy chains – but were certainly unusual. Her normal channel of accountability is, understandably enough, the Education Select Committee. This appearance was triggered by a report from the National Audit Office, saying that Ofsted had no evidence that its inspections were improving education, which, as the NAO knows perfectly well, is nothing new. The purpose of inspection is to report on what is happening – it is up to Ministers and other authorities to make things happen. Inspection can contribute indirectly, by drawing attention to good and poor work, but this is very difficult to prove. It can, conversely, fossilise ineffective, but generally accepted, practices simply by ignoring them.

The accounts committee has a Labour chair, and unions have been pressing Spielman to link what they see as falling school standards to cuts in funding, criticising her roundly for refusing to do so, and calling for the abolition of the inspectorate. Anyone knowing Spielman will understand her commitment to telling the truth as the evidence presents it, and if she says that there is no evidence of funding cuts affecting school standards, that is because, as things stand, there isn’t any.

She was equally clear that this is not the case in Further Education and sixth forms, which, for reasons I’m only now beginning to understand, are funded at lower levels than schools, even though the tasks they face are no less difficult, and in some ways more complex. Schools, she says, have spent a lot of money on teaching assistants, and there is no good evidence that this is effective, a point to which I’ll return in a moment. She might have added that secondary schools have large and very expensive management teams, partly because headteachers are now, in effect, inspectors in their own schools.

A Conservative member of the committee, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, got to the heart of the issue with this question:

“What I am hearing from this whole exchange that we have been having is that your resources have been cut, inspections have been shortened, and the interval between inspections has been extended. Does that not give rise to a regime where the school can game the system by doing things like the Chair has suggested: having a narrower curriculum and not putting pupils in for the more challenging subjects? Isn’t that likely to give us a narrower and narrower education system?”

There is really no arguing with this. In 2005, Labour destroyed the HMI approach to school inspection by removing the independence of inspectors, downgrading them from the top of the professional tree to middle managers, stopping the inspection of subjects, and extending its remit to areas it knew little or nothing about. Inspectors no longer had time to do their work properly, and this situation has got worse rather than better. Take teaching assistants. Prior to 2005, inspectors had time to evaluate their work in classes, and, if they were teaching on their own, to observe them on the same terms as teachers. One assistant, whom I observed teaching reading for the normal 30 minutes, received a top grade and proceeded to train as a teacher. The school as a whole failed, by a large margin, but we were able to pick out and reward her excellence. I doubt whether any such observation has taken place since 2005, and indeed whether Ofsted has any reliable evidence on the effectiveness of assistants at all. If the evidence of their impact on pupils’ attainment is, as Ms Spielman says, “far from clear”, we should be able to look to Ofsted to clarify it.

It is not the fault of Spielman, or her predecessors, that we can’t.

One of them agreed with me when I suggested that they had “played the hand that they’d been dealt,” and, as Sir Geoffrey’s question indicates, that hand does not enable them to carry out their work properly. Since 2010, the government has made major, and for the most part essential, changes in education, while meeting Treasury targets. Cutting quality control at the same time prevented Ofsted from dealing with potential scandals before they broke, and reduced the quality of evidence available to parents. I continue to read reports, and their quality and basis in evidence is showing strong improvement, as in the brilliant report on Michaela Community School and the report on behaviour at Great Yarmouth, whose headteacher, Barry Smith, is to address the Conservative Education Society on Monday.

There is, though, no question that reports do not give anything like the detail they used to, and I don’t rely on one unless I can check it from other sources.

Spielman said at one point that, “Our inspections are now a review of the school’s own work. A school can show us its work however it likes.” It can also choose what not to show. I know of one school that is still rated good despite a note on its last report, some years ago, of a significant weakness in maths. Until this year’s examination reforms, that seat of learning also boosted its results by having teachers write GCSE assessments, a practice which a senior Ofsted official told me was so widespread that Ofsted could do nothing about it.

The special needs issue that I discussed in my previous article is mentioned in reports, but not investigated in any depth, because inspectors don’t have time to find out whether these pupils are making the progress they should be. The campaign on this issue, like that on funding during the last general election, is biting, and will cost votes.

All three of Michael Gove’s successors have served in George Osborne’s Treasury, and their main area of expertise has been finance rather than education. School inspection has become a casualty, and its fate shows how austerity has bitten into essential services as well as eliminating waste. As austerity comes to an end, the government needs to consider giving it the means to inspect schools – and Further Education – properly once again. It would not cost a huge amount, and I can think of at least one quango that could provide a good chunk of the money.

 

Alex Quigley, Closing the Vocabulary Gap. A review.

 

 

 

This book presents secondary teachers with much information that they need to know, but are unlikely to have met in their training, and refines the simmering debate on the nature of vocabulary and language structures in English that has been going on since the 1960s.

It begins by summarising the evidence for the gap, beginning with the vast differences in pre-school experience of children whose parents are highly educated, and of those whose parents are not. The former hear millions more words by the time they start school, and the nature of these words is different, with a lower proportion related to control and behaviour, and a much higher proportion concerned with opening up the world to the child and developing their intellect. Young Children Learning (Tizard and Hughes, 1986), for example, found that the highly-educated parents in their sample welcomed children's questions and used them as a focal point for conversation, while the parents who had left school without qualifications found them irksome and discouraged them.

Labour's former education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, said that poor children in his constituency were 18 months behind in their development by the time they started school, and this may be an understatement. Teachers report a significant minority of pupils starting school using little or no language, and for years were disparaged by educational advisers and researchers, often in the teeth of their own evidence. In most schools, they have to try to deal with the problem at the same time as teaching children on the other side of the language gap, and to date there is very little evidence of success. Once they move to secondary school, the problem becomes more acute, as examinations in all subjects demand control of extended vocabulary and formal grammar that are increasingly removed from the language of everyday life. Vocabulary, or a person's individual "word hoard" is an essential part of this, and we have long needed a book that gives it pride of place. We need not be sidetracked on whether vocabulary is more important than grammar. We can't put words together unless we have the words.

In the sixties, Professor Basil Bernstein offered the idea of "restricted" and "elaborated" codes of language, the first limited to the requirements of day to day living, and the second including the full range of vocabulary and grammar required for all but particular specialised purposes. This led to a huge row, particularly with his colleague Professor Harold Rosen, over the basis of English teaching. Neither was wholly right, but Mr Quigley refines the debate by adding an "academic code", which varies according to subject, and gives examples that would make his book an excellent resource for secondary in-service training. Other strong features are his explanation of etymology, and the use of cognates - words shared between languages - to help language teaching.

I have two reservations. The first concerns the presentation of phonics, which is in line with the non-statutory guidance in the National Curriculum. This guidance uses the academic code of linguistics, based on Greek, to describe the whole of English spelling in terms of phonics, when in fact it is phonically based, but has other features grafted onto it, as described by David Crystal in Spell It Out, a book included in Mr Quigley's references. Some children take this terminology in their stride, but for others it is an obstacle, as it has no connection with the language they already know. It is unreliable, particularly the term "split digraph", which describes the pattern in "here", but not in the common words "there, were, where". It therefore doesn't help a pupil with a word they can't already read. The system also neglects the effect of e, y and i following c and g, a key feature in the intermediate stages of learning to read and spell. Similar issues arise in spelling, and I've dealt with them at this link.

Mr Quigley's presentation is admirably clear, and his work can be recommended strongly to all secondary teachers and senior leaders.

B and D confusion. Using speech to clarify the problem.

In the early twentieth century, Annie Sullivan (Helen Keller's teacher) and Grace Fernald discovered the benefit of using movement to reinforce learners' understanding and use of letters for communication. Writing "d" as an extension of "a", for example, made it less easily confused with "b" than traditional printing, which starts both letters at the top, and leaves a decision to be made at the bottom of the first stroke - does the ball go to the left, or the right? With my current fourteen year old, this was not enough. She did not make errors in reading, but would confuse the letters when writing, even after practice.

The solution lay further back, in the production of the sounds "b" and "d" in speech. If we say "dad", we can feel our tongue touch our top palate, just above the teeth, and our lips don't touch. When we say "boy", we press our lips together to release the consonant (keeping our tongue low, though this is incidental to the teaching point). So, saying the word we want to spell gives us a direct and reliable indication of which letter to use. Lips touch - b. Tongue touches roof of the mouth - d. So far, it is working.

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.

 

David Crystal: Just a Phrase I'm Going Through.

I've always found David Crystal's work illuminating, and have just caught up with his autobiography, published in 2009. I was pleased to see the short shrift he gave to Chomsky and the principle of his Language Assessment Remediation and Screening Procedure, which is to consider the person in front of you and what their needs are. The acronym LARSP is another matter - I still have trouble remembering what it means.

However, a case he cites, of moving a child from a two-word construction - man jump ; see car; red ball - to three, is an interesting demonstration of the relative importance of different parts of speech. Each of these fragments contains a noun, and two out of three a verb. I infer that noun and verb are the main building blocks of language, and other parts subordinate to them. I call them "companion words", adding to the sense of noun (adjective) and verb (adverb), saving time (pronouns) or holding things together (articles/determiners and conjunctions, which I call links). The approach is very similar to what Chomsky called "teaching transformational grammar", an activity he condemned. However, Chomsky is not a teacher, and is wrong once again.
There is a similar insight into the issue of time and tense with verbs. For European linguists, the terms are synonymous. English-speaking linguists reserve the term tense for a change in the form of the verb, and Professor Crystal has used the term "aspect" for other ways of indicating time, such as "He goes to university next week. He is off to university next week. etc." However, in this book he notes the influence of what linguists call "adverbials" - why not just adverbs, with the understanding that they can comprise more than one word - in providing the signpost of time. He may well have made the same point elsewhere and I've missed it, but this time it came across very clearly.

We indicate time in English either by a change in verb form, or by context, usually an adverb. "Once upon a time," indicates that something has already happened, and cannot be followed by a present or future verb, any more than "Tomorrow" can be followed by a past one. I call a compound verb, such as I will go a change in form. Ich werde in die Schule gehen is in the future tense in German, just as I will go to school is in English. The term time zone is, as I've argued elsewhere, more useful for teaching purposes than tense, a word that means nothing to anyone who does not have a working knowledge of French etymology.

David Crystal's book reflects much of the history of modern linguistics, with generous and well-merited account of the work of Randolph Quirk, and of modern family and academic life. There are ups and downs, and a shining example of courage, when he left Reading University without a redundancy package to move to the life of an independent scholar in Wales, with a radio studio built into his house. His invaluable Cambridge Encyclopaedias, respectively of Language and English, rescued his finances, and he became an editor of general encyclopaedias, using the experience of classification this provided as a basis for later work in search engine design. His latest (or so I thought...) books on spelling, grammar and punctuation , published after the autobiography, are to me the most valuable, and provide, with Harry Evans' Essential English, an excellent basis for understanding how our current language has developed and works.

Professor Crystal dislikes linguistic purists, and yet, like all others who do so, writes in immaculate standard English throughout. Language changes slowly, and there is no discernable difference between his grammar and that of Dickens and Lewis Carroll. Food for thought throughout, and recommended.