John Bald/language and literacy

Keep phonics and grammar simple, and cut out the rubbish.

I've just had to decline to write an article because I won't use highfalutin' and confusing terms to describe to parents the relationships between sounds and letters in English. Yesterday, I was teaching a ten year old who was confused by the term "connective" used in grammar paper to describe "Because" at the beginning of a sentence, when it patently did not connect anything to anything. Both problems arose from too much influence given by the government to people who have no experience of teaching the subjects - some are university linguists, others have spent their careers in teaching sixth formers - and who have managed to impose obscure, ill-informed and, in the above case, inaccurate terminology on the educational debate. 

All grammar is the outcome of human attempts to understand and describe the phenomenon of language. We can only use what we have in this process, and it is understandable that complex, and even obscure, terms have been used in an attempt to reach descriptions that are as accurate and unambiguous as possible. Hence, no doubt the practise of linguists in removing the term "tense" from its origin in the French word for time, and attaching it to cases in which the actual form of a verb is altered. This eliminates the practice of composing tenses, but it may suit their academic purpose of clear definition. They are not concerned with teaching children.

However, what children need to know about grammar and reading can and should be explained to them using plain English words that everyone can understand. Calling a sound a phoneme adds no meaning and dresses a simple idea up in a Greek word. Similarly grapheme, for a letter or group of letters. Calling word building "synthetic" phonics, as if it were a variety of artificial silk, is similar pretentious nonsense, and even worse is the folly of presenting the variations of English spelling that have grown up over centuries as variations on phonics to the exclusion of other influences. The Reading Reform Foundation, for all the work it has done in promoting interest in phonics, is a major offender, as were the previous government's Letters and Sounds materials.

Most children are adaptable enough to make sense of these adult errors. Some are not, and are then subjected to more of the same, sometimes using formulaic "teaching" structures carried out by teaching assistants who don't understand the work themselves. 

The teaching set out on this site uses the following terms, among others, to make things clear to learners. All terminology should be transparent as well as accurate, and there is much more to be done to improve this.The term "companion word" for "article" or "determiner" is, however, immediately valuable in teaching European languages as well as English, as it is often the companion word that gives fully reliable information on a word's gender. "Determiner" is arguably the worst term of all from a teaching point of view, as these words frequently determine nothing - one used to be called, more accurately the "indefinite article".  

Obscure terms	Plain English
phoneme	sound
grapheme	letter or group of letters
synthetic phonics	word-building, blending
connective	link word
subordinator	link word, starter word
determiner/article	companion word
tense	time zone

 An afterthought is that no academic should be allowed to advise the government on issues of language unless they can demonstrate that their advice is clear to children and works in the classroom. This should be easy to arrange, and would be instructive for the children, as well as, perhaps, for the professors.

 

Professor Belinda Jack, Gresham College.

Professor Belinda Jack presents a series of lectures at Gresham College, where she is professor of rhetoric, at this link. Professor Jack is a French scholar, and illustrates her lecture on reading with a splendid film clip from Marcel Pagnol, in which we see the young child moving from decoding phonics to reading between the words or lines, and with neuroscience, which she treats with due circumspection, while using what it can tell us. For example, it seems that an original phrase stimulates more brain reaction than a cliché. Professor Jack understands the importance of taking nothing for granted - for example, I didn't know the origin of cliché, and, if you don't know either, I'll leave you to enjoy Professor Jack's lecture, and finish with a quotation from Alan Bennett on HM's introduction to personal reading, and her response to a private secretary's suggestion that she rely on his briefing. "Briefing," said HM, " is terse. factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject. Reading opens it up."

Brilliant. And congratulations to Gresham College and the Museum of London for presenting the lecture so clearly, with a transcript and powerpoint.  More to come - next lecture 28th January, and all on You Tube. The thinking person's television.

The simple view of reading, and why it is too simple. Updated

A good and succinct account of the simple view of reading is here. Its basic idea is that reading consists of two elements, decoding, which it says is based on phonics, and comprehension, a time-honoured but obscure word that means understanding. 

The need for understanding is self-evident, and I welcome current research into building it up. JM Carroll and others, Developing Language and Literacy (Wiley, 2011) is an important account of this work.

The first reason the simple view is too simple lies in its equation of decoding with phonics. In order to decode in English, we need both phonics and a systematic approach to the occasions on which phonics does not work. It is not enough to say that there are irregular or sight words, as this leaves the learner with no systematic way of dealing with them, or of using the partial information conveyed by the letters that make them up.

We have, as far as I can find, no systematic research on the teaching of irregularity in English, and yet it is an issue that is obvious to everyone who has ever learned to read. For phonics proponents,  it is an Achilles' heel that has allowed the guessing game people to make fun of them, establish themselves in academic positions by means of factions, and impose nonsense on the population. For the guessing game "school of thought", it is a fact that they have misinterpreted and abused in equal measure to sustain an approach that has no basis whatever in research or practice.

What needs to be done? There are several options.

1. Careful case studies of people with serious difficulties.

2. Controlled trials. It is never possible to use the medical model in education for one overriding and essential reason - you cannot blind the teacher in the same way as you can a doctor. It is one thing to make two identical white pills, one with an ingredient and one without. It is another to expect a person to teach without knowing what he or she is doing (or supposed to be doing...)

3. Linguistic analysis. Irregularity in English is a fact, capable of objective observation and analysis without the need for experiment. It is therefore capable of investigation via inductive reasoning, provided that a model of spelling is accepted as a starting point.

What is not an option is to continue as we are, with two competing sets of half-truths. Or, more accurately, one three-quarter truth and one piece of sophisticated rubbish.

Update. The idea that word reading (aka decoding) and comprehension are the most important elements to reading appears  true. However, they are not the only elements. Reading also includes the grouping of words into phrases and sentences, and the right pattern of intonation and emphasis that is needed to bring out the full meaning of an English sentence. Quick, accurate word identification is essential to phrasing (See Perera, K, PhD, U Manchester c1989) but the idea of picking words with in a sentence for particular emphasis isn't always evident to people who have learned to read as English native speakers. These are good reasons for continuing to hear children read aloud, from demanding texts as well as from easy ones, well past the initial stages of learning to read.