John Bald/language and literacy

Susan Gets Stuck: How Picture Cues Can Confuse Children Learning to Read.

This is the text of an article published by The Times Educational Supplement, Feb 14 1992). It remains relevant, and I have added some notes to clarify the context of the time.

Susan, who is nine and finds reading very difficult, chooses to read The Magic Key, from the Oxford Reading Tree, Stage 5. She looks at the picture on the first page, and begins to read the text, which is “The box was by Chip’s bed. Something was glowing inside it.”

She gets stuck on “something”, but scans the illustration, which shows a box with a bright light coming from it. Susan reads “shining” instead of “something”, then cannot make sense of the rest of the sentence as this has led her into a semantic blind alley. Asked how she knew that the word was “shining”, she replied confidently that the picture tells her.

This is only partly true. Susan had used light sampling of the phonological information in word – the error has the same initial letter and the same letter as the word in the text – and her reading makes sense in the context of what she has just read, even though it prevents her from making sense of what comes next.

Stopping at the full stop might have helped, but the use of punctuation in reading receives only a passing mention in the non-statutory guidance for the national curriculum (1989 version), while picture cues appear as the first point of reference at Level 2, both as a source of meaning and as an aid to deciphering new words. This formulation is based on the well-established idea that young children use all available strategies to make sense of text, and that concentration on one approach limits their effectiveness as readers.

It does not, however, give any guidance as to the relative contribution of these strategies to the development of independent reading. This lack of differentiation, combined with the cramming of so many of the word-recognition and decoding aspects of reading into Level 2, has blunted the impact of the national curriculum on the quality of children’s reading. More specifically, the prominence given to picture luces, re-inforced by the use of heavily-illustrated books in the assessment procedures, could easily lead many more children like Susan into problems which are largely the result of following their teacher’s advice.

Part of the problem is that the illustrations have so much to offer. They attract children to books, help sustain their interest, and offer an additional channel of communication that enables the author particularly in the early stages of reading, to conevy greater detail than is possible through words alone. But the disadvantage to this use of illustration to extend meaning is that it makes them much less reliable as cues to individual words in a text.

Put simply, if the picture contains more than the text, how is the child to know just what it is in the picture that provides the connection to the word he or she is trying to read? To the fluent reader, to whom picture and text are equally and instantly comprehensible, the connection is obvious, and it seems equally obvious that the child should be encouraged to use it. However, there has been very little research into the practical benefit of encouraging children to think in this way rather than concentrating on text-based strategies. What research there is suggests that clues derived from pictures do not help children to remember words outside that specific context.

Susan’s error is not uncommon. Weak readers often allow information from a picture to override the print when they do not recognise words on sight, even when it means departing from the text completely. (Note, 2019. Morag MacMartin’s PhD thesis, Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in Primary Pupils, OU 1992, confirms this point and explains it in detail). Where text and picture are designed to convey the same meaning, this is less likely, but in most real contexts, where the connections are more sophisticated, the strategy of prediction becomes a two-edged weapon for a would-be reader.

The solution is not to deny the role of pictures in the process of learning to read, but to clarify it and set it in the context of other factors that have been clearly identified by research. These included the effectiveness of phonological teaching, to tune children into patterns in sound before expecting them to attach them to letters, (Note, 2019, more accurate to say that letters and sounds are taught together, not that phonological awareness is taught on its own) the importance of fast, accurate word identification in the development of phrasing (Perera, K, Phd, Manchester 1989); and the detailed instruction in sound-symbol correspondence in the Reading Recovery programme (2019 note: The element “Hearing the Sounds in Words” is not enough to secure this connection in the context of the program as a whole, which has taken scant, if any, interest in the research in phonics). Using pictures as cues to words is a pre-reading skill, and should be moved to Level 1. (2019 note: this again relates to the 1989 NC – levels are now abolished.)

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.

Slow but steady progress with a seven year old - the end of chapter 1.fridge,

Danny The Champion of the World is a good teaching book for a pupil aged seven to eight. For this pupil, it was a big jump from his starting point as a non-reader, and we can only fit in short teaching sessions, 15 mins or so, at the end of the school day once a week, when his father picks him up. The teaching technique is the same basic one - if he gets stuck or misreads a word, we go to another that has the same pattern of letters and sounds, usually at the end, and teach that one thoroughly. We then add more so that he does not have to blend each one from scratch, and, when he is confident, we return to the word in the text, usually taking it from the start of the sentence. In the last three sessions, we have been re-reading the paragraph from the previous week, then one or two new ones depending on how tired he is. We've nearly reached the end of chapter 1, and words such as although, paraffin, gipsies, ceiling, electricity are now within his grasp, sometimes with a double take. There was a slight improvement this week in fluency too.

Essentially, we'd reached a plateau, with a lot of consolidation, and that slight improvement in speed that shows that the plateau is not perfectly flat. After the immediate impact of the first lessons, we have moved to slow progress, as pupil applies his new knowledge to a broader range of words. 

Update, one week later, much more confident progress to reach the end of the first chapter of Danny, with immediately, especially and frightened read without hesitation, but work needed on bough, would and fridge, though once again some self-correction. Class teacher and parent continue to say that these very short sessions - 15m - are valuable to pupil, and fitted today's in around a difficult CPD commitment.

Todd Risley and Betty Hart. Research into young children's language, and a gap in university library provision.

Dr Todd Risley and Betty Hart researched differences in the spoken language experienced by young children over a period of forty years or so. Dr Risley's account of his work (click on the picture above), is an excellent summary of their findings, which are very litte known inthe UK. I found them through a reference in Sir James Rose's report, cited in Ros Wilson's Big Writing, which I will review shortly. Well worth listening to. Copies are not held in either of two major university libraries which I've just checked, and this seems an attempt at academic censorship - if books are not in the library, students have no way of knowing about them, and in some cases this is not an accident. Dr Risley died in 2008.

A summary of the research in their first book, Meaningful Differences, is here. 

A left-leaning progressive critique is here . It criticises Risley and Hart for their evaluative analysis of the quality of interaction, but does not address the key question of whether or not this analysis is accurate. It certainly is accurate. If the main use of speaking is controlling behaviour and getting through the business of the day,  there is no room for language to operate to develop thinking and understanding. There are three UK sources of corroborative evidence. Tizard's Young Children Learning found that less educated mothers tended to take a more negative attitude to children's questions than more educated ones, the Bristol Child Development Study found that the least successful child in school had had no recorded experience of stories before starting school, and Ward and Ward, in Manchester, found that children in a council estate were being assessed as deaf because they had not learned to respond to the human voice. 

The final paragraph of this critique contains two key points:

But, in our view, the language differences Hart and Risley reported are just that—differences. All children come to school with extraordinary linguistic, cultural, and intellectual resources, just not the same resources. It is the responsibility of teachers to draw on these resources in support of
school learning, including teaching the language practices valued in school. If there are crucial language experiences needed for school success, then teachers must provide them. The remedy
for disproportionate levels of failure among children living in poverty is a school curriculum that
respects their background knowledge and experience and builds on students’ linguistic, cultural
and cognitive “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) to teach them what they
need to achieve success. As Gloria Ladson-Billings’s (1994) research reminds us, respect is
the key to successful teaching. Ultimately, this is about respect for students’ knowledge, who they
are, and where they come from.

The first is an error. International evidence shows clearly that these children are not receiving from home the intellectual element that educated parents give their children. Tizard's evidence on questions is a key point here, and more important than whether a request or instruction is given directly or indirectly.  The second is true, and the foundation of the stronger elements in Reading Recovery, and of the Big Talk in Ros Wilson's work.

Finally, the first author of this critique, Professor Curt Dudley-Marling, could find food for thought in his own CV, which contains frequent references to "learning disability". Most of the people he describes as disabled are not disabled at all - their problem is that they have not been taught effectively, and putting the term disability on top of this makes the situation permanent.

"Life-changing breakthrough" - notes from a parent in Scotland.

After lesson 1, by skype, from Linton, Cambridgeshire, to Falkirk, Stirlingshire.

I wanted to extend my thanks for what can only be described as a life-changing breakthrough for both my daughters. 

Your ability to break down spelling into understandable chunks, in an historical context, has made all the difference.  S. now understands she is not an idiot.  She is walking on air today and is even enjoying maths - all because she now knows that she is not inadequate in any way.  The psychological knot in her mind is being loosened.  She feels that she IS able to learn.

 You are the first person who has been able to explain why our language and spelling system operates the way it does, in a simple (but not simplistic) way that and 11 year old can understand.  Most important was your teaching about word groupings and how groups of letters can sound quite different to their individual parts and even make similar sounds, such as 'sh' as in 'ship' and then 'ti' as in 'patient'.  No one had told S. that before.

 Don't get me wrong: I can see the utility of phonics and it helped my children in the basics of reading but alas, beyond a certain level of complexity, it a bit like trying to complete a jigsaw with one third of the pieces missing.  It's possible to formulate a reasonable guess as to what the finished puzzle will look like but much of the detail will be lost. 

 John, you have shown me that's it time to stop blaming the pupils and even the teachers (who can teach what they do not know?) and to put a system in place that is simple in its delivery but comprehensive in its scope.  I hope that those in positions of power start to listen to you.

 

After lesson 3.

 

Wow!  The children were ecstatic after their seesion with you yesterday and I wanted to let you know what a difference you are making to them (and me).  

 

Firstly, their comments:

"I feel as though I'm making a massive improvement."  

"I have a much clearer view of grammar. "What really made the difference was the combination of simple, clear explanations combined with a greater degree of depth that we have been taught before.  Understanding why things were this way."

 "It was really helpful to get the historical backstory.  It satisfied my curiosity and made things make more sense because they were put in context."

"My maths confidence is through the roof.  I feel now that I CAN do it.  It was just that my teachers at school didn't really teach me a system that is quick and gets right results.  John helped me to see patterns in numbers that I'd never noticed and this has made arithmetic a lot easier."

 

And finally:

"The biggest change is that we feel we can do it.  That we are capable of understanding.  It's like a whole world is being decoded for us.   John is better than any teacher we've ever had - we are light years ahead of where we previously were."  "... and it's nice to be made to feel intelligent, to be praised.  I'm starting to believe..."

 

Not much needs to be added to these statements about the effectiveness of your teaching methods.  My children both INSISTED that they dictate their comments to me - I can assure you it wasn't my idea.  That shows how happy they are, how confident they feel about moving forward.  It is clear that what works is a clear focus, simple and clear instruction whilst elucidating a logical pattern of events so that the children can see how, for example, grammar naturally works that way, or that sentences flow better this way etc.  Understanding the provenance of words (in the absence of Latin and Greek) really opened up a whole world of interest.  My daughter commented that she felt ignorant to believe a 'Utopia' was a paradisical, imaginary world after you'd talked to them about Thomas More.  This has made them want to read 'Utopia' out of sheer interest.  And so the intellect is developed quite naturally without being forced.  I have noticed how interested my children become when you talk to them as if they were intellectually capable as opposed to spoon-feeding snippets of data to be regurgitated in an exam or test.  Now they are willing learners.  What more could parent ask for?

 

You have drawn out the joy of learning which is particularly impressive in S. who was told she was probably dyslexic, engaged in over a year of Reading Recovery to little effect and who disliked school so intensely (apart from the social side) that I had to remove her little over a year ago.  Now, she studies for nine hours per day, much of that self-taught, and voluntarily uses a dictionary, writes stories and volunteers to work maths problems at the board.  Most importantly, her growing confidence is allowing her to 'self-correct'.  She will stop herself, notice that an error has been made and happily fix it.

 

All in all, wonderful results.  I really feel there is an argument for this style of teaching in the classroom.  It may seem like more work but when the time has been taken to explain concepts in depth - the why of things - children make the connections which grow exponentially, across subject areas.

 

We're all over the moon and looking forward to experiencing these same principles applied to French grammar!

 

PS. The first French lesson is here.

Professor Greg Brooks: What Works for Children and Young People with Literacy Difficulties?

Greg Brooks' analysis of current research evidence on a range of intervention strategies, published by the Dyslexia/SpLD Trust,  is exemplary. Each piece of evidence is analysed clearly and fairly, with a succinct and accurate conclusion that should make this work a reference point for new research, both to ensure good design, and to avoid errors.  

It includes this study by the OU of the Easyread scheme, a new approach to phonic processing that has enabled pupils to make accelerated progress over a period of four months.   

The Open University has been collecting data, using a randomized control trial (RCT), on the Easyread System in six London schools between October 2011 and June 2013. The trial has been managed by Professor David Messer with the assistance of Dr Gilly Nash.

100 children were assigned randomly to an Easyread Group and a Control Group.

During the trial some of the most challenged readers in the Control Group left their respective schools (perhaps in frustration of not being included in the first wave of Easyread intervention!). Meanwhile some of the best readers from the Easyread group also left their schools. So the two groups ended up showing a different average start point, despite being originally equal.

Over the first 12 months, this is what happened:

 

The Easyread Group actually reached a normal reading level for their age after doing around 120 lessons. Meanwhile the majority of the Control Group continued to fall behind.

The trial continued and in January 2013 the children of the Control Group were also put on the Easyread System. By June 2013 the Control group had done around 50 Easyread lessons:

 

These figures present a preliminary analysis of the data by Professor David Messer. He has commented “these findings although only a first analysis of the data are very encouraging. The two groups of children were identified by their schools as being in need of help with their reading and each group had below average scores on a reading test. After taking part in Easyread lessons the reading of the two groups had improved and the average scores of the two groups were just above what would be expected for children of this age. Over the coming months a full analysis will be made prior to publication in an academic journal."

Copyright Morgan Learning Solutions Ltd 2013.

 

(JB again) While there remains more than one way to approach this issue, the evidence here is both impressive and independent. The one element lacking is what Bradley and Bryant referred to as the "taught control group", which was used to check that it was not just additional attention and practice that was making a difference, rather than the new scheme itself. It's surprising that the OU missed this point. Nevertheless, the rapid progress made by Easyread children after moving to the scheme at a late stage is another very impressive feature. I recommend clicking on the full version here

Professor Brooks' analysis of research on Reading Recovery once again shows the problem that has dogged this scheme from the outset - pupils are shown making well above average progress during their time on the scheme, and building on these gains a year later, but are not able to be followed through to Year 4, so that the much-repeated claim of sustained average progress cannot be substantiated. RR has had decades to address this point.

 

 

Reading Recovery: an international quango in urgent need of reform. (Revised and updated)

The late Dame Marie Clay's contribution to education is based on extensive research and published work, beginning with  Observing Young Readers (1982) and ending with Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals, (2005, Heinemann US and NZ). The first showed that failing six year olds not only read roughly a twentieth as much as successful readers, but were making far more mistakes in what they did read, and correcting far fewer of their errors themselves. They were thinking differently, and less effectively, and so needed different teaching. The techniques used by successful teachers in Auckland were collected, and formed the basis of the manual for Reading Recovery, a scheme designed to improve their thinking so that they could make similar progress to other pupils. The latest book is an update to the manual, and follows criticism that it had not been kept up to date. It has still not been published in the UK, but is available via Amazon, here.

The main change is Dame Marie's acceptance of "phonemic awareness" - conscious knowledge of patterns of sound - (TES, Connecting Patterns, 1.3.88), otherwise known as "onset and rime" - as a key element in relating sounds to letters. The best feature, and one that I recommend wholeheartedly, is the section on getting these children whom she describes, accurately enough, as "hard to teach" to begin to write. This section alone makes the book worth buying, and I've already prestented it to teachers on a training course, alongside Clicker 6, which will make it easier to use.

Phonics, though, remains a blind spot for Dame Marie, who still associates it with the presenting to children the idea that a letter can represent only one sound. She sees a research finding by Kaye (2002) that young fluent readers tend to use letters in clusters rather than one at a time as somehow contradicting the value of phonics, whereas the truth is that it is fast, accurate, application of phonic knowledge that enables them to do this.  Dame Marie approves of "word-breaking" - aka analytic phonics - but not "word building" and, while she includes several put-downs of phonics, there is no mention of it in the index. RR has avoided the issue for the whole of its existence, and continues to do so. As a result, it is not eligible for federal funding in the US, much to the organisation's fury. Thanks to Karina Mclachlain for this information. 

So, where does this leave Reading Recovery?

First, we need to distinguish between teaching techniques, some of which are very useful in themselves, and their use as a manual. Teaching conscious attention to sounds and their links to letters enables children to proceed to use word-building as well as word-breaking, and RR's refusal to include this, aka synthetic phonics, in its manual, is pure obstinacy. There is a hidden element of look and say in its approach to new words that, at best, slows down the process of learning to read and at worst prevents it. Reading Recovery has a considerable and predictable failure rate that is both expensive and distressing - click for my successful work with a child who had previously had RR to no avail.

Next, the timing and structure of the scheme are inflexible, bureaucratic and wasteful. We know by the time they are five which children are likely to have difficulty in learning to read, and should not let them fail for two years before doing something about it. The best schools tackle the problem by building the necessary understanding from nursery onwards. If schools know their children, spending two weeks "roaming round the known" is a waste of time and money.  A skilled teacher can find out what a weak reader already knows in minutes, rather than weeks, and can make an impact on the problem - in most cases, turn it round - in the first lesson.  In the Foundation Lesson, the teacher inspires immediate confidence, backed by the fact that the child will immediately begin to get things right and continue to do so. See the examples below.  

Picking the weakest six children in a class for RR is also arbitrary - in some classes, fewer than six children will need help, and in others the whole class will. Similarly, the criterion of subsequent average progress for the class is meaningless - in a high-attaining class, a child could be doing well, but still be behind the others. In a class where most of the pupils are failing, doing as well as they are is of no benefit.

The National Foundation for Educational Research found in 1988 that RR pupils in London started secondary school with a reading age of 8.4. Better than zero, but nothing to shout about. RR's response to this finding was a propagandist article in The Guardian saying I should have been pleased with the result. They are easily pleased. They have, unfortunately, succeeded in conning a lot of politicians with their mantra of "accelerated progress first, sustained average progress later". This is salesmanship rather than education, and needs to be resisted.

Reading Recovery gives children who need it the undivided, trained attention of an adult who understands children of their age, and gives them work they can do, rather than forcing them into a pace they can't match. It has, however, become fossilised  and needs urgent reform. Until this happens, it should be treated like any other quango, and receive no more public money. Big charities investing in it should ensure that the outcome is evaluated independently, and in particular should track children's progress carefully, at least until the age of 11.

 

Reading Reform Foundation: a note

Following a link from the RRF forum to my recent posting on Reading Recovery, I posted this on their site:

Recent links from RRF to my comments on Reading Recovery have prompted me to offer this account of my personal journey in reading teaching in the hope that it might interest forum members

Shortly after I started teaching, a colleague introduced phonics to a class as "the science of reading and writing." I was taken by this and began turning the idea over in my mind. I like science, and had already seen too much guesswork. Moving to a school with a reading unit, under the redoubtable Mike Burton - not the rugby player, but in the same mould, only a bit bigger - I found that phonics helped me to make an immediate impact on reading problems, but in an unusual way.

Shortly after I started teaching, a colleague introduced phonics to a class as "the science of reading and writing."   I was taken by this and began turning the idea over in my mind. I like science, and had already seen too much guesswork. Moving to a school with a reading unit, under the redoubtable Mike Burton - not the rugby player, but in the same mould, only a bit bigger - I found that phonics helped me to make an immediate impact on reading problems, but in an unusual way.

A 13 year old couldn't read the word "round".  I took a pound note out of my pocket - that's how old I am - and the pupil of course knew what it was. I carefully explained the combination of letters ound, changed the first letter a couple of times and worked on some other words with the ou combination. We then went back to the book and he read the word without difficulty. I was mildly surprised, but quite pleased. Mike was a fan of Bevé Hornsby, and I got a copy of Alpha To Omega, developing a great series of sets of words written on blank playing cards that I would use whenever pupils stumbled on a word. This book is organised in terms of letter combinations, and was one of the first to include soft c and g and the idea of a letter as a wall, either to keep two vowels apart so that the first one stayed short (stopping, sloping) or to stop a the softening in plague.

Bevé had, in short, catalogued most of the features of English that are not the most common phonic patterns and grouped them together. I found this very helpful, particularly in getting pupils's reading ages up from around 8 to 10 or 11. I used flash cards and games for reinforcement, but always explained everything in as much detail as I was able. I never used look and say, and I mean never, not "hardly ever."

Fast forward 40 years. to the brain research summarised in Blakemore and Frith's The Learning Brain, which remains I think, the clearest introduction to this field for teachers. We find in it a comparison of brain activity in reading aloud in English and Italian, which shows an area of the brain that is active in English, and that the authors call the "word form" area. It is used to interpret the information from letters so that we know, for example, the difference between to and go. Its implication is that, in Italian, the letters tell us what we need to know all the time, but that in English, we need to interpret what they tell us - we need, in short, to know what they are telling us in a particular word.

Somewhere in the middle of this journey, I was teaching a sixteen year old non-reader in Clacton - more accurately, trying to teach him - when my colleague, the late Avril Lofthouse, pointed out that my instruction to the student to sound out an awkward word couldn't work, because the letters did not correspond exactly to the spoken word. She was quite right, and this again made me think over several days. If the information indicated by letters was not reliable, what could we do?

The guessing game people were clearly wrong, as their approach had led to wholesale illiteracy, on a scale worse than we have not - at Beaufoy in the seventies, we would frequently have children starting secondary school unable to read anything at all, and we don't have quite so much of that these days. The answer came to me from my days of swotting my way to a decent degree in French - I am a slow learner, which my piano teacher says has probably helped me to understand people with learning difficulties. If we look at the words fruit and biscuit, they are pronounced in exactly the same way in French, but differently in English. We spell table as we do because it is a French word, and in French the l is pronounced before the e. If children were to read these words - and I mean those who were not confident enough to play around with letters, sounds and context until they found a fit - they had to be explained.

This, though, is what Bevé Hornsby did not do. She listed very nearly every variation in spelling, but did not explain why things are as they are, probably because she did not know. The full picture, in fact, has only become clear following the computerisation of the full Oxford English Dictionary, which allows all of its copious (an understatement) examples to be analysed so that we can track and explain changes. I have found that this explanation, and making it clear to children, is the key to teaching reading in English, and an essential adjunct to synthetic phonics. David Crystal's explanation of how it happened in history almost mirrors the development of this understanding in a child. Anglo Saxon English had around 50,000 words and was very regular - Queen was spelled cwen, and they had their own letter, þ, to indicate th , so that our the was written þe. William the Conqueror and his scribes did not like anything Anglo-Saxon, and so replaced the "thorn" letter with th.

At a recent inset course, an assistant said that it could take her up to a year to teach a child to read the, as they persisted in trying to sound out the word one letter at a time. I showed a video in which I taught a 7 year old with this problem - he had been assessed as dyslexic and had already had two years of individual private teaching - how to read this and similar words in around 8 minutes. I do things like this all the time, and have been doing so since the mid-nineties. Google my name and Sue Palmer's for one parent's view, and see my site for the latest feedback from parents, which sounds too good to be true, except that it is true.

Explanation of the language as it is, and how it has come to be as it is, unlocks reading block - one parent, an army colonel with three daughters who are now all graduates, described it as "turning a key" - and enables children to approach blending and word building as something that will help them most of the time, but not always. Once they understand why this is so - I explain it with simple analogies between language and other human foibles - they can learn to read remarkably quickly. As long ago as the early nineties, when I'd just finished my battle against Essex Education Department's ignorant guessing game approach to reading, the local paper recorded a two year gain in reading age, independently tested, after seven lessons. The most recent feedback on my site is even better.

Reading Reform was necessary when this organisation was founded, and remains so. It is, though, not to be achieved by a presentation of language as purely phonic, loading teaching with unnecessary adult terminology, and printing some words in different colours in an attempt to get children to suspend the rules that the teacher has just carefully taught. Synthetic phonics is the basis of learning to read. No one presents it any more as the whole story - the "science of reading and writing" - but what is needed is not a combination of phonics and guesswork. We need to give children the full picture, clearly explained in terms they understand, and turn the fuzzy logic of English spelling into an object of curiosity and pleasure, rather than an obstacle.

Having reached the age of 64, immortalised in song, I'm happy to show anyone how this works free, gratis and for nothing, either here or via skype. So, if you have pupils for whom everything is working as well as you'd like, ignore this. If there are any who are stuck, sit in and see what you think.

Lesson 4, seven year old pupil, Kettlewell School

 This was lesson four by Skype from Linton, Cambs, to Nettlewell, Yorks. Previous lessons are below.  None has lasted more than 30 mins, and today's just 18. We continued to read from the DK reference book on the Humpback Whale. Jodi Storey's note first, then mine.

Jodi: I was completely and utterly surprised to listen to JH’s progress with you this evening. He is now: 

• Remembering words like ‘ancient’, ‘myths’ ‘Trident’ and ‘flukes’ for a whole week.
• Able to work out words from their combinations of letters and contexts- before we can come up with similar formations – e.g. clouds, thread and these
• Able to remember words as tricky as ‘through’ and sight read them – almost
• Willingly read and re-read for perfection (those tricky plurals)
• Differentiation between ‘breaths’ and ‘breathes’ ! (JB - he worked this out for himself before I had a chance to explain it!)
• Despite and above my use of the tracking pen – start to self – correct and read for meaning!!

 THANK YOU!

John This was excellent progress after roughly an hour and a half's teaching. I would add to Jodi's points

• In addition to remembering Triton, JH was able to use his knowledge of the first i to read Titan, and then Titanic, changing the point of emphasis appropriately between the two words. He knew about Titanic, and was interested in the story of the lifeboats (only carried in case she had to aid another ship).
• JH had to work hard on prononuncing s a the end of a word, and on keeping himself from adding s where there was none, but he read two pages without this error by the end of this short lesson.
• JH is beginning to work words out and correct himself, sometimes so quickly that he had worked out a word, notably through, spray and mist, before I had time to explain it to him.
• Jodi considers this reference book to be above the expected level for a seven year old, and I agree, though we still have work to do before he can read it with full confidence. 
• JH said last week that he was dyslexic. From the way he was working out new words on his own this evening, and generalising from his new knowledge of letter patterns, I suspect he may change his mind in a month or two.

 

Reviews: Teaching Grammar in the Primary School, and Reading and Spelling Irregular words.

Teaching Grammar Effectively in Primary Schools. David Reedy and Eve Bearne, United Kingdom Literacy Association.

This is one of the clearest and most practical books on this topic I’ve seen, and will be of immediate help to many primary teachers.  There is a very clear pattern of progression in topics covered from Years 1 to 6, and an interesting teaching system known as REDM – reading and investigation, explicit teaching, discussion and experimentation, and making controlled writing choices.

The last of these is the ultimate aim of teaching grammar – it puts children in control of what they do, and enables them to make informed decisions rather than guessing.   Each topic comes with a complete teaching plan, including activities for practice and a “terminology check.”  I was grateful to this for the clearest explanation I've seen yet of the term "modal verb" - a verb that operates with another, adding to its meaning, but didn't so much like its use of the term "stative" for verbs that don't convey an action. "Stative" is a hideous and misleading term invented by linguists who prefer one word to a clear phrase. The French call them "verbs of state". We should not use adult terminology with young children until they can understand it, and should not use that particular term at all. The obvious interference from everyday language is that these verbs state something.

There is good advice on paragraphing, but I'm not convinced that letting children work out how punctuation works is a good idea at all - a good many will never do so. I tackle this point in Go-to Grammar.   I've bought this book, though, for its ideas on helping children to extend their sentence construction.

Towards an Understanding of How Children Read and Spell Irregular Words. Sarah P McGeown, Rhona S Johnston and Gerri E Moxon.  Journal of Research in Reading, Vol37, 1, 2014.

An interesting study of the factors that predict children’s scores on a test of reading spelling irregular words  that showed the best predictor as…their ability to phonically regular  non-words, and their scores on the British Ability Scales spelling test.  The other items tested, vocabulary and their recognition of book titles (used as a measure of reading frequency) did not correlate anything like as highly with success.

The authors’ contention that irregular words in English are quasi-regular is supported by studies of the history of language, most recently and notably by Crystal’s Spell it Out.  However, their suggestion that the fact that regular word spelling and decoding predict the decoding of irregular words is more difficult to prove.  Fluent readers and spellers need to be good at both, as English has a high level of irregularity in spelling, but by no means all children develop what one of their reference points, Share, describes as “a self-teaching mechanism”.  For many weak readers, slow processing of regular material goes alongside complete inability to cope with irregular words, even  of very high frequency.  It is also true that most irregular words in English do not depart wholly from the normal correspondence of letters and sounds – the letters always tell us something, even if not everything. Who and the are probably the least regular words, where only one letter in three gives us the sound we would expect most frequently.

The authors are frank about the limitations of this study, including the use of the title test as an indicator of reading frequency.  They have, though, done us a great service by providing evidence of the links between regular and irregular patterns, and of the patterns that exist in irregular words. These can and should be explained and taught.