John Bald/language and literacy

Grammatical terms and language learning - Greek or English?

One of the problems in restoring the place of grammar in the teaching of English has been the choice of terminology. Too often, terms developed by the twentieth century discipline of linguistics have been put straight into the school system without thought as to whether they are the most suitable for young children. Sir Michael Wilshaw compounded the error in a newsletter praising teachers for children's knowledge of the Greek terms phoneme and grapheme to describe sounds, letters and groups of letters. There is no evidence whatever to link the use of these terms with success in reading, and for some children they are a barrier rather than a help.

One of these is a boy of eight, who eight months ago had  severely limited language and no knowledge of reading despite extensive and expensive private tuition. In teaching him, I began by establishing a clear idea of the links between letters and sounds, and how to blend these to read words - phonics.

I did not use any terminology other than normal English, and never do unless a new word is essential, as in verb. This pupil might have been able to parrot the terms phoneme and grapheme, but they would not have contributed to his understanding. Rugh Miskin's Ditties, as ever, did. There is no irregularity in them, so the new learner can practise with no distractions. What the teacher says, works.

As we move to a book that uses the full range of English spelling, we need to build on this basis by explaining how 26 letters can be used to convey the 600,000 or more words that are used in English. This means adding to the child's knowledge  by showing how groups of letters such as th (the Norman substitute for the Anglo-Saxon thorn,  þ), le(table), and even ough, have been incorporated into the phonic base. The child can then use them as part of his arsenal to read new words. This is not difficult to do, and this brilliant animation of the Bayeux Tapestry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtGoBZ4D4_E   shows clearly the brute force behind the imposition of French words on English. They now amount to almost a third of the total. My pupil and his parents were fascinated by it. If you're interested, there is more on thorn here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7BSAaI7AZk .

The book we chose was Burglar Bill, by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.  Using my explanation of the variation in the way letters interact makes it easy to explain why Janet is not pronounced in the same way as Jane - a difficult if not impossible task if you use the Greek terminology of "split grapheme".  Allan is more difficult.  The ll usually alters the sound of a, as in all, wall, tall etc, so he had to learn that the variation he had worked hard to understand applied usually, but not always. Finally, Ahlberg, German for "Eel mountain" is a further import. It's phonics, but German phonics, just as fruit and biscuit are perfectly regular as French words, but not English ones.

We learned all of these things, and other words in the book, such as the difference between say and says, and the contraction of the voice (vowel) sounds in breakfast,  by explanation, practice and quick flashbacks to establish them in the pupil's memory. Memory has been abused in education for millennia, and still is. This is not a reason not to learn to use it properly, and it is a key element in Hirsch's approach - we only know things if we can remember them (or, occasionally, remember where to find them). As it happened, the pupil had not had a book to practise with over the week, and so I was delighted that he had remembered the variations (eg say, says) that we had worked on, as well as working out new words with increasing confidence. 

The key lies in using the teacher's knowledge of the full range of elements in English spelling to make them clear to the pupil in terms that are easy to understand. This applies in all areas of grammar, where current terminology is an unhappy combination of words developed during the Renaissance ( eg adjective, which is short for the original term "noun adjective", ie unable to stand on its own) and inventions of twentieth century linguistics, such as "determiner", which frequently does not determine anything at all.  Any grammatical terminology is better than none, but the best is both accurate and easily understood by the pupil. This is work in progress, and it is supported by the evidence from brain research on the growth of neural networks. The old educational idea of linking new material to things children already know is entirely consistent with this, and introducing ideas abstracted from things the child does not understand, does not. I discuss the approach I developed for older children who have problems with English in this peer-reviewed journal (not that I hold any brief for peer review in education.)  There is more to be done, but I'm sure we don't need Greek for young children, far less term such as "determiner" which are even less informative and transparent than those they have replaced.

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.

Technical Note - the limitations of regression analysis

Regression analysis is a statistical technique that looks for correlations between a range of variables in research structures -  it might look for correlations between test scores and pupils' ages or whether they have free school meals.  The technique is often used to suggest that one factor is not just correlated with a final result, but causes it. This is difficult to prove, as it is not always easy to find out what it is in a factor that might cause the result, but it makes a convenient shortcut for people who want to argue that one factor - often income - causes another - often educational achievement,.

So, we can all be grateful to Professor Steven Gorard for this note in his chapter on Multiple Linear Regression in Arthur, J., Waring, M., Coe, R. & Hedges, L.V. (2012). Research Methods and Methodologies in Education. 

A zero or weak correlation coefficient does not mean that there is no interrelationship between the variables involved. It might just mean that the relationship is more complex than a single linear correlation. Also, regression does not test anything. It merely models a relationship that we predict as analysts. … It is certainly not evidence of a specific, or indeed any, causal relationship between the variables involved. p. 353

This will, of course, not prevent misuse of the technique for political purposes, but at least it makes the position clear.

 

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.

 

Developing understanding through conversation while teaching reading.

Michael Rosen and I do not exchange greetings cards. The reasons are mostly political, but partly to do with teaching. We've recently agreed on The Guardian's comment threads on two points - the importance of non-fiction, and of the value of conversation with children as a means of developing understanding. So, a little more here on conversation.

The teaching techniques on this site help people learn to read by adjusting their thinking so that they can use both the regular and irregular features of English spelling to identify words. I've never been happy with the term "decoding" for this process, as there are so many irregular features in English spelling, and from so many different sources, that it lacks the consistency we are entitled to expect from a code. It is more akin to "fuzzy logic".  

With learners who have previously failed, as most of mine have, the adjustments to thinking are often great, and the lessons can be intense. So, I developed a system of taking the pressure off by engaging them in conversations that were focused on their interests, sometimes linked to a point arising from the work, and sometimes not. I'd let the conversation run for as long as the learner - child or adult - wished it to, and then switch back without warning to whatever we'd been working on, causing electricity to flow along the new connections made in the brain, and stimulating memory. This approach had immediate teaching benefits, and was also amusing. Children would often learn to anticipate it, and would be ready to foil me with the right answer when I switchd back. Curses.

I begin the first session with new learners with an explanation of English spelling, its strengths and foibles, which explains all of the features of a word in terms of four broad categories - sound, information about another letter, groups of letters and history. So, bright eight year old, as she now is, had been interested in Armadillos from a project on South American animals, and we explored the origins of the word.

She also likes birds, and we worked in similar ways on the captions to the illustrations in Audubon's Birds of America - words such as wren, warbler, trumpeter swan - were reinforced by the striking and sometimes amusing images from the book, though it would have been too difficult for her to read these on her own. Conversation can be initiated by either the child or the teacher, but is not necessarily "led" by either. Teacher knows more than child, if only by virtue of having lived longer, and has the professional skill to present this knowledge in ways the child can understand (a nod to Jerome Bruner for his idea of "courteous translation"). Because the conversation is related to the child's interests, and usually involves a new slant on them, where possible through some beautiful book, it generates interest, enjoyment and satisfaction.

For one bright nine year old, the key was turned by a copy of the Duke of Berry's Book of Hours, still for me one of the most beautiful books ever, and the high point of medieval art. Showing her this wonder, and her appreciation of it, is something I recall very clearly, although it happened twenty-seven years ago.

Three brief progress reports - reading, straightline graphs, and geometry

A fourteen year old unable to read any text used in his school - in practical terms a complete non-reader, as the old definition of someone unable to recognise any words at all is unrealistic and useless. Explanation of English spelling, including its history and why it does not always tell us all we need to know, enabled him to read the title page and first two paragraphs of The Goalkeeper's Revenge after three lessons. This pupil could use phonics, but had to piece words together very slowly in doing so. As soon as a letter did not indicate the sound it most often did, he was completely lost. A "perfect storm" then - slow processing, combined with no ability to read any irregular words. 

The solution is to unpack each spelling that is not straightforward, explain it with examples of similar words, and then to practise, so that the words become inserted in long term memory, and the pupil does not have to start working them out from scratch each time. I've divided words into three broad categorise for this purpose:

1. Completely regular - cat, catamaran.

2. Secondary phonic patterns, where a letter influences the sound of a nother - eg "soft c and g" - face, city, cycle: gentle, gin, gyrate.

3. Irregular patterns, usually historical, where the letter simply does not indicate its usual sound or where pronunciation has changed over time. Egs. was, water (from German Wasser), table (French), the (th replacing phonically regular Anglo-Saxon alternative, at behest of Norman scribes).

Words in these categories included Naughton (caught, naughty)  Dalt (alter, Walter, salt)  Revenge (ge) satisfied, touched (fr touché). I can't see how anyone, from a standing start, could deduce "touched" from its letters without explanation. More to come on this pupil.

Straight line graphs. These involve a simple formula, in which one item - x - is defined in a constant way against another - y.  Sometimes an additional variable, m, is added to the solution, and this causes great confusion. A typical question would ask a pupil to plot X = 2y +1. The pupil would calculate the solution for two or three values of y, plot the points on a graph, and they should end up in a straight line. Pupil, however, had a problem with the difference between 2x and x squared. Leaving out the multiplication sign in what would otherwise have been written 2 (x) x  was a contraction he found it hard to keep in his head. One suggestion was to have a pencil as well as a pen, and put in the multiplication sign if he was likely to forget it. In fact, a lot of practice enabled him to use the contraction and he phoned me having achieved three straight-line graphs in a row in response to questions. This took a lot of hard work, though, and the real problem was with the compaction of information in the maths. Not everyone finds it easy to hold an absent multiplication sign in their head.

Geometry. 64 year old who had struggled painfully with Euclid in his youth, spending hours and getting migraines over work which took people who knew what they were doing five minutes, obtained from the internet and understood the first three propositions, which use the fact that the radius of a cirle is the same at any pont in the circle, so that we know that one straight line is of exactly the same length as another. There are three possible sources for this individual's initial confusion - 1. He missed a lesson. 2. He wasn't paying attention. 3. The postulates and axiioms of Euclid were thought to be too obvious to be worth mentioning. At this distance in time, I really can't remember which it was...

The Dyslexia Debate, Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko. Review

In 2005, Professor Julian (Joe) Elliott, of Durham University, took part in a television programme that claimed that there was no way of distinguishing between "dyslexia" and other forms of reading difficulty. This was followed by a conference in London, to which I contributed a case study, and this book is the long-term follow up. 

Professor Elliott, and his Yale colleague Professor Elena Grigorenko, have produced the widest-ranging analysis of research into the subject I've ever seen, with seventy pages of references to research, ranging from the battles over phonics to the latest brain scan evidence. While they give credit where it’s due, their criticisms of the limitations of the research evidence they scrutinise are consistent and convincing. Even brain research evidence, the clearest yet of a genuinely biological basis to reading difficulty, has its limitations clearly exposed – the illustrations of brain dysfunction that have resulted from scans are composites, and do not yet provide any clear evidence that can be used to help individuals. Their conclusion is that it is still impossible “to identify a dyslexic subgroup in any consistent or coherent fashion that would be acceptable to the scientific or professional community” (p.170).  The term “dyslexia” therefore has “outgrown its diagnostic and conceptual usefulness”, and should be “discontinued.”

And yet it is “untenable”, say the authors, to deny that some reading difficulties are biological in origin. They propose instead that such difficulties be termed "reading disability". The problem here is that most people assessed as dyslexic are not disabled - a young man who had been so assessed approached me in Oxford while I was carrying the book, and we had an interesting discussion about its contents and his experience. He was now working as a retail manager, and found it ridiculous to think that he was in some way disabled. What he and others in his position need are some adjustments to the ways in which they are taught. These adjustments are known to some (not all) teachers,  and are based on a strand of case-study research beginning with the work of Grace Fernald - whose 1943 classic, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects is not listed in the references. Only one article of Fernald's is listed, from 1921, and evidence of her techniques is seen as "anecdotal". This term in itself is too easy - the whole of surgery is based on clinical observation and case study, and it is as valid a research technique as any other.

The dismissal of evidence on the use of tints is similarly based. If we take from the physical sciences and the development of new drugs the idea of a double-blind, randomised, controlled trial as "gold standard" research, it is self-evident that the method can't be applied to a tint, as everyone can see it. We can't have a "partially sighted" trial.

Here are three cases involving tints:

1. A very bright girl who read excruciatingly slowly, but with perfect accuracy and understanding. She explained that she needed to read everything twice, and with an overlay immediately read just as well, but faster than she could articulate the words.

2. A school secretary whose desk was opposite a glass panel behind which was an unshaded fluorescent light, and who was losing days of work at a stretch through incapacitating migraine. Covering the panel with cardboard and adding a blue tint to her computer screen removed the problem.

3. A boy whose behaviour deteriorated so rapidly when he started school that he became a danger to himself and his family. After five years of misery, a teacher in a private school tried a tint and the problems disappeared.

Three anecdotes. There are many similar cases on migraine, but they remain anecdotes. Or cases, if we consider that they are essentially true, and the outcome of professional observation. None of these people were dyslexic, however the word might be defined - they were sensitive to certain elements in light, a different issue, but one that can cause devastating problems with learning to read and write.

Which brings us to Dr Terry Moore and Chris Carling, and their advocacy of Thomas Locke's approach to language study in Language Understanding: Towards a Post-Chomskyan linguistics. Locke's pragmatism, using best avaiable evidence, will not produce a perfect solution - or the illusion of one - but will, as he says, probably get our ship into port. We can't match people who are assessed as dyslexic with controls with any reliability, so case studies and other evidence are the best we have, and some of their shortcomings can be tackled by using standardised tests and long-term follow-up, as in the Clackmannanshire reading research.

In the end, the problems of investigating the range of issues known as dyslexia lie as much in the limitations of scientific method as in the elusiveness of the phenomenon itself. It is there - though probably in no more than 1.5% of people and not the 5%+ suggested by psychological tests - and teachers need to tackle it. The way forward is to consider each element of evidence, including test scores on issues such as memory and processing speed, on its merits, and to tackle the specific issues that they indicate, without recourse to the global term "dyslexia". I never use it myself unless someone else does first, which may be a start. 

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.

 

Progress report, bright seven year old and 9 year old.

Bsyo knew 2x this week with just one slip in place on 6x2, which she corrected quickly, so we started on 3x, she saying them with me and losing place much less often than she had while learning 2x.  V pleased and happy.  9 year old, who had not known 2x at the beginnng of December, completed his first multiplicaton practice, multiplying three-digit numbers by single digits, using the standard method. I'd given him half a dozen and asked him to do more - mum was confident that he'd succeeded, and, when I checked, he had made only one error in 15 examples. This is excellent progress in three months, and was made possible by explaining how to move the overflow numbers (aka carrying) without getting confused. This week, he will practise multiplying by two-digit numbers.

Bsyo's reading keeps getting better, though she still has to go back and work out words one letter at a time. So, we work on blending letter combinations, using the technique of working on similar words to a word that has caused a problem, then going back to it. We are now at the end of Ruth's purple set of books, and there is a twist - Bsyo reads the parent's introduction as well as the book itself, so that she learns to read longer and more intersting words such as continue, impressed and ignore, as well as building up her blending skills. She'd been dressing up as a Roman Empress at school, and liked the impression of a leaf on a reproduction Roman vase we have in the house.

Nine year old has written a nine-line description of Oliver Twist, with accurate grammar and punctuation, but some spelling mistakes, including groul for gruel, workes and skruffy. We work on these using the principles of Slimmed Down Spelling. I get out my Doulton set of Dickens characters and he decides his next description will be of Mr Jack Dawkins, aka Dodger. We read the Dickens introduction to Dodger, and mum will re read it with 9yo before he writes his description. This writing was a solid L3 overall, and a good base for reaching the expected standard by the time he goes to secondary school. 9yo's life is changing for the better.