John Bald/language and literacy

Technical Note. David Crystal and Lindsey Thomas: Making Sense and Teaching Grammar.

David Crystal's series on spelling (Spell It Out), punctuation (Making a Point) and now, grammar (Making Sense) demonstrates his gifts as an intellectual historian as well as a linguist. Unlike most such  historians, who deal with what is seen as the best that has been thought and said, Professor Crystal is more often concerned with exposing follies that have become entrenched across the centuries, and are sustained by force of habit and snobbery. Fortunately, this latest book also contains important ideas for teaching, centred on the Bucks Grammar Project, led by Lindsey Thomas.

Professor Crystal's demolition of the flaws in grammatical thinking is impeccable, and his encyclopaedic knowledge enables him to identify unsung heroes, notably Professor John Wallis FRS (1616-1703), who was the first to write a grammar of English without basing his description on Latin, with which English grammar has very little in common, The real link between English and Latin lies in vocabulary, as it does in all European languages.

Professor Crystal’s key idea is that the sentence is the unit that enables us to make sense of the words we use, hear or read. What constitutes a sentence is a matter of debate, and Professor Crystal offers the useful idea of "minor sentences" such as "Yes.", which do not contain the conventional structure of a subject and main verb. Professor Crystal draws a distinction between this time of sentence and an elliptical sentence, in which something has been left unsaid. To me, though, the idea can be extended to any that do not conform to the conventional structure. If we accept this this view, the single words and verbless sentences at the opening of Bleak House are sentences, beginning with capitals and ending with full stops. In any event, the idea of "minor sentences" allows us to focus on major sentences, which will be used almost all the time, while admitting occasional, deliberate, alternatives. This is one of the best ideas in the book.

Professor Crystal accepts his young daughter’s early, single-word utterances as sentences in their own right, when a great deal of the meaning is left unsaid. This is controversial, as so many children have to learn to add additional words to what they say in order to make and write understandable sentences. I also have trouble with two technical terms. English often requires nouns to be accompanied by what I describe as "companion words", such as my in my book, and a  in a table. Linguistics has coined the word "determiner" to describe these words, even though some of them are indeterminate.  I suggest that my alternative is more accurate and more understandable to children, though it may need further explanation to distinguish these, generally short, words from adjectives. The issue of tense, which I describe in terms of time zones, is another that needs further development, and Professor Crystal’s idea of integrating semantics – meaning – with the study of grammar offers a useful way forward.

The Bucks Grammar Project integrated grammatical teaching into the teaching of spoken and written language in a group of Buckinghamshire primary schools, with one project in a secondary modern school. The work at each stage is carefully matched to children's understanding. They study the construction of sentences, and experiment by varying structures in the course of their work, analysing their effects and improving the range that they use in their writing.  The principles are described in the Appendix to Making Sense, and in a series of free downloads, including over 100 pages of case studies, illustrated with children's work showing consistent evidence of progress.  I recommend these wholeheartedly.  Lindsey Thomas is now working independently, and can be contacted through her site.

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.

 

Writing Accuracy - Cheney School, Oxford.

Thanks to Cheney School for this lovely poster, and to Edutech and Suzi Bewell for passing it on.

I've also seen an outline of a hand - teacher puts in specific points an individual child needs to check.

These other links are well worth following up

Three #EdTech choices include: making movie posters, Pattern Paper & @EDpuzzle - See bit.ly/1jmSCsu pic.twitter.com/dW4h6kxs92