John Bald/language and literacy

Intelligent children with reading difficulties: two progress reports.

Bright seven year old, who could not read just over three weeks ago, as she tried to sound out each word one letter at a time, and so became confused and frustrated every time she met the word the.  The immediate progress once irregularity was explained has been noted below, as has her wish to read Alice in Wonderland, which we started on Monday, once we had finished Good Little Wolf. GLW is an excellent teaching book, as it introduces longer words, such as comfortable and unfamiliar, in the context of simple sentences, with plenty of excellent illustrations, and not too much text on a page. The only edition I had of Alice was in a paperback complete stories, about three inches thick.

Beginning at the beginning, I used a paired reading approach, with BSY joining in - I waited for her to read each word - and then going back and trying to read each new paragraph on her own, with me joining in again once she got stuck. (This is a variation on the original paired reading approach, but has some of its key principles - support is immediate an unobtrusive, and the child does as much as he or she can, with the security of knowing that they won't be allowed to fail.). This worked very well. I noted and picked out any words BSY struggled over, and she made rapid progress in identifying them and in phrasing her reading. A very satisfying page and a half later, we called it a day.

An adult who was observing noted BSY's determination to read the book, which was itself a huge jump from the previous one, and one I'd hesitated before using. Parent's verdict was "brilliant," and BSY left greatly satisfied. We'll go over the beginning again next lesson, and I've recommended the fantastic pop-up picture book as a Christmas present. BSY had made good progress with the two-times table, but the school had moved to counting fives in multiples. This remains in my view an error, as it makes the table harder to learn. We started on threes.

With the seven year-old boy in London, I plugged a small microscope into my laptop, and left it where he could see it while we did the 2 and 3 times tables. A lot of work needed to stop him from losing his place, but good progress, particularly when he'd worked out the questions I was likely to ask him and had his answers ready in advance, to beat me.  We looked at coins and his little finger through the microscope - What was that black speck on his little finger? Surely not dirt? - and then started to read the title of the accompanying book - Usborne Science and Experiments. The world of the Microscope, which he learned to read very quickly.

Using conversation to build up understanding of meaning around the text was crucial in both cases. BSY found unfamiliar easier once I had explained the link with family, and similarly could read helium and hydrogen after we'd discussed their properties. Phonics alone could not explain why helium is pronounced differently from hedonist (or indeed hydrogen from hystamine), but unpacking the use of vowels in English, and the reasons why we can't always be sure whether a vowel is long or short, enabled her to try both versions and read the words. The young man found science much easier to understand and read once I'd unpacked the Latin scio, and was pleased to tell his dad abou the influence of Norman French on English. 

In order to teach more advanced reading, we need to do much more than just teach the reading. We need to open up the world for the child, in terms he or she can understand. 

Afterthought on the phonics of hydrogen and hystamine - the phonics tell us much of what we need to know, but not all of it. We need to know which of a limited range of possibilities applies in a given word.  Hydrdogen is like hydrangia, dehydrated and others. Hystamine is like hysterical, hystrionics etc. Once we make a small group, each word in the group reinforces the others.

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy.

This is a disciplined and clearly-written account of an investigation into the links between early language development and literacy problems that is the culmination of over thirty years of research, and contains within it the germ of a solution. For all of that time, Professors Snowling and Hulme have taken a practical and controlled view of the issues involved in early literacy and have made significant discoveries, chief among them the link between problems with speech in early childhood and subsequent assessments of dyslexia. They have worked patiently and hard, with respect for the limitations of evidence and the constraints of research methods. I hope that all of the authors of this excellent book will forgive me for putting Maggie and Charles first - I declare a bias, indeed an interest, in a disinterested sense of the word, having followed the research since their first publication

In this book, they and their co-authors have set up random allocated controlled trials of teaching, provided by trained teaching assistants, designed to promote the development of spoken language and to tackle problems that put children at risk of failing to learn to read and write properly. Professor Snowling has described the organisation of the study, which involved 29 schools, as “a logistical nightmare”. However, she and her colleagues have woken up in bright sunshine, with statistically and educationally significant outcomes that are an important breakthrough, not only in literacy, but in the training and deployment of teaching assistants. At the York conference presenting the work, the authors were full of praise for the work of the assistants and quite rightly - this is the first fully documented account of what assistants can achieve, and for that alone is very important. 

The two key programmes, phonology plus reading, and oral language, are described in great detail in the book and should be read by everyone concerned with early literacy. I have a couple of quibbles, the most important of which is the suggestion on p2 that “by the time children go to school, they typically have an oral vocabulary of 14,000 words”.  As Professor Snowling and many others have shown great disparities in the pre-school language experience of children, it is impossible to know what is typical, or to put a figure on it.  

The research was supported by a grant of £212k from the Nuffield Foundation. It has demonstrated that randomised controlled trials are possible in education, though to me this is still one criterion among many for evaluating research. Focus on the right groups of pupils, clear design and consistent monitoring of teaching techniques, and long term follow up are all just as important (technical paper here).  This study followed pupils up after 15 months, which is good, though follow up to 11, as in the Clackmannanshire studies, should be undertaken if possible. There is no quick fix here, either real or implied - as with Reading Recovery, the social and intellectual conditions that are part of the cause of literacy problems are still in place once the intervention has finished. But life is short. This research is the best we have had to date in this area, and much better than most of that surrounding Reading Recovery.

Julia Carroll, Claudine Bowyer-Crane, Fiona Duff, Charles Hulme and Margaret Snowling: Developing Language and Literacy. Wiley-Blackwell, Nuffield Foundation, ISBN 978 0 4707 1185 9

New Publication - Edufax for Teaching Assistants.

I've just delivered the manuscript of a completely revised version of Teaching Assistant's Edufax, a handbook for assistants that lets schools run their own training to national standards, without the bureaucracy of FE colleges, who like nothing better than taking people out of class. We've had one block order from a local authority to date and interest from more. More details from Curriculum Publishing, www.edu-fax.com