John Bald/language and literacy

To make best use of phonics, we need to understand what it will do, and its limitations.

Eleven year-old Jonathan Bryan has gathered almost 850,000 signatures on a petition for children with disabilities to be taught to read and write. I signed as soon as I heard of it. Case studies since Helen Keller have shown that, if a person has the intellectual capacity to understand what they are reading, they can learn. The key is to find a way of overcoming the communication barriers caused by the disability to reach the person’s intellect. In Keller’s case, it was the feeling of water on her hand, followed by Teacher (Anne Sullivan) tracing the word on her palm, with a finger. In Dorothy Butler’s Cushla and Her Books, it was using Dick Bruner’s strong and simple illustrations to enable Cushla to focus her eyes for the first time, and so get in touch with the world. But there are no miracles. Cushla was able to attend a normal school, but the late Dame Marie Clay told me that her intellectual development did not proceed beyond that of a typical seven-year-old.

A parallel petition has been launched by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), asking for a revision of government guidelines of July this year, which said that systematic synthetic phonics should be the sole approach to the teaching of reading. I will not be signing that one, despite what I wrote last time about the dangers of “whole phonics”.

The first reason is the BDA’s push for more money to be put into assessments and “diagnosis”, based on their assertion that ten to 15 per cent of the population is dyslexic, a claim I first heard from the late broadcaster, Robin Day, in the ’70s, backed by the assertion “figures show”. The problem is that “figures” from brain research show abnormal patterns of brain activity in only one to two per cent of samples drawn from several countries, including the UK, Italy (which has highly regular spelling) and China, which of course does not use an alphabet. Ten to fifteen per cent – or more – certainly experience difficulties in learning to read, but to describe this as dyslexia, and put more money into assessments designed to prove it, simply labels the problem without contributing to a solution. These assessments are regularly gamed, releasing concessions in examinations without reaching a definite conclusion that the person is, in fact, dyslexic.

The error of whole phonics lies in the history of the language, set out by the linguist David Crystal in Spell It Out, and described for parents in this presentation to the Wellington Festival of Education some years ago. The key fact is the Norman Conquest, which flooded English with French in a way that only happens through invasion. The pupil I wrote about last week found it straightforward to read regular words based on the spelling of his name, but started to read table as if it were tablet, breaking down when he did not see the expected t. He was applying phonics accurately, but it did not work because these are French phonics and not English. Explaining that languages have human foibles, and that English is a thousand years old, and so has wrinkles, unlocked the word and around ten others with the same pattern of spelling and sound. He has remembered and applied this new knowledge, and his Deputy Headteacher reports increasing confidence in other subjects. Whole phonics advocates have argued that variations such as table and centre (also French) are so well established that they can be seen as regular. This argument was dismissed two centuries ago, when the brothers Grimm identified some irregular features as strong enough to resist the pull towards regularity, as centre has in British English despite the US shift to center.

The BDA recommends Professor Usha Goswami’s “onset-rime” approach as an alternative teaching method, and that also needs clarification. Professor Goswami won the Spearman medal in 1992 for her investigation of this approach, in which the second part of the word, the rime, the at in cat, is taught and the first added, enabling us to learn by analogy. This is important, as some pupils find it hard to hold one letter in their mind while they decode and blend the remainder. I stumbled across the idea in the seventies, switching to another word with the same pattern when a child couldn’t read a word (from memory, I switched to pound when they couldn’t read mound). It is an essential aid to teaching reading when it is not straightforward, and helps children to adjust their thinking as identified by Stansilas Dehaene in How We Learn. The research evidence on a computerised version of the approach is, however, based on work with children who had not met the threshold of the phonics check at 6, who may well, nevertheless, still have learned some phonics. The technique is, therefore, neither the first shot in the teacher’s locker, nor the last.

That place is reserved for Professor Sue Buckley of Portsmouth University, who developed an approach for pre-school children with Down syndrome, thought at the time to be incapable of learning to read. It worked by having them learn to match, first pictures, and then words by placing identical cards on a baseboard and gradually increasing the number of items. When the words could be matched, the teacher – or more often a parent – would call them out for the child to select, and, once this was done confidently, the child would name the word. This is, again, a technique best kept for reinforcement when necessary, but I have found it effective in the most difficult cases, including some that had been referred for hospital treatment.

Underlying all of this work is an application to the teaching of Occam’s Razor, reducing the issue to its simplest components and developing effective techniques to address them. But, to paraphrase Einstein, things need to be made as simple as possible, but not more so. We need to be able to hold all of the relevant evidence in mind and work in ways that do not contradict any of it. Whole phonics ignores the parts that don’t fit, and opposes intellect with persistent and energetic assertion. The dyslexia lobby gives the same label to almost all reading problems, whether they are caused by a genuine intellectual problem, or by other factors, including poor teaching, visual stress under fluorescent light, or temporary hearing loss in early childhood. Almost all are overcome once we find, like Anne Sullivan, a way to cut through whatever is causing the difficulty, and establish understanding. My late friend, the linguist Michel Thomas, was right – “What you understand, you don’t forget.”

This article first appeared in Conservative Home.

Reading Reconsidered, Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs, Erica Woolway. Plus some thoughts on phonics.

Towards the end of my time with Ofsted, I led the inspection of an unusual primary school in London, where nearly all of the pupils spoke English as a second language. All of them - except for some who arrived just before they took the tests - met the nationally expected standard in English, maths and science,  and two-thirds of them exceeded it. No fewer than seven of the staff were guest lecturers at the Institute of Education, and our report was used as evidence when the school won the Evening Standard School of the Year award.

We were neither the first nor the last to recognise the excellence of Gateway Primary School, but what was really interesting was how they did it. Careful and intensive initial teaching of reading, using the Jolly Phonics scheme, was followed by systematic use of reading in virtually every lesson in the junior school, using texts designed to extend the children's vocabulary and understanding beyond the everyday language that they met outside the classroom. The outcome, in sharp contrast to the "first-hand experience" that I'd seen preached in Essex, was that the pupils developed the linguistic understanding they needed in order to make sense of the rest of their work, and to succeed in secondary school.  They were, as Nicky Morgan has put it, "secondary ready",  at a time when most of the pupils we were seeing in other schools were not.

Behind this success lay brilliant planning by a senior member of staff, who understood paths of language development, guided her colleagues with great clarity, and subsequently became the headteacher.  How, though, could we extend this excellence so that all children could benefit from it?  The guest lectureships were clearly not enough - Gateway's principles needed to be understood and applied throughout the school system, and there was no easy path.

Doug Lemov, managing director of the US group Uncommon Schools, and author of Teach Like a Champion, has provided such a path in his new book Reading Reconsidered. He began with an unsolved problem. The good discipline and hard work of his organisation's pupils were not leading to the "march of triumph" they had expected when they went to college, and their ability to handle the demands of advanced, independent reading, was the main cause. Mr Lemov and his colleagues, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, have tackled it by recognising the importance of all types of sustained reading to the development of pupils' intellect, and putting into their book a very wide range of source material and techniques that make it the most significant contribution to reading teaching since the Clackmannanshire research on early phonics.

 The technique behind Teach Like a Champion was to analyse excellence and present it clearly to teachers in training, with the aim - largely successful - of putting old heads on young shoulders. Reading Reconsidered does the same for reading.  Many of its techniques - for example, on ways to prompt pupils when they are hesitant, on developing phrasing in reading, and in selecting texts that go beyond their immediate experience, are ones I've found valuable myself, though I had to learn by stumbling into them. This concentrates so much outstanding material in the space of a book, plus an excellent DVD showing the approach in practice, that it should be read by every headteacher and English co-ordinator in the country and incorporated into training for new and practising teachers.

Two pupils I've been teaching over the past few weeks bring me back to phonics, and its limitations as well as its strengths.  They are aged 9 and 14, have parents of mixed Spanish and English nationality, and had been assessed as dyslexic because of severe problems with reading in English with, in one case, an apparent weakness in memory. Spanish is one of the most regular languages in the world, with no surprises in spelling and only one silent letter - h, at the beginning of a word. What you see is what you say, and what you say is what you write. English, as I discovered some years ago by trying to have a pupil sound out a word that could not be sounded out, is different. We need not only to know and blend the most frequent sounds indicated by letters - synthetic phonics - but to understand and use the variations between words such as should and shoulder, and interactions between letters that change the indicated sound, such as cat and centre.  Evidence from brain scans has shown that English speakers develop activity in an identifiable area of the brain - (Blakemore and Firth, The Learning Brain 2005) that is not needed in a regular language.

Fluent readers often adapt to these variations spontaneously. Others, like these two girls, need to have them pointed out and explained, and then to practise. Allowing them to choose their own books , reflecting the interests of children of their age, led them to meet the variations in English as they occur in the normal run of writing. Explaining these and their origins, usually by switching to a word with a similar pattern to the word that had caused the difficulty, allowed words such as neighbour, and tinier, to be unpacked, explained and learned. The parents were, as usual, delighted. "I've never heard my daughter read so fluently," said one, and the other, having seen me move from shine, to shiny, to tiny, to tinier, described the process as "amazing".  Not a split digraph or phoneme in sight, and no more mention of dyslexia.

LSE Phonics Study, with a summary of Hart and Risley.

The LSE's study of phonics was spectactularly misreported in The Times and Telegraph as asserting that the approach had no benefits over other methods. In fact, it showed continued benefits at 11 to pupils in disadvantaged circumstances, as measured by free school meals or having English as an additional language. One of the sadnesses of the decline of print newspapers has been the degeneration of educational journalism into a series of snappy pieces based on press releases, and this was one of the worst. Sally Waite's report in The Guardian was better, though she perhaps did not give full weight to the importance of the benefits of the approach to the disadvantaged groups. There are many intervening factors in reading between the ages of seven and eleven, and to have any detectable benefit four years after an approach finishes is stiff test. The report certainly does not discredit phonics.

There is a very good summary of the linguistic difficulties faced by these groups of pupils - the LSE report calls them a "vocabulary deficit" - in this account of Hart and Risley's research. The children of highly educated parents have a vastly different experience from those of parents with little education, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how this gap, estimated at thirty million words, can ever be bridged.

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 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.

 

Phonics Check second year report, National Foundation for Educational Research 2014.

The NFER's report on the second year of the government's phonics check  is worth reading. It shows a generally positive impact of the check on schools' approach to early reading, combined with a feeling among half of the teachers of young children that there is too much emphasis on phonics, which, they feel, should be used alongside "other methods to teach children to decode words". The problem is that they do not say what these other methods are. Only one per cent of teachers surveyed said that phonics needed to be taught in a way that did not pay attention to meaning - look at Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc and you will find meaning emphasised from the very beginning.

But meaning in an alphabetic language is communicated through the use of letters, predominantly, but not exclusively, to indicate the sounds of words. The only way to "decode"  a word is to use the letters that make it up. Once we have identified the word and remembered it, we do not need to "decode" it again - we know what the letters are telling us about this word and identify it from what we have learned. In English, an are of our brain adapts itself specifically to the identification of variations in what the letters tell us, in a way that is not required in languages such as Italian, where the correspondence between sounds and letters is almost entirely consistent. Professors Utah Frith and Sarah Jane Blakemore have called this the "word form area".  

The alternative "methods", which are not described anywhere in the report, are guesswork, either from pictures, context, or the first letter of the word. Guessing from pictures, as I demonstrated in Susan Gets Stuck (TES 1992) depends on picking the right clue from the picture. In the example I quoted, a picture of children helping in the garden of a house was accompanied by the text "Biff and Chip liked the new house."  "Susan" read this as "Biff and Chip were in the garden" - a mile away from the original meaning. The unreliability of contex clues was demonstrated by Schatz and Baldwin in 1986, and later by an experiment in which undergraduates were asked to predict the next word of a text, and usually got it wrong. The definitive research on this point was Dr Morag MacMartin's thesis, Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension in Primary Pupils, 1992,  which showed both that pictures could put entirely the wrong idea into pupils' minds, and that they were also liable to misread subsequent words to try to make sense of an error they had made earlier. Guessing from the first letter is so obviously unreliable as to be virtually incredible as a teaching technique - I've known pupils read "the" as "ten" on that basis, and to read every word beginning with f a "fish". The inferiority of this approach was demonstrated clearly in the early Clackmannanshire studies.

This does not, of course, mean that phonics are everything. Roughly a third of English spelling does not correspond to patterns in modern English speech, for reasons set out by Professor David Crystal in Spell It Out.  Children need to learn to deal with this, and the best way of teaching them to do so is to explain why things are as they are. This is the source of my success in work with people with reading and spelling difficulties ranging from complete non-readers, to the highest attaining pupils who have problems with spelling - my latest in that area, from a university town in the north, achieved an A* in English that she wasn't expecting after just three lessons by telephone. She had this grade in everything else except English, and it was spelling that was inhibiting her writing. What I didn't tell her to do was guess. Ever.

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...

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.