John Bald/language and literacy

Welcome.

For over thirty-five years, I've been teaching people to read and write in English, and to learn foreign languages. I was one of the worst rookie teachers in history, but by the end of my second year, I found I was able to think through what was preventing people from learning, and was finding ways of helping them to adjust their thinking so that they could succeed. The approach has enabled a significant number of people to put misery behind them and begin to achieve their goals in life, be they going to university, improving their job prospects, or simply being able to do their school work properly. I am not going to get another thirty-five years' experience, so the approach is freely available on this weblog, and in my books. I am very pleased to have correspondence via email.

Training. I have almost 30 years' experience as a trainer, for organisations that include The Learning Trust, Comenius South-East, the French Embassy (London), Strasbourg, Leeds and London Universities, the Department for Education (Teaching Assistants), Penzer Allen and Lighthouse. I have worked with all types of school, public and private, and design training to meet your needs at competitive rates. Some schools defray costs by selling tickets to neighbours - one school that did this got its own training free and managed to buy some equipment with the profits.

Here are some comments from recent courses:

I have tried out a couple of your ideas so far this week and it was amazing the difference that bit of time (to review work before handing it in) made to what I then received. I have also stopped writing things on the board for them to copy, rather looking at words if in French - or discussing English words with a very bright Y6 RE class before them writing the things down. Already the standard of their writing has gone up! Fantastic! Rebecca Kennedy

Above and beyond what I expected. I feel I now have the knowledge to teach my groups at school in a way that will benefit each individual... Lots of useful tips and strategies... specific to my role as a TA.  Teaching assistants, University of London Institute of Education, July 09.

This weblog has had over 19,000 hits. Many thanks to all readers for their interest. If you think a topic needs more coverage, please get in touch.

A Book of My Own is a charity that makes grants to enable children in care to choose some books of their own. Enquiries from care authorities and foster carers are most welcome.

I object to the current UK government's takeover of school inspections for political purposes and to its incompetent meddling in the examination system. To oppose it, I've set up a weblog  here.  This weblog has received over 4,000 hits.

A third weblog, dedicated to publicising the effects of noise pollution on daily life (and sleep) is here . 

Dyslexia - clearing the mist

In the early 1980s, the late Dr Margaret Peters of the Cambridge Institute of Education recommended I read Grace Fernald's  Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (McGraw Hill, 1943). The book made an immediate impact, and still does, for Fernald's demonstration that it was possible not just to accomodate dyslexia, but effectively to knock it out. Her most striking example was of a boy who had lost brain substance in a car accident, was completely unable to read, and yet was able to recover and go to college. This was "acquired" dyslexia - due to the accident - but she had plenty of examples of people whose reading skills had not developed, and which were effectively put on track through her techniques. The idea of knocking a problem out is almost as unfashionable and politically incorrect as Fernald's title, but it is the basis of my approach.

Fernald did not have computers and could not scan brains. The brain scan evidence summarised in Blakemore and Frith's The Learning Brain provides pretty conclusive evidence of limited activity in two areas of the brain - the Isthmus and what Frith calls the "word form" area, that deals with irregularity. The first appears primarily to be used for co-ordination, and the second for filtering the information provided by phonics to take account of irregularities in English.  The experiment that established this evidence was based on giving people who had been assessed as dyslexic new material to handle, alongside controls of similar reading ability who had not received this assessment.

This finding was reinforced by my experience this morning of working with a boy aged 10 who had been assessed as dyslexic, but who had recently been making good progress. He has been able, with careful teaching, to learn to read complex vocabulary and to retain these words from week to week. However, when he comes to a word he has not clearly learned and practised, he quickly runs into problems he can't solve. This morning, looking at a SATs revision book, he could not read spinal. He got as far as spine, but could not add the ending.  Using my normal technique of switching to a similar word - final - produced a quick result. Then, doing some French using Little Tails, he had problems with dirty. Cinderellla was wearing a dirty skirt, and he could read skirt. But he could not work out dirty. Once I started to talk about the skirt, he got dirty without further prompting.  This is a typical example of this child's learning, and when we've encountered similar difficulties in the past he's had no problem getting things right next week, after extra practice.  He has now learned all of his tables, with just a little hesitation at times, and is beginning to be able to apply them.

The conclusion I'm drawing here is that dyslexia, as defined in the strict "broken bridges" criteria used by Blakemore and Frith, primarily affects the learning of new material, where it can be tackled through clear explanation and additional practice, supplemented by Fernald's techniques and a couple of others, one from the Portsmouth Down's Project.  It is primarily a word level problem, rather than a text or sentence level problem. Once it is tackled, people can, as Fernald indicated, achieve their full intellectual potential. Taking Sir James Rose's "working definition", which conflates dyslexia with other literacy problems, would have the effect of diluting this focus, and giving large numbers of dyslexic people the wrong kind of teaching - a  view confirmed, paradoxically, by the report's own assertion that dyslexia would show up as a condition that was not responsive to its recommended teaching techniques. With Fernald, I believe that this is a problem with a solution. But it is not Rose's solution.

How New Labour has botched primary languages

The introduction of languages in the primary school has been botched, for the following reasons:

1. Cumbersome documentation, schemes of work and assessment that are too complicated for people to use. The French have a few pages in their primary curriculum, while our govt framework has 133, some of them with no more than a pair of inverted commas on the whole page. The reason for such poor communication puzzled me for some years, as the same mistake was repeated time and again, for example in the literacy strategy. The only answer is Blair's disguised New Left idea of "joined up government", in which everything the government does has to be loaded with its hiddent agenda.

 

2  No foresight of the need to train teachers and no provision to do so. Training institutions, like everyone else, are having to patch courses together with what they have.

 

3. No research, so no evidence of what does and doesn't work. The latest book on primary languages, by Philip Hood and Krustina Torbutt here promises research evidence, but does not really deliver it - the chapter on research is just a theory, which speculates that an approach that appears successful with older children - though again it needs proper investigation - will also work with younger ones. There is no solid evidence of children making better progress as a result of primary languages teaching, and we need some.

 

4. Too many competing initiatives, including social and emotional aspects of learning (SEAL), a complete new assessment system for primary schools, rehashed literacy and numeracy strategies - with the literacy strategy apparently abandoning its one successful idea (the use of word, sentence and text levels in teaching) - and new MA degrees for all teachers, as well as vicious and stressful pressure on heads from "New Ofsted" and the botched SATs. The result is that languages have had to fight to establish a toe-hold in teaching time, particularly for eleven year olds transferring to secondary school.

 

5. No progress (HMI), ten and eleven year olds doing same work as seven and eight year olds, and not progressing from words and phrases to sentences. No assessment in place in most schools to track progress. This has been accepted by national spokespeople at three conferences I've attended, but they have no solution to it. It is probably the most damning finding of all, and the only one based on genuinely independent evaluation.

 

6. An obsession with intercultural understanding rather than languages teaching - head of links into languages is an intercultural specialist whose CV lists no experience of languages teaching. Following lobbying by the Association for Language Learning, an attempt to force this into the curriculum for older children has been abandoned. It is an important issue, but it is not the key to learning languages.

 

7. Fudged guidance based on "expectations" and "entitlement" without making clear what was really required and when. Result -  the introductory date has been put back and back, and is now Sept 2011 - subject to Rose - and then for Y3 only. The result is that schools that don't want to introduce a language are under no obligation to do so. The response to my complaint that inpsection of languages is virtually optional has been interesting - the most HMI can do when a school says it has not made a start is to discuss what the obstacles are.

 

Overall, the introduction of primary languages has been beset by a lack of clear thinking and poor organisation. There has been an expansion in the number of schools that are at least doing something, but government claims of better progress are based on responses to surveys rather than hard evidence.  Primary languages need a clear place in national priorities, backed by clear thinking to enable schools to introduce language teaching without undue pressure and without abandoning key priorities. 

 

 

Well done, Association for Language Learning

The Association for Language Learning, and in particular its former President, Helen Myers, are to be congratulated on having the revised level descriptions for modern languages in Years 7 to 9 returned to their proper purpose. They are to be found here.  The two most important points are removing the need for pupils to understand language at close to normal speed to Level 7, so that it will not be necessary for all pupils in Year 9, and the removal of a proposed nes attainment target on intercultural understanding. Overall, these level descriptions are an improvement on those they have replaced, but they are not yet reflected in most textbooks.

A step forward in upskilling teachers.

 The link below leads to four units to build primary teachers' skills in each of French, Spanish and German. They all contain things teachers need to know and are well worth investigating as a a resource for school based training. A contrast with the last posting on this topic? Certainly.

http://www.primarylanguages.org.uk/training_zone/language_upskilling.aspx

Progress and assessment in primary languages

At the Solihull primary languages conference in September 2009, HMI Haezewandt identified two key issues emerging from inspection of primary languages:

1. There was too little evidence of children making progress from isolated words and phrases to building sentences.

2. There was too little evidence of assessment.

Taking these two points together provides the basis of a solution to both problems.

First, we need schemes of work designed to enable children to make this progression, and to examine critically those that give children language that is too complex for them to understand and use in the early stages. The primary toolkits on this site are an attempt to do this.  We know from experience that some words and phrases – colours, days, etc – are learned quickly, and that these can be built into sentences related to children’s own experience. I turned these into a simple rap for Year 6 pupils in French last year, based on name, where they live,  brothers and sisters, and something they liked or disliked.  

Once a scheme of work on this basis is in place, assessment takes the form simply of keeping a record of what children know, understand and can do. I’ve previously posted comments on sentence building as a technique for teaching writing in the early stages that cuts out copying, which is for most pupils a barrier to understanding. To recap briefly, children begin by looking away  from the board or model, and writing words and later phrases on their sleeve, and then checking. Once they’ve got used to this non-threatening activity, they can write on a miniboard, and then, once they’re confident, in a notebook. As they only write in the notebook what they’ve actually learned to write, it provides a running record that can be summarised annually by giving them, say, fifteen minutes, and asking them to write what they can in the new language. The contents of the notebook provide an initial assessment, and children’s ability to  use the same language orally can be quickly checked – eg through a rap – which can be recorded if necessary. I found that an outline format for the rap enabled the whole of a Y6 class to complete it successfully, and that reading each other’s raps helped the whole class to understand.

This basic format can be adapted to record whatever else the children have learned. Once again, rehearsing work orally, on the sleeve and on miniboards gives the teacher an initial view of what the children do and don’t understand, which the children can write in the notebook once they’re confident. As they never copy into the notebook, this can also be taken as an indication of their growing understanding of points such as masculine/feminine, pronunciation, spelling, in fact whatever else is taught. Can Do statements can easily be added.

This approach has several advantages over the more cumbersome national initiatives that have been developed. The first and most important is that it is easy for teachers to understand and use – as it is built into normal teaching, it does not give them extra work, and they do not have to spend time they haven’t got in ploughing through pages and pages of criteria. Instead, they go straight to the Languages Ladder and drop the impedimenta. The second is that the assessment is personal to each pupil, increasing motivation and understanding.  Its reliability depends chiefly on the extent to which teachers ensure that the record is of the pupil’s unaided work, and on the occasional checks carried out to ensure that they remember it – these often make lesson starters. The small sample of work that they take to secondary school is less comprehensive than a full-scale test – which we will, I hope, never have – but it gives the new teachers an idea of how far children have moved – who can construct sentences and who is still at the word/phrase level, for example. The teachers I’ve worked with have liked the idea, and have encouraged children to practise their raps between lessons. At this stage, a modest proposal, but one that fits HMI’s key concerns and is, I think, worth developing.

 

 

Alexander's last stand..?

The much-hyped Alexander review of primary education is best seen as progressive education's answer to New Labour. Google provides links to a wide range of personalities and publications related to the review, which has set out to use the university to make it look like the equivalent (or better) of an official government review.  The main team members are here, and they make interesting reading. The "dissemination co-ordinator", Julia Flutter, is a psychologist, as are Linda Hargreaves and Ruth Kerschner. Christine Doddington and David Harrison's main fields are philosphy of education. Robin Alexander himself is simply a professor of education, notable for his contributions to "pedagogy", progressive education's rather pretentious alternative to teaching and learning. There is a little academic equation here - psychology + philosophy = pedagogy.

The three Ps rule. But only in progressive circles, where philosophy - in education, a set of ideas based on values rather than evidence, and which are therefore hard to attack and easy to defend - ruled the roost in primary schools from sixties to Lord Dearing's review of the National Curriculum in the mid-nineties. Robin Alexander was seen as a big player in this field until he joined the "Three Wise Men" - a misnomer if every there was one - review of primary education in the nineties. He has since tried to return to the fold, with this as his pitch to be leader of the flock.

His review was, quite rightly, rejected immediately by the government, chiefly on the grounds of its suggestion that children should not start formal education until the age of six.  Once Professor Alexander had staked so much on this card and lost, some other daft ideas - such as having 30 per cent of the curriculum determined by "the community", and dividing it up into "domains" instead of subjects - got lost in the mist. "Dissemination co-ordination", and the name of Cambridge University, got the report a field day in the press and media on its launch day,  but we will hear less of it in the future, even if some progressive local authorities and sympathisers rush to its "dissemination conferences".  The whole peformance, complete with razzamatazz, can be found here. It has collected a lot of evidence on the mistakes and authoritarianism of New Labour's education policies. As an alternative, it is too complicated and woolly-minded to get to the starting line. It may well turn out to be progressive education's swansong.

New Ignorance and a ten year old girl

(Cross-posted with the Ofsted weblog)

John Stannard, the first director of the National Literacy Strategy, had an authoritarian cast of mind that I described in The Guardian as "Cromwellian".  The Literacy Hour was his, borrowed from Australia and New Zealand, and its appeal is not hard to find - it is clear, understandable, and easily enforced via the timetable. Mr Stannard (still Mr, with just a CBE to show for his efforts.) asked Chris Woodhead to use Ofsted to enforce his edicts, and Mr Woodhead (not so much as a CBE ) told him, quite rightly, that inspectors were there to evaluate rather than enforce. But headteachers are easily bullied, and Mr Stannard's writ usually ran.

Enter my ten year old pupil, whom we shall call Josie. Josie has had her English education in primary school under Mr Stannard's regime, and has suffered from one perculiarly stupid edict. The Literacy Hour is subdivided into a starter of ten minutes, a main teaching session of perhaps 20 mins, 20 minutes group work (during which the children would write) and ten minutes at the end for what is grandly called a "plenary" as if a primary class.

So, Josie, thanks to the great educator, was forced to complete every piece of writing in 20 minutes, even though, sensitive soul that she is, she needed longer to think about what she was doing. (At least she is not left-handed, unlike another pupil who was continually kept in at break at the age of 6 for not finishing his work in the pseudo-statutory 20 minutes). Now, no doubt the learned gentleman would complain that he never said things should be set in stone, or some other cliche, but he was old enough and experienced enough to know how power and fear operate in education, and should have known better. I'm now working with Josie and her mum to persuade her that she has genuine intelligence, that all writing does not have to be completed in 20 minutes, and that she can take her time. Her school, of course, is still following the national literacy strategy. So, whatever I do, she is back to 20 minutes on Monday. Shameful, ignorant, disgraceful, anti-social. Mr Stannard has surely earned a New Labour K.

Verb Hubs

These verbhubs help you to form simple sentences at foundation level and higher levels. The introduction has an explanation of the importance of verbs, and each hub gives you the first person in the present, two future and three past tenses. If you print them out, you can use each sheet to compose sentences in different tenses for the verbs, using whatever topic vocab you choose. They include regular and the three most common irregular verbs.

This first hub is first person only - I - as most of the writing you do for GCSE is first person. This meets foundation requirements. Having the tenses available enables you to meet the first requirement for a higher grade pass - add other tenses if you wish to be more sophisticated. For grade C you need evidence of being able to write in the third person singular - he, she - and first person plural - we. These are in verb hub 2. 

Download Verb-hubs-1 with English equvalents

Download Verb hubs 2 revised

 

 

Asberger's or a reading problem? Update, two years on - Sept 21st 2009

Peter is a distant relative of mine - his grandfather was my mother's cousin, and they were very close as children - so there is an element of commitment in this work that goes beyond the normal relationship between teacher and pupil. When we started, two years ago, Peter was starting his secondary education without having had a primary education at all. While his conversation seemed to indicate at least normal intelligence and interests for his age, his sensitivity to light had prevented him from learning to read, and his frustration had led him to a pattern of violent, destructive and anti-social behaviour that seemed destined for a quick and sad end, probably in jail. The prescription of tinted lenses allowed him to make an immediate improvement in his learning and behaviour at secondary school, but the teaching in his first school seemed to content itself with improved behaviour rather than really challenging him intellectually. Almost all of his written work was copying and gap filling, and he was not allowed to take a language.

His parents decided - on their own initiative rather than on my advice - to move him to another school where he was told he would be learning Spanish. After I'd spent the summer preparing him for Spanish, he was put into an Italian class instead, so we had to start Italian. Much of his written work was still copied, but the social and other activities of this school were a lot better, and Peter was much happier. Still, there were problems - for example, he was graded Level 4 in Italian, but only knew one or two words of the language and could not compose a sentence. Starting on tables after the first year, Peter now knows them, and is just a little hesitant on 7 and 8s. Looking back over the postings, this has been an issue for some time, but there is less hesitation now and Peter is quicker to correct his mistakes. He also knows why he is learning the tables. He did not learn them at primary school, and this experience shows the need to practise them over a long period.

Peter has been working with me on Italian, using Languages Online (free) and, this week, Forza 1 - the book only, as I've been unable to obtain the sound recording. Since the start of this term, we've been concentrating on remembering the differences between greetings - Ciao, buongiorno, buonasera, buonanotte, arrivederci. Buonanotte was very hard for Peter to get - he kept mixing it up with arrivederci and buonasera. Each time, I would go back through the chronology of the day, beginning with Buongiorno, then buonasera, ensuring that he understood both, and then Peter would get Buonanotte. On Friday, he got Buonanotte straight away, and understood the difference between the masculine buon and feminine buona. He also understood, from languages online, the difference between fiore and fiori. We moved to the book, with Peter reading after me, and he understood Questa è mi classe. He understood mi chiamo and si chiama, then me piace and mi dispiace. Working directly from the book was progress, and we made a list of verbs that Peter knew and could write without copying - it took a lot of work for Peter to understand and recall that i in Italian gave a sound a bit like double ee rather than i as in it. We will use these to make sentences - so far we have ho, so, sono, e, mi piace, mi dispiace. Peter got a merit for his Italian in school this week, and his father says he has been practising 15 to 20 minutes a night independently. We have made an important breakthrough in Peter's understanding and use of memory and he is in a position to move towards communicating in Italian. This work is, once again, quite inconsistent with a diagnosis of Asberger's.

Finally an update on reading. My analysis, which I've shared with Peter, is that he is an intelligent boy who had one problem - light sensitivity - that led to a great deal of frustration and misery for him and everyone connected with him. Our goal had always been for him to catch up by the end of Year 9, and I've  bought copies of CGP's KS3 complete revision and Practice in English, maths and science, to make sure we don't miss anything. These books are not easy to read, and we began this week by working through page 1 of the science book, on organisms. We had to work on quite a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary here, including words like chloroplasts, chlorphyll, vacuole and nucleus, as well as rigid, which caused Peter problems. As always, I ensured that Peter read and understood every word on the page. On Saturday morning, Peter read the whole page to me with good understanding and only one hesitation on vacuole. This is real progress. Whether or not we get to Level 5 by the summer, we'll certainly give it a good shot. And behaviour problems are a thing of the past.

Abolish SATs or reform them?

The Guardian,here, has a picture of Michael Rosen above an article campaigning for the abolition of SATS. There are two problems with SATs:

1. The marking of the English SATs is corrupt, with mark boundaries adjusted to meet political considerations at the QCA. The English SATs do not do what they should do, and in particular Level 4 does not mean Level 4. These SATs should be removed from the QCA, which is not competent to oversee them.

2. The maths SAT is fairly marked, but the language contains hidden obstacles which prevent pupils from seeing the nature of the question in some cases. This turns the maths SAT into something like an English SAT.

3. There is too much discretion in the amount of support offered in the science SAT, so that results are unreliable between schools.

Getting rid of SATs would leave no reliable check on performance at 11. This would suit the Left and Michael Rosen, whose left-wing views are reflected in much of his work outside the BBC, including this and this in the Socialist Worker Online. The second is an interesting piece - Mr Rosen is opposed to smiley faces as well as SATs, as he thinks they show most children that their work is not good enough for a smiley face.

 Reliable SATs would show that the proportion of pupils achieving L4, genuinely, in English and maths is lower than the government would find politically acceptable. Taking the politics out of SATs can only be achieved by removing the political influence of left-leaning officials, and putting them under the control of genuinely independent examining boards. We need a fresh start.

The Politicisation of Language Studies: Professor Michael Kelly

This link to Professor Michael Kelly's details on the University of Southampton website is one of the clearest indications yet of the government's politicisation of languages, to the detriment of language learning. Professor Kelly's background is in cultural studies, and his expertise in that area is not in question here. What is in question is the appointment of a person who does not have experience in teaching and research in language learning to head the body that is supposed to be promoting language learning in schools. This is, no doubt, why we have politically correct drivel on intercultural understanding shoved into the modern languages curriculum - where the place for such considerations is in citizenship - and why we still have no decent research - almost no research at all - on effective teaching.

Fortunately, this organisation's contract ends in 2011. I would not bet much on its being renewed.

Inspection, anyone? Updated, September 19th - one step forward.

Update. Following the posting below, CILT has announced that HMI will now discuss with schools that have not yet started languages what the "main deterrents" are. HMI also said at the conference that, following "a strong case" within Ofsted, the letter to the school published on the Ofsted website following an inspection did not give an overall grading, and that the inspection would take account of the school's state of development in languages.

This is a step forward. However, languages lessons in the normal run of inspections may still be observed and graded by inspectors who don't know the languages, or indeed any languages, and I share HMI's concern that this may  lead to data that is not, in Ofsted terms, "secure". Ths issue of inspecting a subject that is not part of the National Curriculum, but which is still fudged as an "entitlement" has not been fully resolved, and should be.

An interesting revelation from HMI at last week's CILT briefing conference for primary languages consultants - if you tell HMI's administrative assistant that you're not doing languages yet, Ofsted won't come. HMI told the conference that "it would be a waste of resources" to inspect what wasn't there, and that roughly a quarter of schools had not started doing languages - "or said they hadn't. My administrative assistant can't ask, Are you sure?"

As over 90 per cent of schools have started offering languages, there is something of a gap between reality and inspection. Part of the problem is that the inspection is rigorous, and some schools are frightened of it if they've just started. One LEA consultant told me that she advised schools to say they hadn't started yet, even if they had, because of one such unfavourable report. This is clearly wrong. But so is talking about an "entitlement" to a subject that is not compulsory. The government has fudged the issue hugely by delaying the introduction of primary languages until 2011, while pretending that there is an "entitlement" - which in plain English is an enforceable legal right - next year. The truth is that there is no entitlement without title, and that the government has placed local authorities and HMI in an invidious position. Such is truth under New Labour.

Letterbox Club - a breakthrough for children in care

The Letterbox Club, is a big step forward in educational support for children in foster care. Currently operating in 100 local authorities in England, it sends parcels of books, school equipment and maths games to children in attractively packaged parcels. Over 3500 children in England are currently receiving parcels. The evaluation study  here, includes the first evidence of gains in reading that can be directly ascribed to this provision, and has many tributes from foster carers as well as children. A Book of My Own, the charity founded by Garth Collard and myself to provide books for children has the advantage of offering the children a choice of book, but Letterbox Club has cracked the problem of providing books on a national scale, and of reaching foster carers who might otherwise be difficult to contact for this purpose. Any authority not yet involved, and any school that has children in care, but who are not yet receiving parcels, should get in touch with them immediately through the website above. A Guardian report on the project is here.

Oenone Crossley-Holland, academies, Ofsted and behaviour.

Oenone Crossley-Holland's book, Hands Up, is based on her experience at Harris Academy in South London. It is an interesting account of the reality of life in a tough school, and makes interesting comparison with the head's view and the school's view - we know the school's identity for sure because of a visit by her father. The work may not interest all readers of this weblog, so I'm just putting a link to it here.

GCSE - the slump continues.

According to The Guardian, 670,000 pupils took GCSE this year. 0f these, 188, 688 took French, and 73, 469 German. 67,020 took Spanish. The number of pupils taking more than one language is minuscule, and roughly 3000 took each of a range of community languages. So, well under half took one of the three major European langauges.

The unions blame the government, but inspection experience in the early years of the century confirmed to me the truth of the argument that children were failing to learn languages long before they became optional. From what I'd seen, teaching methods that did not enable children to learn effectively were to blame, and mixed ability teaching, generally foisted on heads of department either without consultation or with token consultation, was the main cause of this failure. The weakness of mixed ability teaching was not only that the highest-attaining pupils were not stretched, but that the lowest-attaining did not understand their work at all, started to fail during the first lesson, and were effectively out of the game by half-term in Year 7, with no chance of getting back into it. HMI's consistent argument that children should be grouped according to their learning needs was ignored. As one local authority inspector put it to me - though in the context of history, not languages - "Who the hell takes any notice of them?"

Result - misery, wasted time and burned-out teachers. Unfortunately, many of those responsible for these developments, and for the National Curriculum, are still in charge of languages nationally, and mixed ability teaching is high on an agenda that is generally kept hidden, as those in charge of it know that most of the people who have to do it do so against their will and against what they see as the interests of teh children. So, mixed ability teaching is rarely promoted openly, but other forms of grouping are simply not mentioned. We need a change.

A level languages marking - updated 30th August

This has appeared on the linguanet website following concern over marking of orals. It gives every appearance of irresponsibility, ignorance and self-interest (watching their backs) on the part of examiners. I'm cross-posting this on the Ofsted and New Labour site. If this comment seems harsh, it is simply a reflection of what happens when examiners move from assessing quality to giving out grades that are, in effect, a kind of academic currency, which can be devalued like any other. The politics of A level grading in the context of university expansion are at the heart of it, and the students are the victims of the politicians.

. If it is paper one, get the papers back and see. We did this in January for Spanish. I think for June AS AQA French, the first part paper one (L and R), most candidates have done very well. This means that most of the discrimination (look how close the raw mark boundaries are) was on the essay.

2. Look at how the essay is being marked. Is it being marked by the published criteria, or is it being marked by ticking the number of points a candidate makes? A candidate who treats a small number of points intelligently and in depth can get a very poor mark if this is the case. A candidate who glosses over a large list of points can do very well.

3. Candidates have to second guess the list of points on the markscheme. In Jan in an essay on TV +ve or -ve, a paragraph on how ridiculous it is that the newspapers are full of Big Brother instead of real news got 0 marks. Saying "TV helps  you relax and is fun" got 2 marks. You need to train your candidates in the light of this. Lots of points, relevance well sign posted, nothing too intelligent.

4. If it is the oral exam, there is a lot of debate currently on the mflresources forum, and one line of thinking is that the best candidates who make fewer mistakes and who can develop their answers, are being deemed to be spouting prepared answers and marked down. How else can you explain the way weaker candidates seem to be scoring higher?

 

All this is deduction from results and getting papers back. I wonder if AQA could shed some light so we know how to teach our stronger candidates to do better than our weak ones.

 

Here is part of another posting from the same site:

 

Secondly, I should add that my gripe is mainly with Spanish, which is the
language I teach to A Level, however we have an excellent dual-linguist who
acheived virtually full marks in the R/W/L paper yet only a B and a C in the
orals for French and Spanish respectively. I do not think that the marking
reflects the ability of the candidate, and I am concerned that there may
more emphasis on rigid exam structure, which, if not adhered to correctly,
can mean that an excellent candidate can drop marks.

I will be discussing this with my department when we return next week, but I
hope to get remarks and/or some feedback on the oral exams.

 

and another

 

1.  On unit 1 candidates needed 92/110 to get an A grade.  I have looked at
the table and cannot see any other subject where it is this high (My wife
teaches Geog and 55/120 in one of their units got an A).  You could say that
this is because the paper was easy, but in reality it has meant that only the
absolute top candidates got A grades, as I said in my previous post.
2.  The content marks for the essay in unit 1 seem to be given against a
bizarre mark scheme of expected answers.  If pupils write perfectly reasonable
answers which do not appear on this pre-determined list, they are not
rewarded.
3.  The oral marking seems to make no sense at all.  Many teachers are saying
they simply cannot understand how it was marked.  If it is the case that we
are disadvantaging the candidates (despite being experienced, having
attended all the training meeting etc etc) then the exam is clearly too
complicated to conduct and this needs looking at.

 

and another

 

...in Jan in an essay on "TV positive or negative?", a paragraph on the fact that it is ridiculous to go into a newsagent and see nothing but TV gossip on the front of newspapers got 0 ticks. Saying "TV is fun and helps you relax" got 2 ticks. And the overall mark did exactly match the number of ticks in all cases.

 

The last is as good an example as I can think of of rewarding banality and penalising imagination - perhaps the zombie who marked it thought that the reference to newsagents was irrelevant. Problem might be to prove to a legal standard that it was marked just by adding up the ticks. This would require a few more examples.

 

 

See also the TES forum here.

 

 

Cambridge research on the decline of GCSE languages among able pupils

Cambridge Assessment, here, has an interesting study showing the decline in participation in languages among able secondary pupils. The key point is:

In 1984, before the National Curriculum was introduced, 94 per cent of pupils in the highest achievement group studied at least one modern foreign language at GCSE. According to research carried out by Cambridge Assessment this percentage dropped to 80 percent in 2000 and an all time low of only 75 per cent in 2008.

This shows it is not just the weakest students who are failing and dropping out. Unfortunately, the authors follow with this:

Senior Research Officer, Carmen L. Vidal Rodeiro, at Cambridge Assessment, said: “Such a big drop in the uptake of languages by high attainers was a surprise but not totally unforeseen. If students are not exposed to and have no prior knowledge of languages at KS3, how can we expect them to make an informed choice at GCSE?”

Also commenting on the research, Cambridge Assessment spokesman, Bene't Steinberg, said: "You wouldn't buy an ice cream maker if you'd never tried ice cream".

These are the kind of comment that give research a bad name. The document provides no data on languages at KS3, and there is no evidence anywhere, as far as I know, to suggest that children are not being taught a language from 11 to 14. Cambridge Assessment should do much better than this - in fact the comments are so inaccurate and so irresponsible that they should be removed from its site at once.

Victoria, Australia, Website, with thanks to Steven Gibson.

Steven Gibson, of Hyde Park Junior School, Plymouth, has recommended this very useful site from Victoria. It has lots of good, clear simple activities for beginners with sound and interaction. Steven sees it as a free introductory scheme of work, and this seems pretty accurate. Definitely worth checking out, and includes German and Italian.

Maths update - progress, and Dr Haylock's cardinal error.

As explained in the earlier posting, Tables, Peter began with almost no knowledge of maths beyond counting and adding very small numbers. Or so I had thought - later on we will find he had learned to do something else, and in a surprisingly effective way.

Having begun with saying the 2 times table, and taking it slowly to get it right and avoid crossover and losing the place on the single side of the table (eg once two is two, three twos are...), we worked through the tables until Peter could do them all, but with some hesitancy. This took roughly a year, but could be done more quickly now I see the best way to practise them. We then practised the bits he hesitated over. We also worked on number combinations up to 20, almost exclusively with addition. Peter had not learned any of these number combinations in primary school, and it did not believe in teaching tables. It preferred strategies, of which more later.

I tried Peter with some subtractions of numbers to 20 and he got them right. This was very encouraging, as we'd never done this before. So, although he was still  a little uncertain, I thought it might be time to move on. I gave Peter some additions, adding a two-digit number to a three-digit number, making sure that some of the digits added up to 10 and he got them right. So, Peter understood the principles of a vertical sum and could move figures accurately between 10s. Another, involving a number in thousands, he got wrong. One line added up to 10, and he did not know he could have a 0 in the answer. He picked this up quickly and got another example right. 

Subtraction of three-digit numbers was Peter's big success. He had hit on a way of moving a ten from the tens colum to the units and reducing the tens by one in a way that avoided Dr Haylock's problem with the dea of borrowing and paying back - Peter's operation all took place on the top line, and was very straightforward. His parents had pointed out to his primary school that this enabled him to get subtractions right, but the school had replied that he needed more strategies. More fool they - if he had found a way of getting it right consistently that was all he needed, and his approach is economic and effective. This was the best example yet of clear thinking from Peter, and convinced me that he will be able to do maths GCSE to a good standard.

Moving to multiplication, I got Peter to multiply some two-digit numbers by single digits. He got some right, but had problems carrying - sometimes he would multiply the number he'd carried instead of the original number. This was quickly fixed, and we did some simple division. We reversed multiplication and division to check. I carried out these operations with Peter watching, and he understood them. I then explained long division.

A strange kind of breakthrough, with a lot left to do. Susan Williams, deputy head at Harrington Hill Primary School, who watched me teach a lot last year, said that the teaching worked on the following basis - Make it very clear, and then practise.  This lesson made it very clear. We will now practise, with Peter discussing the work with me each evening over Skype.

And the theory?  A visit to Cambridge Institute of Education Library showed no fewer than 20 copies of Dr Haylock's book Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers on the shelves, with multiple copies of his other works. Among his most important idesa is the replacement of algorithms, of which vertical layout of calculations is the best example, with "adhocirithms", in which methods are worked out to suit each problem, usually involving new layouts and additional, but smaller, calculations that are then added up.

I've never accepted this idea, and the work with Peter has convinced me that it is an error of monumental proportions. It has suffused the education system to the extent that anyone who disputes it is faced with layer upon layer of prepared and rehearsed arguments, much like a WW1 trench system. An algorithm is a reliable way of carrying out a calculation, provided the child knows the prerequisites of number bonds and multiplication tables. The replacement of algorithms with ad hoc methods has taken place because of failure to establish, or even to try to establish, these skills with number. Tackling this basic problem, and using Peter's own exceptional insight into subtraction, allows us to move towards the creative problem solving that Dr Ackland and his colleagues have been advocating. Their approach to maths, though, has been like trying to teach reading without phonics, and has met the same fate. It is time to reverse the process.

A level Factsheet

Cambridge Assessment has an interesting series of factsheets on examination choices, including this on A level languages. Languages are clearly stronger in grammar schools and the independent sector than in comprehensive schools, and are clearly most popular with highest attaining sixth formers. It is also clear that the decline in the proportion of sixth formers taking languages dates from well before the time when they were made optional at GCSE - no surprise here, as it is mostly lower-attaining pupils who have dropped out. Are languages too difficult, or have other A levels become too easy? The language content has been seriously diluted, literature removed, so that you can do A level without any sustained interaction with a text.

In my experience, the root of the problem lies in teaching methods in comprehensive schools, and in particular in mixed ability teaching. Dereham Neatherd school has its highest attaining pupils take GCSE in Y9, and then starts AS. If they can do it, in a catchment area with no social advantages at all, then so can everyone else. This posting will also be posted on the examinations site. Cambridge Assessment has a lot more factsheets, here.

Mathematics teaching, number bonds, multiplication and division: why we're getting it wrong.

Derek Haylock's Mathematics Explained to Primary teachers (Sage) is one of the most influential books on mathematics teaching, and contains many of the key ideas in current practice. The writer's knowledge of mathematics is not in question, and is without doubt greater than mine. The application of this knowledge to teaching mathematics is where the controversy starts. It is a controversy that has haunted me ever since I first began to help people with mathematical problems, in the late eighties, and that continues to haunt discussion of mathematics as part of a hidden agenda that is designed to move maths teaching away from number work, but does not dare admit that number work is neglected.

My first pupil was a man in his twenties who wanted to join the police force, but had not passed O level maths and was not confident about the maths test he needed to take instead. I looked a the kind of questions asked by the test, which usually involved calculations in the context of police work, including decimals, and taught him how to do them. He passed. My more recent pupils have been children who have had literacy problems, and who also struggled with maths. They have all had difficulties with tables - any tables - and have had to work out number facts up to 20 from scratch virtually all the time. They can all count, and 2 + 2 is usually automatic, but not much more. Their current ages range from 8 to 13, and I'm teaching them number bonds and tables before we do anything else. One practice technique for number bonds, which was given to me by a parent, is to take a pack of cards, remove aces tens and face cards, and put down two cards at a time - children call out the total. Once they can do it quickly and accurately, without having to add the numbers up from scratch, we sometimes add a stopwatch.

The reason for working on number bonds and what the National Curriculum calls "multiplication facts"  is that adding and subtracting depend on the bonds, and multiplication and division on the tables. Dr Haylock says, speaking of efficient mental strategies for multiplication and division (p87) that "The first prerequisite is that you know thoroughly and can recall instantly all the results in the multiplication tables up to 10 x10." He also notes at the beginning of Chapter 5 that pupils should be taught to recall all addition and subtraction facts for each number up to 20.  But then his approach to the formal approaches that apply these facts to longer calculations is not simply to unpack and explain how they work, but to concentrate, particularly on division, on "only the number knowledge they are most confident with" - in other words, to compensate for weak knowledge of the prerequisites by devising methods that get round them, even when these are more cumbersome and inefficient. Dr Haylock even refuses to explain long division at all - "In my view, it is a method that could well be laid to rest in the twenty-first century. To be honest, this is mainly because I have been singularly unsuccessful whenever I have attempted to teach the method." 

Dr Haylock reaches for the calculator. But would he need to do this so quickly if children were properly taught the "prerequisites"?  This is the rub. Does the teacher of a ten year old who, like my pupils, does not know any tables can cannot do much more than count, teach the pre-requisites or try to get round them? On the one occasion I've been able to research the issue, the weakest twenty pupils in a South Essex comprehensive school virtually cracked their problems with number bonds and tables in three months, using a combination of Grace Fernald's techniques - virtually unknown in mathematical circles - and computer games to speed them up.  The piece was published in The TES in 1994 - too early for the website - and I got support from Ann Dowker of the Oxford Department of Experimantal Psychology, here. When the Director of the London Institute of Education tried to set up a project to take it forward, he was cold-shouldered by his own academics, who included a prominent supporter of Dr Haylock. The curse of educational research is the way it has come to be controlled by people who use it for political purposes, and prevent investigation of elements that might conflict with their political goals. In the middle ages, such activities were known as "treason by the clerks." In the twentieth century, they are the bread and butter of left-wing politics.

Dr Ann Dowker's What Works for Children with Mathematical Difficulties contains important further evidence.   She says that problems with arithmetic are not unitary, but may arise because of problems with several aspects of thinking. However, almost all children with mathematical difficulties have problems with remembering number facts, and are hence reduced to counting where others can use their knowledge of number facts to save time. This is in line with Fernald's thinking, and suggests that teaching and learning simple combinations is an important first step towards helping them.

Dr Haylock does address the issue of multiplication tables in his book for younger pupils. He and his co-author are in favour of children learning them, and include the interesting tip that, if they are chanted or said, each line should be said twice, so that the weaker children have a chance to get it righ the second time. But they don't go into detail on how to help the children who have difficulty in recalling and using the tables, and this is the problem facing the teachers of most pupils who have problems with maths.

Letterbox Maths

 Rose Griffiths set up this project from the University of Leicester to provide support for looked after children in maths. The report, here, is concise, well-written, and another example of the benefit of direct, personal support for these children.

Language, maths and copying.

Peter has just finished Year 5, and to look at his maths book you'd be impressed with his vocabulary. Symmetry, horizontal, vertical, parallel, sequence all correctly spelled, and correctly indentified in response to questions. Peter could'nt read any of them though, and didn't know what all but one meant. He knew what parallel meant, but couldn't read the word, and read sequence as square. He had copied all of them, another example of copying as an anti-educational activity, as it disguised what he didn't understand. So, I set about explaining them, with examples from around the room. We'll see what he remembers next week.

Terminology and language learning - some more thoughts

Linguistic terms were mostly developed in order to analyse languages rather than to learn them. The analyst needs precision, and as long as other analysts know what he or she means, there is no problem. The learner, though, does not know what a new word means in advance, and so the term itself is part of the learning. 

Where a term does not have a meaning in common language - eg verb - it is straightforward to learn it as any other new word. Vygotsky's observation that our understanding of word meaning develops can be applied to teachers as well as children here. Verbs are still commonly presented as doing words when the most common verb, to be, does nothing at all. This problem can be avoided by careful phrasing - eg most verbs do things, some just are, so that words such as is, am, was, were, are, are all verbs. Chomsky's term verb phrase is useful as an indication that a verb can contain more than one word. I suggest verb group, as everyone knows what a group is.

The problem gets worse when there is a pre-existing meaning for the term. Subject, which is tne next most important grammatical term after verb - because nearly all sentences contain both - has the general meaning of topic which must be got rid of before a learner can understand it. Careful explanation and practice, for example using questions such as What is it? or Whodunnit? can help children to detect the subject, and to act on it when they write - in practice, repeating or changing a subject raises the question of using strong punctuation or a link word. Understanding subject lets the learner make an informed decision on these points rather than just guessing. This is a key point at GCSE as well as in SATs.

Articles are another problem. An article, in common language, is an object, a thing. Historically, an article has been seen as any separate item. It is highly likely that the term article was applied to short words such as a and the simply because they had to be called something - the examples in the OED entry are interesting on this point. Sometimes articles are now called determiners, though what they have to do with determination is so obscure to someone who does not already understand this sense of determine that the word is really an obstacle to learning rather than a help. To children, I just call articles short words that are a bit like the cement between bricks. We use them because we expect to. Some languages don't. Latin often left them out, as does modern Turkish.  Short words makes sense to children - article doesn't. Anyone have anything better?

Further prolematic terms are adjective, adverb, participle and tense.

Tense is a corruption of the old French word for time. We should ditch it, and return to the idea of time, as modern French grammarians have. Everyone knows, in an everyday sense, what time is, and today, yesterday and tomorrow are clear introductory markers.

Participle. Part verb would be clearer and have a link to verb. It's a paradox that we add something to a verb, and yet take away its completeness as a verb.

Adjective and adverb. The second at least links the word to a verb, so is slightly informative. Adjective is obscure -originating as a word that could not stand on its own - but at least has no conflicting meaning in normal English. It needs careful explanation - it's nbot a word that can stand on its own, hence its Latin route, and to call it a describing word leads to confusion with adverbs. We talk about verbs being modified rather than described, but this is sophistry - to say someone runs quickly is to describe the way they run in common language. 

Here are the relevant parts of the OED entry on adjective

 1. Gram. Naming or forming an adjunct to a noun substantive; added to or dependent on a substantive as an attribute. noun adjective: a word standing for the name of an attribute, which being added to the name of a thing describes the thing more fully or definitely, as a black coat, a body politic; now usually called an adjective only, see B.

1414 DK. OF EXETER to Henry IV in Hall Chron. (1809) 55 Scotland is like a noun adiective that cannot stand without a substantive. 1561 T. N[ORTON] Calvin's Inst. I. xiii. (1634) 46 All other names of God [except Jehovah] are but adjective names of addition. 1612 BRINSLEY Posing of Parts (1669) 3 Q. How many sorts of Nouns have you? A. Two: a Noun Substantive, and a Noun Adjective..A noun adjective is that cannot stand by itself, without the help of another word to be joyned with it to make it plain. 1875 WHITNEY Life of Lang. vi. 103 The variation of an adjective word for gender and number and case

 1. a. A ‘Noun Adjective’ (see A.1.); one of the Parts of Speech.

1509 HAWES Past. Pl. V. x. A nowne substantyve Might stand wythout helpe of an adjectyve. 1597 BP. HALL Satires VI. i. In epithets to join two words in one. Forsooth, for adjectives can't stand alone. 1690 LOCKE Hum. Underst. III. viii. (1695) 267 Our simple Ideas have all abstract, as well as concrete Names: The one whereof is a Substantive, the other an Adjective; as Whiteness, White; Sweetness, Sweet. 1865 MARSH Eng. Lang. xiv. §11 The only striking peculiarity of the English adjective..is its invariability, or want of distinct forms for different cases, genders and numbers.

 

I would like to find a simpler word to replace adjective. The only one I can think of is adnoun. Don't think it is very elegant, but it is at least more descriptive, and like adverb.

Phoneme is unnecessary -  sound is a better and shorter word. Grapheme is a unit of writing - I just call it a letter or group of letters. Both of these terms can be learned, but why? They are not more precise than the words of plain English.

And of course, noun and pronoun. A little like verb. These words do not exist outside discussions of grammar, and the French alternative, nom, is not much help as there is interference from the common meaning, name. Both short words, and there is no interference in English. Can be learned,  needs careful explanation - one hint from an OED example is that you can put a or the before the word and make sense. But why proper noun, when proper is in the sense of property, and hence obscure, for different reasons, to both children and adults. A first thought is that the term name could be reserved for proper nouns, which in English all have a capital letter, as the child's own name does. A noun could then perhaps be described as a thing, a feeling or a thought, and practised.

And that is my final point. As Wittgenstein said,  What can be said at all can be said simply. If it can be, it should be. The national strategies have made a serious error in taking terminology from academic linguistics and feeding it straight to children without the benefit of what Jerome Bruner called a courteous translation into words they can understand. And of course, they then back this up with the authority of government. We can do better.

Nerve Maps

Until the last twenty years or so, our knowledge and understanding of how language developed was based on a combination of observation of external features (aka behaviour) and analysis. Our knowledge of the bain's role in language development was based largely on what happened when someone was injured, and on tracing language difficulties to the location of the injury. Scanning is changing this by opening up the brain at work, rather then when parts are knocked out. This link to a Telegraph story takes the picture a small step further, by allowing the nervous system to be fully pictured. Peripheral, perhaps, but perhaps not - once pictures like this can be obtained, it must be a  step on the road to tracking how the nerves work, and how they transmit information.

Speedy Spanish - An Explanation? (updated 1st August 09)

Why does Spanish sound particularly fast to new learners? Any new language at normal speed sounds faster to us than our own, because we don't have the mental structures in place to understand it as we hear it - every time we have to pause and wonder what a word is, we are lost, as the speech keeps going at the same pace and leaves us behind.

With French, the main problem is the way the language likes to run words together. This can be learned, but it takes time (for a slowish learner like me, a long time) and study. But Spanish tends to pronounce every syllable, so this is not the problem. I´ve been discussing the point with my friends at Duero Formación in Tordesillas for some time, in the context of the speed needed to teach English learners of Spanish, which seems to be slower than that needed for speakers of other languages (usually French). When I did a word count in French and English on two radio broadcasts some years ago, in the context of one of Julian Whybra´s courses for gifted children, the speed was virtually identical at 206 and 208 wpm, though of course the French sounded faster.

I haven't yet repeated this with Spanish, but found a clue in the characteristic noted above, of pronouncing everything.  On a long tube trip, I counted the words and syllables in a paragraph from Amalia in Lawaetz, Penguin Parallel Texts 2, p84 , and its English translation opposite. The Spanish had 80 words, and 165 syllables. The English 81 words, and 108 syllables. Each Spanish vowel that was separately pronounced was counted as a syllable, which accounts for the difference of roughly 30 per cent in the amount of articulation required.

This made me curious enough to try two more comparable texts when I got home. These were on recent ETA activity, from El Pais and The Times of 31.7.09. The El Pais article had 117 words, in which I counted 251 syllables. The first 117 words of The Times piece had 177 syllables.

Update - I checked the first 117 words of the corresponding article in The Telegraph, which, co-incidentally, also contained 177 syllables. To square things up, I repeated the exercise with El Mundo, which had 250 syllables in 117 words.

There is an interesting historical element here. When voicing the -ed  ending in most English verbs was dropped (instead of dropp-ed as in learn-ed) around the turn of the 17th century, Jonathan Swift wrote a furious attack on the shortcut. But it accounts for some of the compactness of modern spoken English, and is a factor in the syllable count - ido, ado add two syllables in Spanish.  Similarly, the adverbial ending mente in Spanish has two syllables, the English ly one.

Errors and borderline judgements on syllable boundaries excepted, I offer this as prima facie evidence -no more, no less - that, in comparable texts, Spanish has significantly more syllables for a given number of words than English has, and that the need for increased articulation to pronounce these additional syllables in the same space is what makes Spanish seem fast. Any views? 

Zim Zam Zoum, Module 2 - three more cheers!

I've just had the great pleasure of checking out an advance copy of ZZZ module 2. It would be hard to overstate the impact of Module 1 on young children learning French - its brilliant animations, light, melodic and rhythmic music, and careful script make it a pleasure to use, and anyone who has not seen it should make a bee-line to it.

Receiving the pack in August, I can't try it with a class yet, but it seems every bit as good as Module 1. The very popular theme song has been reworked, the music and animations are top flight - the music has aa real French feel to it - and the linguistic content has an excellent combination of new, authentic French material and plenty of practice and reinforcement. A new feature is a series of animated descriptions of basic French grammar, followed by interactive exercises. The explanations are very clear and slowly paced, and may well be useful to non-specialist teachers as well as pupils. I'd be very grateful for any feedback on their use in practice, and will try them myself as soon as term starts.

ZZZ is now used in every school in North Yorkshire as well as in Hackney. Very highly recommended. http://www.taughtbysong.com/

Spanish in Tordesillas - an excellent week, and the solution to a problem.

My work in Hackney schools over the past three years has been based on the idea that language learning is an activity of the brain, in which we adapt and extend the structures that we have learned in our first language. This is consistent with several key features in the primary framework, but is also based on the idea that children need to understand all aspects of their work from the start, and should not be given language they don't understand. It is also in contrast with the idea of "four skills" in language - understanding is the key to all, whether we are reading, writing, speaking, listening or just daydreaming. 

 

Since 2006, over 250 Hackney primary teachers and assistants have visited France and Spain for training courses, some funded by the authority and some by the British Council. The results have been very good and at times excellent for French - thank you, Le Français en Ecosse and Learn French in France - but mixed for Spanish.  Most of our Spanish teachers have been beginners - myself included - and the problem was simply having teachers go too fast and not explain things. The pace of speech is always an issue for beginners in a new language, and I don't know of any evidence that Spanish produces more words per minute, or syllables per minute, than French or English - if anyone has this evidence I'll be pleased to see it. But I've been criticised by Spanish teachers for going too slow myself with beginners, although our British teachers and assistants have felt that the full speed language did not help them. As one returning teacher said, "It flowed right over me".

 

Well, this time Leo Blanco and his colleagues at Duero Formación in Tordesillas got it dead right, with teaching that gave plenty of explanation and practice through songs and games for our beginners, and careful explanation of grammatical issues for teachers who had just taken GCSE.  The course members were delighted, and I felt that the approach of building up knowledge, skills and understanding in a way that each learner could handle comfortably and confidently was fully vindicated for adults, as it has been in the classroom for children. If we can return to this concept as the core of language learning we have a fighting chance of ditching the legacy of failure that still haunts us.  Leo is taking a leading role in the recently awarded Regio project between Hackney and Tordesillas, so we will be able to take the work a good deal further.

Learning and using multiplication tables: a co-ordination problem?

Following previous postings on this issue, I now have direct observation of four pupils, aged eight to twelve, who have been having problems with multiplication tables. As they have all been making the same type of mistake, and have all made progress following similar teaching, I think there is the basis for a a clear statement of the problem, and of a solution.

First, the problem. As we say a table, we count in single numbers and multiples alternately. One two is two, two twos are four, three twos are six, etc. When the tables are written out, we can see two columns clearly. When we say the table, we have constantly to switch from one to the other. Children have learned to count first, and the error all four children were making was to count on by one from the last number they said, rather than going back go the singles column and counting from there. Hence J, a ten year old girl:

One two is two

Three twos are

and this morning, after she'd made some progress

Three nines are twenty-seven

Eight....

Getting the two columns mixed up is, I suggest, a co-ordination problem; all four pupils have been assessed as having varying degrees of learning difficulty, including one statement for Asberger's, one for dyslexia and one for the type of language delay that would be considered dyslexia under Sir James Rose's working definition. 

The solution?  Explaining to the children exactly what they are doing, and then concentrating on getting twos right, slowly, followed by calling out individual facts from the table.  Once the twos are right, and facts are recalled with little or no hesitation, repeat with other tables, and not just the easiest ones. The two older pupils are now quite good on 7 and 8. J is nearly there with 2s and just slight hesitation, and the younger pupil is at a similar level. All are making progress. I'm recommending using learnyourtables.co.uk for practice, and think we're on the right road. Correspondence welcomed.

A lovely day at the Institute of Education

The course was a small one - five teaching assistants from state schools. and a teacher of children with autism from the private sector. The great thing about a group this size is that people can ask as many questions as they want without feeling they're disturbing the group, and that we can discuss them fully.

We started with the idea that dealing with literacy problems - the course was Using Phonics to Tackle  Literacy Problems - involves helping people to adjust their thinking so that they don't keep running into the same snags, but have a way round them. In English, the fuzzy logic of the spelling "system", in which letters behave regularly about three quarters of the time, is the key issue, and one that the government, with all its tons of paper, has never faced up to. In regular languages, learning difficulties slow people down, but fuzzy logic adds a new strand to the problem, so that children need to learn to think flexibly, and to be prepared for letters not to do as they expect.

We discussed the analysis of English spelling in my books, and course members felt that they provided a way in. We considered the issue of light sensitivity, and, as usual, it affected one of us quite strongly, to the extent of getting frequent headaches under fluorescent light. This person benefited immediately from putting a blue overlay over a text, using the British Institute of Optometry's screening kit. We looked at materials and resources from Mantralingua's Talking Pen and John Crick's Clicker, to Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc, with its excellent use of questions to ensure children understood what they were reading, and considered training and assessment. We discussed snags - assistants not being kept fully informed, for example - and ways round them. We even shaved a few minutes off the lunch break to make sure everyone could get home easily on Friday afternoon. 

Everyone enjoyed the course, and several people asked me if I could repeat it in their schools, "as everyone would benefit". Of course - and the cost per head is very cheap if you run the course in a cluster, or offer places to neighbouring schools. You can download the core presentation from the course here:

Download IoE Phonics

Intercultural Understanding - a third of MFL or New Left Politics?

Learning a new language involves learning about the culture of the people who speak it. It always has. I was interested to find, in what is now Year 8, that the French did not eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, and more interested still to find that they had a custom of drinking a glass or two of wine with their supper, which I found an improvement on tea. Their cider tasted different from ours, and they had this thing called Perrier, which I thought was probably pear cider (perry) and found cordially revolting.

But a third of language learning, and when the main substance of language learning is in such a parlous state?  Pure PC, pure manipulation, pure government-sponsored ignorance, designed to draw attention away from the important task of giving children real understanding of their work and generating enough interest and enthusiasm for them to want to carry on with it. In other words, New Labour, taking a good idea and using it as a mask for a thoroughly bad one, and in the process helping disguise the fall in standards - any idiot could get 100% on that assessment, hiding weaknesses elsewhere.  

The politics go deeper. Most of us thought that the New in New Labour referred to modernising, getting rid of nationalisation - more fun and much cheaper to tax businesses than to buy them - and reducing the "beer and sandwiches" culture of the unions. This was the public agenda. The private one was to put in place the policies of the New Left. This was done under the shaded leadership of David Miliband, Blair's head of policy, and the architect of the shift from the early attempt to raise standards (eg by summer schools run by people who mostly didn't know what they were doing. Blair has a naive streak.) towards the dilution that has drawn criticism from academics in maths and sciences. This latest step will lead to less language teaching and more indoctrination. Negative responses to consultation might work - New Labour will always step back from something that loses it votes. My hunch is that they believe they can get away with it, and that they probably will get away with it. Personally, I'd had enough of them some time ago. I have a naive streak myself, and helped them at the beginning, meeting shadow ministers and contributing to their first policy document. I've now joined the Conservative Party.

The White Paper on languages - and what it should have said.

The government's White Paper on Education - in effect, the preparation for a new Education Act - mentions languages twice. In para 3.7, it says that partnerships with specialist schools can make languages available to all, and in para 4.12, it says that central support from the ministry can encourage more people to take maths, science and languages to A level. That is all.

The first comment hides the catastrophic decline in languages in most schools - and hence for most children - in the country. The second, a similar disaster at A level, where languages are kept alive by heavy subsidy from more popular courses.  There is no attempt to address the underlying causes of this failure, and the government made sure they would not be addressed by spiking the "independent" review of languages by the late Lord Dearing by appointing its chief official as his co-writer. This ensured that, whatever else was criticised as a cause of language failure, the government and its policies would not be.

What should the White Paper have said?

1. That the idea of simply exposing children to "a rich input" of the new language will only lead to learning if the children understand the language.  I made this point to Lord Dearing, and he told me that he accepted it.  I was told this week that the mangled version of the point that appeared in the report - that children "needed to understand what they were learning and why" - was not based on this point at all.  Direct observation of children learning, and discussions with them, have convinced me that deliberately giving them language they don't understand, particularly in the early stages, is a catastrophic error.

2. One major error in the National Curriculum, moving to full speed in listening almost from the beginning, has been moved to Level 7. However, it is still present in many of the materials teachers use, and these need to be replaced.

3. Separating listening from its context is another error, particularly in the early stages. We only listen without a visual context via the radio, and this is an advanced skill in a foreign language. Normal speaking and listening is supported by facial expression, gesture and body language, and children should not be expected to operate in new language without these elements. Listening should not be presented out of context before A level, and even then it should be presented with great care. Now that video can be used just as easily as sound recording, there is no reason to continue with the practice of artificial separation of listening from its normal context.

4. Government communication on languages continues to be cumbersome, ineffective and politically loaded. As I left my meeting with Lord Dearing, he told me that the primary Framework was "repetitive and overloaded". So is everything else the government produces on education. This is because of its commitment, under what Blair called "joined up government" and Miliband "equal opportunities...the political lodestar", to promoting a political agenda rather than to raising standards. Sir James Rose's reports, for good or ill, have been genuinely independent. Lord Dearing's report on languages was not. If it had been, I believe it would have read very differently. My reason for this belief is his other parting comment as I left the ministry - "I've learned from you," he said. The government hasn't, and won't.

4.  The late Professor E C Wragg's surveys of primary and secondary children's opinions of teaching found that they valued clear explanation above everything else. My late friend Michel Thomas applied the same principle in teaching adults, and the primary Toolkits I've produced with my colleagues in Hackney do this for primary children, explaining, for example, the idea of gender in terms that six year olds can understand. This approach needs to be developed further. It is not possible to learn a language, either our first (past an everyday level) or a second language, without understanding how it works.

5. We need a new approach to the subject, based on hard evidence and on direct observation of teaching and learning to establish what works and what doesn't. The present state of research is a disgrace when compared with any other academic discipline - much as the research into phonics was prior to the Clackmannanshire study.

Jim

I am currently working with a ten-year-old, whom we shall call, for the sake of cheek, Jim. Jim has been pronouced as dyslexic by an educational psychologist on the basis of extremely low reading, spelling and psychometric scores, although there was no evidence whatever that these difficulties were related to dyslexia. They are in fact rooted in very limited early language development, coupled with an environment in which so many shortcuts are taken in speech that it was difficult for Jim to make the transition to reading and writing, where attention to detail and discrimination in using symbols (letters and figures) are the key to communication.

I explained to Jim how English spelling worked, using the techniques described elsewhere in this weblog and set out in my books, and then apply these in a book on a subject he likes. As Jim likes animals, we picked 101 Dalmations - the original version, which does not stint on vocabulary, and which I have found popular with children since I first used it in Stepney Green School in the mid-seventies.

The first paragraphs were very hard work, as I explained and worked on the patterns behind every single word that Jim misread or hesitated over. After about eight lessons on 101 Dalmatians, we are making good progress, and Jim continues to enjoy the story, helped by the presence of Jasper, our own aging Dalmatian, who adopted us partly because he knew we'd read the book and were likely to understand him. Jasper, like Pongo, sleeps on the best sofa, and is kind to his pets. He has brown spots.

Jim is also learning to spell and is working on his tables, as until he is sure of them he can't do his maths work. Jim's school teaches tables, but has been working on high numbers, which confused him as he did not know his 2s. It took Jim several weeks before he understood the need to practise until he could remember items from 2 and 3 times tables, and he then moved quickly to 4s and 6 and 7s.  

We started with addition number bonds, on which he made quite rapid progress. In Labour's world, a levelling world disguised as equal opportunities, whether Jim makes progress, so that he can read, write and do maths to his full intellectual capacity, or not, is not the key issue. It would prefer that he learned, but what really matters is that he is not treated less favourably than anyone else. Dyslexia is respectable, speech and language difficulties less so.  So, Jim's primary school, which produces a small but steady stream of people unable to learn to read by the methods it uses, discouraged  him from coming to see me. I might be interfering with the work done by their teaching assistant. Did Jim find any benefit from coming to see me on a Saturday morning?  "Yes," said Jim, emphatically.

(Another child I'm working with has been taught to count in multiples instead of learning tables. This is common practice in schools, despite national curriculum requirements. I should not have to teach the 2 times table to children aged 10 to 14 just because the school doesn't want to. This child's parents told me the school believes tables should not be taught until secondary school.)

A note on these lessons - while my courses on dyslexia and other reading difficulties have been attended by many leading public schools, I do not charge for lessons. Most people whose children have literacy problems can't afford the true cost of private teaching and assessment. Instead, I encourage people to contribute to A Book of My Own, a charity that provides books for children in local authority care. A parent sits in on each lesson, so that they can see exactly what I do and reinforce it. Jim's mother and father have contributed to the charity. They are pleased with Jim's progress and agree with me that there is no evidence to link his difficulties with dyslexia. 

If you know someone who needs help, please get in touch. After an initial lesson, I can now teach via videophone. I can, of course, also offer the training course in your school. 

Grow, Story, Grow - Val Thornber

Val's new website is here.  Lots of interactive stories, at levels that will suit Y2 upwards, in the style of Little Tails, but with more scope. Highly recommended, especially at its current price (free).

Rose and Dyslexia: Consequences

The mixture of science and politics in Sir James Rose's report on dyslexia will have positive and negative consequences. The positive consequences can be welcomed, and the negative ones overcome by attention to detail in considering evidence and teaching.

Positive.

• Dyslexia is officially accepted as a cause of literacy problems.
• Visual stress is recognised as a cause of literacy problems
• Schools need to recognise this, and parents should not have to fight them to get help
• There is to be money for training teachers

Negative

• Dyslexia has been conflated with a range of reading and spelling difficulties stemming from problems with language.
• Scientific evidence on brain functions is not properly considered and is lightly dismissed.

The negative aspects can be overcome by attention to detail. Essentially, a teacher meeting a person with a literacy problem needs to ask him or herself two questions.

What is it in this person's thinking that is preventing them from reading or spelling effectively?

How do I help them to adjust their thinking so that they can read or spell?

The answers need to be based on direct observation, not on the application of some pre-determined forumula.  As a person reads, they may guess at words from their first letter, may sound them out, with extra bits of vowel attached to consonants, so that the process doesn't work, may just give up at a word they don't know, may misread a word to make sense of an earlier error.  One way or another, they are not using all of the information the letters provide. And do their eyes hurt? Do they rub their eyes, or get headaches? Are they uncomfortable under fluorescent light Any indication that visual stress is a factor needs to be checked out.

The solution then depends on the evidence. Tests are good at detecting weaknesses in performance, but not at getting to the underlying reasons. An assessment based purely on tests is therefore inadequate as a means of informing teaching. All assessments should include direct observation of the child reading and writing, videoed if necessary.

Teaching needs to be put into immediate practice in the context of things the learner wants to read and write.  There is no point whatever in grinding a child or adult through one series of phonic patterns after another if they do not also learn to apply them in their work. This is the main weakness of nearly every commercial scheme, and the reason is the underlying weaknesses in processing of people with dyslexia and some of its look-alikes. Whatever is taught in an abstract context needs to be reinforced with carefully designed practice, using books the child is interested in, but in a way that makes learning to read for these people much more like learning to play a musical instrument than like a normal English lesson. 

The final weakness in Rose's report is that heand his colleagues define the severity of dyslexia in terms of the response to their teaching methods - the more severely dyslexic they are, the harder they are to teach. This shows the fallacy of their lumping dyslexia and language problems together. The people who respond well to their teaching have language problems. The people who don't probably have the processing difficulties in the brain that the "narrow research definition" (Snowling) refers to as dyslexic. The pattern of teaching for the two is likely to be different. Provided teachers understand this, and base their work on the pattern of direct observation and practical reinforcement in the tradition of Grace Fernald - who does not appear anywhere in their references - then they will be able to build on Rose's positives, and make up for his and his colleagues' political fudging.

 

 

Sir James Rose and Dyslexia:Technical Update 1

The approach to dyslexia set out in Sir James Rose's report can be traced to a paper for the Government's Foresight organisation here. Its conclusions, and in some cases its wording, are identical.  Foresight is a little-known organisation headed by the UK government's chief scientific adviser, which describes its function as "bridging the gap in policy making between the long and the short term".  The point at issue is the basis of this paper - is it scientific, or does it mix science with a personal perspective that is not fully based on evidence?

The first, and permanent, problem, is distinguishing dyslexia from other forms of reading and spelling difficulty, and the language here is important. The preface speaks of "Starting from a consensus view of dyslexia..." without saying exactly what this "consensus" is - recalling Thatcher's comment that "consensus is what you have when you can't get agreement". Elsewhere it refers to "the predominant view", and "a narrow research definition" that is not defined. So, when saying that 50% of prisoners (p4) are poor readers, Professor Snowling adds a footnote that "by a narrow research definition of dyslexia, the figure is 20%. So does this mean that 20% of prisoners are dyslexic? There is also the emotive use of the term "narrow" - does it imply narrow-mindedness, as used here, or precise thinking?  Switching in and out of references to poor readers and dyslexics in this way makes it impossible to trace a clear line from evidence to conclusion, and is therefore unscientific. And does a description of a view as "predominant" imply that it has any validity? There are many views that were once predominant that are nw known to be untrue, because they have been disproved by science.

The same reasoing applies to some of the assertions in this paper - its conclusion that "It is not, therefore, appropriate to think of dyslexia as a single category of impairment" (p6) is carefully worded. What does she mean by appropriate? And, whether or not it is appropriate, is it accurate?  Science deals with accuracy. What is appropriate is a matter for politics.

Foresight's own introduction to its work gives an insight into this kind of thinking:

Our aim is to provide visions of the future using robust science to be used by policymakers to inform government policy and strategy, and to improve how science and technology are used within Government and by society.

Foresight brings together key people, knowledge and ideas to look beyond normal planning horizons to identify potential opportunities from new science and technologies and actions to help realise those opportunities. We are recognised as world leaders in our field

The programme focuses on three to four areas at one time, examining either a key issue where science might be part of the solution or a cutting-edge scientific topic where potential applications and technologies are yet to be realised.

A high-level stakeholder group, comprising senior decision-makers and budget-holders from relevant Departments, Research Councils and other organisations, oversee all projects. The group is chaired by the Minister from the lead Department, and is responsible for agreeing an action plan, which is usually published alongside the findings and reports of the project. Each project is led at a senior level by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser. Projects usually last between 18 months and two years.

In other words, this is the government's view of science, with direction set not by the scientists but by a committee chaired by the Minister. Add to this a single person writing the paper and the choice of the person will largely determine the outcome. No-one's integrity is questioned - we expect politics from Ministers, and the author of the paper, like every scientist since Einstein, is entitled to personal views.

One aspect of the preface that is quite accurate is the sentence

It briefly outlines brain-based, perceptual theories of dyslexia before focusing on the widely agreed view that dyslexia is a language based disorder characterised by deficits in phonological (speech) processing skills

This outline of brain research is far too brief, and. like the Rose report itself, does not take account of the study by Paulescu and his colleagues in 1996 (summarised in Blakemore and Frith, The Learning Brain, Blackwell 2005) that showed distinct differences in the brain functioning of adults assessed as dyslexic when matched with a group of similar capacity who are not. The Rose review did not refer to this study by name, but made the general comment that

However, the causal status of brain differences in dyslexia is debatable because brain development shows considerable plasticity: both its structure and function are shaped by use.

This is too easy, and certainly not grounds for dismissing a study of adults rather than children, particularly adults speaking the same language, and with matched levels of attainment, which suggests that the brains have had broadly equal use on broadly the same material.

It would be useful if Foresight commissioned a review of research on the brain in dyslexia from Professor Uta Frith, FRS. Whether this would please whatever minister was chairman of the committee would be another question.

 

PS. One of the studies cited by Professor Snowling is Neuroanatomical Markers for Dyslexia: A Review of Dyslexia Structural Imaging Studies by Mark Eckert, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Stanford University. The summary of his paper is as follows:

A neuroanatomical description of dyslexia has been elusive, due in part to the complex cognitive nature of dyslexia. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of impairment in reading skills that engage oral and written language (reading) neural networks. Although findings for the inferior parietal lobule, inferior frontal gyrus, and cerebellum have been relatively consistent across studies, these studies also demonstrate that anatomical patterns of results vary according to the reading skills that characterize dyslexia. The number and likelihood of atypical anatomical findings in oral and/or written language systems appears to be related to the pattern of impairments in measures of phonology, orthography, and fluency. A comprehensive neurobiological understanding of dyslexia will depend on studies of dyslexic individuals with homogeneous perceptual, cognitive, and genetic backgrounds.

 

 

 

 

Sir James Rose and the wider politics of dyslexia

The idea of dyslexia as a political lever to change the education system has taken some time to emerge. Peter Dorey, Reader in Politics at Cardiff University, told the House of Commons select committee in March that he and his colleagues "have to assume that the inability to spell is always due to dyslexia, and they are not permitted to penalise poor spelling".  Peter Dorey's full evidence is here.

This is in line with Sir James Rose's "working definition" of dysiexia as a reading and spelling difficulty - with no distinction made between different types of reading and spelling difficulty except those caused by visual stress. As David Miliband put it in a revealing article in The Spectator, equal opportunities is "the political lodestar". That idea explains this and many other political decisions that seem otherwise inexplicable. In this case, why should a person whose reading difficulties are caused by weak synchronisation between elements of the brain - the "broken bridges" explanation of dyslexia - be treated more favourably than one whose difficulties are caused by weaknesses in early language experience or hearing?  What does it matter whether the causes are different if the effect, weak literacy skills, is the same?

Relabelling all literacy problems as dyslexia fits New Labour's EO/PC agenda, and, in the phrase used by Sir James Rose on You and Yours (BBC Radio 4, Monday 22.7.09) enables us to "move forward". This may or may not be what is in Sir James' mind - I believe, on the basis of his other work on literacy, that the the issue is too subtle for him to understand. But it is the way his political masters think, which is why they provided immediate funding. This is not to deny the need for better speech and language services, or for training for teachers to support them. It is simply to point out that Sir James's committee has adopted a misleading solution by piggy-backing them onto dyslexia.

Sir James Rose and Dyslexia: a step forward, but three major errors.

Sir James Rose's report on provision for dyslexia here makes the crucial point that parents of children assessed as dyslexic have to fight their school for help, and should not have to do this. He argues that we need more trained teachers, and that specialist teaching should be built into the system. Both of these points are correct, and the government's funding for this training is long overdue.The idea of practising certificates for specialist teachers, issued from more than one provider, seems useful, as does the idea that schools should no longer be allowed to disregard advice they don't provide themselves, though this will require more reinforcement.

Sir James' report is also for the most part,  an honest attempt to get to grips with the patchy and at times inconsistent evidence surrounding the issue. Here, for example, are the qualifications attached to one of the main research studies, sponsored by the DCSF (p 72):

The size and complexity of the project entailed some methodological difficulties. These included:

·         the comparison group had less severe literacy difficulties than the intervention group

·         whole school dyslexia awareness training was undertaken at the schools while the intervention was underway, potentially improving support to the comparison group

·         in 4 schools it emerged that some support staff had been using photocopies of some of the intervention teaching materials with members of the comparison group

·         the lack of teaching protocols, meant it is not possible to know exactly what interventions were used by the specialist teachers (who were guided by professional judgement in tuning teaching to children’s needs).

These are not minor weaknesses - the first one alone would invalidate a drugs trial - and they are typical of the fog that has surrounded reading research since I first became interested in it in the 1970s. Take the last point, the lack of a protocol, which means that we have no way of linking what was taught to the outcome. If we do not know what the teachers are doing, how can we know what works or does not work? But at least Sir James is open about the flaws.    

However, his "working definition" of dyslexia as a difficulty with reading and spelling does not distinguish between dyslexia and other sources of reading problems. This is puzzling, but may well reflect theerror of assimilating dyslexia into the field of speech and language difficulties. This fudged thinking, and its basis in correlation rather than cause and effect, appears clearly in this comment (p,111)

There is strong evidence of overlap between specific language impairment and dyslexia: between 35 and 40% of children with reading problems have been reported to have language impairment and vice versa

 

The association of speech and language impairment with reading difficulties is quite different from its association with dyslexia, unless the goal is to have all reading problems classified as dyslexia. This may well be the case. Professors are not stupid, and do not fudge an argument as simple as this without a good reason. This is the first major error.

Further good points include an interesting list of characteristics that teachers see as key elements in good teaching, and a recognition of visual stress as a factor in reading difficulties, though this is grudging.  There is no "visual dyslexia", but the error arose because the effects of visual stress on reading, particularly in severe cases, are very similar to those experienced by people who can be identified as dyslexic on the basis of the brain scan evidence noted below.

The bibliography is extensive,  but does not include either the brain-scan evidence, summarised in  Sarah- Jane Blakemore and Uta Frith's The Learning Brain (Routledge 2005) or the great pioneering work on Dyslexia, Grace Fernald's Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects (1943 - try www.bookfinder.org). This key text, recommended to me by the late Dr Margaret Peters of the University of Cambridge Institute of Education, shows how people assessed as dyslexic can be given a full education that integrates effective teaching techniques while opening up the true dimensions of human intellectual activity and achievement. Why? The answer is, in my thirty-five years' experience, that the Univerisity establishment is a closed, pseudo-intellectual mafia that does business with the people it does business with, and treats any evidence outside its own domaine with contempt or condescension, depending on its mood. Rose is right to state that dyslexia exists, and that is affects people of all intellectual capacities.  As to exactly what it is, he does not enlighten us. Blakemore and Frith (FRS) do. Omitting this research is the second major error on the part of Sir James and his committee.

And the third major error?  In his "working definition", Sir James says (p.10) that

A good indication of the severity and persistence of dyslexic difficulties can be gained by examining how the individual responds or has responded to well founded intervention.

One of his panel members says later that "success can be elusive", and another made the point at the London Conference organised by Professor Joe Elliott in 2007 that the manifest failure of a university student to learn to spell showed that he was dyslexic, and she could personally vouch for the "excellence" oof the intervention he had received. If this were true, dyslexia would be the educational equivalent of an incurable disease. But it is not. The teaching techniques pioneered by Fernald in the 1940s enabled many people with dyslexia not just to make average progress, but to reach their true potential. One of my own students has done as much by saving the country hundreds of millions of pounds as a fraudbuster with HM Customs after I taught him to read at an adult level. No-one could accuse a group of experts such as those advising Sir James of ignorance, and I do not. I simply say that there is a huge gap in their knowledge of teaching techniques, and that they should read Fernald and build on her work, as I have tried to. And what is the value of a practising certificate, the holder of which has to "work within national guidance" if the national guidance is not fully informed as to the best available teaching methods?

Slimmed Down Spelling versus the government version

The government's latest publications on spelling make some sensible points, particularly on the historical origins of English spelling, but are loaded with jargon and cumbersome. This is typical of government documents - I put the point to the second director of the National Literacy Strategy that they needed to learn to write for an audience of teachers, and above all to take the time, in Bernard Shaw's phrase, to write a short letter rather than a wrong one. He agreed, but it made no difference. 

This alternative, Slimmed Down Spelling, is the outcome of practical work with people learning to spell. I have been working on it since about 1996, as a development from the approach to reading that appeard in The Literacy File.

It uses plain English instead of jargon (a phoneme, for example, is nothing more or less than a sound) and has the following key points:

English spelling is an example of fuzzy logic, in which items do not necessarily share all the characteristics of a group to which they belong. In English, roughly three-quarters of letters represent sounds. But sometimes letters work in groups, some words have an extra letter, and occasionally we do not need the letter we think we do – these cases are awkward. To learn to spell, we need to understand both the theme – the sounds – and these variations.

Here’s how:

1. If we hear a sound when we say a word carefully -   without taking any shortcuts - we need at least one letter for it. We use a letter to represent a sound because we hear it. This covers roughly three-quarters of spelling.

2. Sometimes letters work in groups –eg, station has one sound per letter for the first three letter then the group tion.  We use a group when we’ve learned we need it – this way, we don’t guess at what group we might need.

3. Some words have an extra letter, eg made, chaos.  We use an extra letter when we’ve learned we need it. Sometimes there is a function for the extra letter – eg plague where the u stops the e from softening the g, as it would in page.

4. Sometimes, because of shortcuts in speech, or changes in the way people speak, the letter we need is not the one we think we need. These letters are awkward, and we only use them when we’ve learned we need them.  The easiest example is probably was rather than woz.  Once again, we use an awkward letter only when we’ve learned we need it.

Once we’ve learned to spell a word – and we never copy – we find at least one other that is like it. This helps us build up our understanding of patterns, and is especially useful to people who do not find learning to spell straightforward.

It usually takes children and adults six weeks to three months to learn to apply these principles. They work. But they are designed to teach people to spell and not to promote a political agenda. Slimmed Down Spelling has been published in The Times Educational Supplement, and is in my book, Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling. I've presented it at courses at the London Institute of Education and for the Lighthouse organisation. It works.

Fabulous French Puppets - Stephen Novy

Before tonight's tube strike bit, I saw ten minutes of Stephen Novy's puppet show at CILT's London regional network. It was enough to recommend Stephen's work without reservation to schools doing French who wish to give their staff and pupils a special treat. Stephen's art combines excellent French with excellent puppetry and first rate teaching skills - he managed to put lip synch into the first five minutes - and I hated tearing myself away - I would have been stranded otherwise, the strike having started 90 minutes early. Stephen's website is www.pekkospuppets.co.uk, and his day or half-day package includes workshops for teachers as well as a puppet show. Enjoy - and thanks to CILT for putting this on.

A note from Katharine Wheatley

Thanks John for the pointer to Stephen Novy
I had him last week for two of my schools and they loved what he did, particularly the younger ones.

Mrs K Wheatley
Primary Languages Coordinator
Dame Alice Owen's School
Potters Bar

Ashcombe school MFL resources

For some years,  The Ashcombe School has been offering free courses to colleagues and publishing free resources on its website. An example of how good these resources are is this link to Spanish road signs. Small combinations of words like this are a great help in building networks in pupils' minds, and make a great starter or conclusion to a lesson. Thanks to Aschombe for giving me the basis of a good lesson after half term.

Early morning call

When I'm not driving into London, I sometimes just get up and start work, so I was mildly embarrassed to find Michael and his mum knocking on the door at half past eight this morning when I was in my pyjamas. Could I help with Michael's homework?

He'd been given a table with a colum of three-digit numbers down the middle. On the left hand side, he had to subtract 1, 10 and then 100, and on the right he had to add the same. His puzzle was - should he subtract 1, and then 10 from the new number, then 100 from the next new number, or should he start his operation from the central number each time? The only thing to tell him - or me - was a printed number in the second row, that had clearly been subtracted from the original number. Once I'd spotted this, I could explain to Michael what he had to do.

But why didn't they explain the operation on the sheet? Is maths about reading implications into cryptic clues?  If so, then children need to be taught to do this. Adding or subtracting 1 from a number is not difficult - not knowing what to do had Michael in distress, as I was with geometry until I found out how it worked fifteen years after I'd left school.

Michael has just been "assessed" as dyslexic by a psychologist, purely on the basis of his low scores on her tests. No consideration of cause and effect. If only it were so simple...

Charlie's First Lesson

My books, The Literacy File and Using Phonics to teach reading and spelling analyse English spelling in terms of just four features, that are easy for children to understand and apply. The approach needs to be presented to children or adult learners in ways that match their current level of understanding - some children can manage only to understand that sounds tell us most, but not all, we need to know, and that they have to be ready for letters not to behave sometimes. Charlie was able to understand and apply the whole approach in one lesson, and then to proceed to using commas as a guide for phrasing. I'm  posting this note of Charlie's lesson as a guide for anyone else who needs to help a person of above average intellingence and language skills with reading or spelling. Please note that the child in question was not called Charlie, and that Charlie in modern England can be a girl's or a boy's name.  I have tried to anonymise all features of the pupil, except to say that he or she is ten years old. To save time, the child will be termed he from now on.  tbc

Sensitivity to Light. Christopher Woodhead and the Sunday Times

At long last, sensitivity to light gets a mention in the Sunday Times in this answer to a question from a parent by Chris Woodhead. He is quite right to say that the problem is common - when I asked children in two primary classes last week if anyone found their eyes hurt when they read, four in one class and six in another said they did. This is typical. I've been writing about this issue since 1987, and getting it through to pyschologists, special needs teachers and even opticians has been like trying to teach social skills to crocodiles. Anyone meeting a child with a reading problem needs to check this out. If you don't you will waste a lot of time and money if this turns out to be the root of the problem.

Zim Zam Zoum Update - Open Arms and Joyful Hearts

Last summer, I bought Zim Zam Zoum for all Hackney primary schools doing French. The program was designed in an Oxford prep school, and proved an immediate hit with Hackney children, who were singing the songs all day long. After two terms' use, the program is having the following effects

• The songs, sung by native speakers on the DVDs, are leading children to develop accurate pronunciation, which is transferred to other work. This reinforces the work I've been doing on pronunciation through the Primary Toolkits.
• Children notice where they need to modify their thinking to communicate in French. Once I've drawn their attention, for example, to the masculine and feminine anglais/anglaise, français/française, they get it right when singing the introductory song:
• Non-specialist teachers are finding the program very easy to use for reinforcement as children find it a treat
• The karaoke feature is helping children to remember French words and constructions without inhibition.
• The presentation of animation, text and spoken language together helps children recognise words that are identical or similar in English and French.

Some aspects of language teaching can be controversial. This program is not. It has been welcomed with open arms and joyful hearts by every teacher and child who has seen it and was recommeded to his colleagues by a visiting inspector from Paris. It should be first call on the new year's budget for any school doing French - and children love it so much that it won't matter to Year 7 children if they've already seen it in primary school.

New Weblog on Assessment and Testing

Warwick Mansell, who did so much as an investigative reporter on the TES to expose the corruption, dishonesty and inefficiency of the examination system, has started a new weblog here.

Congratulations to Warwick on an excellent dissection of the government's latest round of deceit, and very best wishes for this new stage of his career. This posting will also appear on my weblog on Ofsted and New Labour. I'm grateful to Warwick for this link to the Select Committee's hearing with Ken Boston.

Examinations, the government and languages teaching.

Warwick Mansell, in today's Guardian, points to the scandal of examining boards controlling, in effect, not only examinations, but teaching. They also endorse textbooks. The immediate scandal has been the practice of rehearsing oral exams to the extent of scripting and regurgitating them, so that any genuine communication in the new language is eliminated. How far this is a practical possiblity is questionable, and of course none of the scandal is the fault of teachers, who have to try to make sense of the mess in the interest of their pupils.

Languages are, we have been told, more harshly graded than other subjects. This argument is based purely on analysis of pass rates, and not on analysis of what children taking the examinations actually know, understand and can do. Behind it is the issue of the teaching methods that have been promoted by the National Curriculum and national organisations since the merger of GCE and CSE in the eighties, which the head of languages at Cambridge University has identified as the time when standards seriously started to fall. 

The Dearing review of languages was effectively prevented from identifying government policies as the root of the problem by the presence of a government official who was the major author of these policies as co-author. Lord Dearing, left to his own judgement, might well have produced a very different report. In particular, the view that children learn by being exposed to the language, has led to a lack of clear focus on understanding as the basis for learning. This is, in my view, contradicted by the most recent research into the formation of networks in the brain as we learn - in effect, using the raw material of brain cells to create structures, which are reinforced by practice and maintained by electricity - but remains for many senior officials a matter of belief.

The scandal over oral examinations goes to the heart of long-term changes in the examination system, that have led to widespread concern not only about its reliability, but about its honesty. Defenders of the changes, which have led to lower standards - recently publicly acknowledged in science - have been desperate to contain criticism, because it is essentially directed at their own leadership of the education system, and at the methods they are promoting. The fact that exam boards are private rather than governmental organisations means nothing - they are private in name, but their monopoly of state school entries makes them instruments of government policy. They do as they are told.  The system is as rotten and corrupt as the pre-reform bill House of Commons. We need a fresh start, and an honest system.

Phonics and adults

Somewhat surprisingly, this Guardian article says that there has been no serious study of the use of phonics to teach adults. It is followed by an anonymous comment saying that phonics only work well with people who are good at processing sounds. Both the article and the comment misunderstand the role of phonics in reading and learning to read in English in a way that is as tedious and half informed as Tim Beadle's efforts on Channel 4.

The issues in phonics, for adults as well as children are as follows:

• English is phonically based, so phonics are not just an essential element, but the basis of reading. 

• Because of the Norman conquest, and changes in pronunciation over centuries, English spelling is roughly 75% regular - that is, in roughly a quarter of cases, a letter does not represent the sound it most commonly does. This creates unique issues in English, and leads the brain to adapt a special mechanism to sort out anomalies and irregularities. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Professor Utah Frith, FRS, term this "the word form area". (The Learning Brain).

• Teaching reading to children and adults in English is more complex than in other languages, as the learner has to cope with the constant interference of irregularity as they try to apply what they have been taught about phonics.

• Weak sound processing slows people down in any language. The real issue in English is that sound processing is complicated by irregularity, so that a slower learner can become a non-learner.

The solution is to explain from the outset, to adults as well as children, that the language, like people, is not perfect, and that letters, like people, do not always behave. Once we have said that phonics works most of the time, and explained how and why spelling varies, we lift the burden of confusion from the learner and help them to think flexibly. Rose and his colleagues did not understand this, and neither do most of the "phonatics", who present irregualar words as "sight words" and leave learners with insufficient explanation of how to read them. When the teacher is not on hand to prompt, the result is breakdown. On the other side, critics of phonics do not acknowledge the 75% regularity of English, and have too often bought into guessing game theories that do not work at all.

The result is not so much a dialogue of the deaf as a head-on clash of blockheads.This failure to think hard enough is the root cause of our continuing problems with literacy, and is shameful to the academics and senior advisers who perpetuate it. There is no point in naming names here - they know who they are, and the people professionally involved in literacy who are not involved in the mess in some way can be counted on the fingers of one hand. 

As an independent consultant and teacher, my own evidence is necessarily limited to the cases I've dealt with. Anecdotal, no doubt, but anecdotes are based on fact and not fiction. Here are some, with apologies to those who have seen them mentioned elsewhere in this weblog:

1. A young man with cerebral palsy, whom I taught to read at an adult level using Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. He is now one of the two leading experts on computer spectrography in the country, and has saved us hundreds of millions of pounds by his fraud detection activities.

2. A parish councillor in her late fifties whose working life had been blighted by not being able to read and spell to the level of her intellectual ability. Her reading and report writing improved beyond measure.

3. A young lady who was able to pass her entry test to be an air stewardess after being assessed as dyslexic.

4. A young man who had been assessed as dyslexic who was able to read correspondence and manage his life more effectively.

5. A secondary school teacher who gained confidence in preparing materials for students and writing reports.

6. A mother in her thirties, whom I taught to read in about three months, in order to enable her to read to her son. He is now three, reads with his mum every day, and knows his alphabet. 

There are plenty more. As this issue is so central to people's lives, I am happy to repeat my offer of helping anyone with reading and spelling difficulties, without charge. Teachers, or indeed professors, are always welcome to watch.

Freshwater Theatre Company

Freshwater theatre company have sent me a DVD with part of a performance at Hugh Myddleton Primary School in Islington. The performance was enthusiastic, professional and engaging, using familiar children's stories, with well-chosen French that would give good practice for elements children will probably have already been learning. The cost is £150 ex VAT for an hour's storytelling performance, or £205 for an eighty-minute show for up to 120 pupils.  If you use Freshwater, please let me know how you get on and I'll update this posting. 

Feedback from Hugh Myddleton:

"Great to see the children spellbound, laughing and really enjoying speaking the French words."

Charlie Pitt, KS2 Coordinator

"Funny and tres bien!"

Karver, Year 3 pupil

"It was cool because I got to be a bear."

Dakhota, Year 6 pupil

"My Year 6 class were totally absorbed. They liked the fact that they knew the stories so well. "

Louise Berry, MFL Coordinator