I've tried asking the question, who owns literacy? and seeing if I can answer it.
To get at it, I try to think about what are the 'literacy objectives' of schooling? What kind of literacy do we want school students to end up having at the age of 16? You can answer that question in terms of what kinds of exams they can pass but that doesn't actually answer the question. That just tells us that they've passed tests for something. I'm talking about a literacy that you use away from tests. I don't suppose there's any universal agreement on this, but what I'd go for is something to do with 'ownership'. That is, in particular in relation to writing, that you feel entitled to write what you want, when you want; that you feel you can say what you want through your writing.
As it happens, one of the things that has happened in the last period is that phone and internet literacy has massively increased in the last few years. It's a literacy that no one controls. It's not taught in schools, users make up the rules. If you don't like doing it, you don't do it. How long this new-(ish) literacy will last, isn't certain because smart technology will enable people to speak their written messaging. They won't have to write it. This may well turn out to be a revolution in what we understand by literacy.
But what happens through schooling?
Let's go earlier than that, though. When we're babies and toddlers we learn language through need, want and desire. We also learn it through a need to say, tell and explain. However, a good deal of very early language-use in its fullest sense includes of course the making of sounds - not just the making of words, grammar and morphology (how words are constructed and reconstructed to make meaning). So a good deal of language-play goes on with very young children, some of it involving the selecting of that particular language's repertoire of phonemes (the sounds of the language) from all the sounds you can make with your mouth, others involving play with word order (a key component of English grammar), the morphology of words and so on.
One key aspect of all this is that the language-user (the child, in this case) mostly does this voluntarily. And though we teach young children rhymes and tell them stories, read them stories and so on, most of this learning of the language seems to go on as a result of face to face talk, and, just as important, face to face sympathetic and loving listening. Most parents and carers have a sense, I think, that we are helping a child to become an owner of language. Aren't we saying to the child, 'Have this, it's yours.' - and very soon we spot what seem like original utterances, new ways of speaking, ways of speaking that are that child's way of talking?
I don't want to idealise this too much, because there are many, many occasions when parents and carers tell their very young children to be quiet and to stop talking or singing; many occasions when parents and carers tell their children that they shouldn't or should say this or that. Even so, my experience of talking with 4 and 5 year olds is that they talk as if talking belongs to them. If they're asked, most will talk about anything they know about. You can hear them talking while playing in the 'home corner' or outside in the play areas. Or, if you tell them an appropriate short anecdote, they've got plenty to tell you. Not all, but most.
Then we have the job of teaching them to read and write; acquire literacy.
What I want to know is how often do children in schools get a chance to approach this matter in any way like the way they approached the matter of learning how to speak - or indeed in the manner in which they approached things like discovering the properties of, say, a ball, or water - which is mostly through prolonged and repeated investigation, play and discovery? Mostly but not entirely in the company of parents, carers and other children who more often than not played with them - throwing a ball, supervising them playing in the bath and so on.
So what does that approach look like when transferred to the acquisition of literacy? Investigating, playing with, and discovering the properties of the written language?
I think some or all of the following are crucial: looking for, choosing, selecting, browsing, comparing, speculating, discussing, playing.
So at one very basic level - words - what would looking for, choosing, selecting, browsing, comparing, speculating, discussing and playing with words look like?
We can say that every child is a Word Detective and their job is to find words, groups of words, lines, paragraphs, chapters, books of words that they like. They're not pupils, they're Detectives and it's their job to find these. Their resources are everywhere - in what people say, in what's written up on walls, in newspapers, comics, magazines, books. Stuff in schools, in the street, in markets, at home, in churches, temples, mosques, going with their parents to work - anywhere.
But where to put it? On the wall to share with others - either as words, phrases, overheard stuff from parents, on buses, from TVand radio, lines from songs, poems, books. In journals - poems, songs, paragraphs, thoughts...On shelves for books, magazines and comics that they've found in libraries, charity shops or wherever...
What about 'scaffolding' or 'modelling'?- well, the teacher can model all this, showing the children how to collect things that people say, favourite phrases from stories, songs, poems and plays and TV.
What to do with it?
The key thing is talk. Where did this word or phrase or verse come from? Why did you choose it? What's it about?
And...the key thing is that all this collected language provides fantastic starting points for writing and fantastic resource in the process of writing. So, if this or that phrase or paragraph. or chapter was interesting or brilliant - why? how? And what if you or I wrote like that? How could you or I do that?
Again,the modelling or scaffolding going on here is the teacher showing how you can start from this material and write stories or poems or explanations or recounts or persuasive writing. Indeed, to give direction to some of the Word Detectives' collecting, the teacher can ask them to look for examples within such categories if they haven't turned up already.
And what to do with what's written? Audience. The key thing is audience. We now have the technology to make beautiful books in schools, powerpoint displays and the like, but also it's so easy to make blogspots like this one. These can be pages on the school website or separate and you can make them as private or as public as you want. We now have the means for children and teachers to publish and to share - whether that's just with the writers, with the whole school community or beyond to other schools in this country or another country or wherever. There are of course a thousand ways to share and discover what others think...performance, display etc etc.
All this is about working from the principle of making literacy your own, making it the thing that you go out and investigate, collect, select and play with; making it the thing that you produce and quickly find out its effect on others. Going back to when we first acquire language, an enormous amount of that is involved in finding out what works. Shouting 'ma' works pretty well when you're about 11 months old for example if you want something. Many speakers of English start there or thereabouts and it gets results! The equivalent in writing is for you to hear from your friends, your family, your teachers that what you've written is interesting or indeed that they start to talk of what you've written as if it is the start of a conversation. That's to say, they start talking about something related to what you've written. This is the most important motivator for writing - of any kind, fiction, poems, plays, non-fiction, writing-up of school sports, visits by visitors to the school, comic strips or whatever. Effect, effect, effect.
By way of postscript: I know that many teachers do this sort of stuff anyway. What I'm doing here is grouping together what I've seen in schools, or heard about. It's not meant as a criticism of anything that anyone does at the moment. It's offered as a set of suggestions, as things to play with, adapt and improve. If anyone wants to write to me to tell me about stuff they've done in this area already, what worked, what didn't work, I'm more than happy to post it up here. I'm thinking primarily of literacy practices informed by the idea of 'how to help children own literacy and take control of it.' If anyone has done any research on this basis and wants to publicise it here, then pass on the title and place where your research is published and, again, I'm more than happy to put it up here. At present, I have some teachers and librarians doing an MA writing up some research in this area, and Jenny Vernon and I at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education will be seeing a group of teachers do their presentations in May in this area too. UKLA and NATE journals are full of practices along these lines.
Ultimately, the answer to the question, who owns words, who owns literacy is: we do. We're the users and with language it's the users who own it. Because we own it, we take it upon ourselves to change it and adapt it to our own purposes. This is sometimes contested by people who want to keep telling us that we're not allowed to change it or adapt it or use it in this or that way, when in fact, social existence tells us what's appropriate every minute of our lives. One of the key ways to finding out about all this is to investigate, investigate, investigate. Language is a human activity. It's not a fixed system separate from humans. It comes out of people's mouths and off paper and screens in many, many different ways - all produced by humans. The more we each look at it, investigate it, discover things about it, hear different views about it, to try out using it in different ways, observe the effect this has on others - the better able we are to make it our own.
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Why writing isn't 'words'.
I am going to start a poem. It's going to have something to do with bumble bees. Here are several ways I can begin my poem about bumble bees:
1. Bumble bees are...
2. The bumble bees are...
3. A bumble bee is....
4. Some bumble bees are..
5. A few bumble bees are...
6. The bumble bee is...
7. O bumble bee...
8. Bumble bee, you are...
The reason why I'll choose one or other of these is down to what aspect of bumble-bee-ness I'm going to write about, or have been thinking about before I even started to write.
1. Bumble bees are...
This is me thinking that I'm writing about what all the bumble bees I know about are doing or thinking or saying. It's one great big generalised bumble-bee-ness. In fact, whatever I write is almost certainly not going to be true, so there may be an element of irony in it.
2. The bumble bees are...
Much more specific. These are the bumble bees over there or over here or on that hedge over there. This might make for more truth and less irony. Perhaps.
3. A bumble bee is...
This is very specific. It's that bumble bee I've just noticed that I'm trying to draw your attention to.
4. Some bumble bees are...
A bit loose this one...though in this story not much different from 'The bumble bees...'.
5. A few bumble bees are...
A little bit more specific than 'some'. There are just two or three, maybe.
6. The bumble bee is...
Very interesting this one. If it's an opener of a poem, it could either be the very specific bumble bee that I'm going to tell you about, or it could be an emblematic bumble bee...as in 'the bumble bee is full of love but do not anger him...' That makes it sound like an entry in a bestiary, or a Puritan poem drawing our attention to the significance of the bumble bee.
7. O bumble bee
Once could have been a genuine paean, but nowadays mock-heroic. Not a bad gag, actually.
8. Bumble bee, you are
Same grammar, is it the 'vocative' as we used to call it in Latin? But because it hasn't got the 'O', it can be quite friendly, and child-like...or like a hermit or castaway starting to talk to his or her little animal friends...
I said before that it is how I'm thinking about the bumblebee(s) that will determine which of these I might begin my poem with - which flies in the face of two things:
1. The idea that when we write, we choose words in the same time-frame as we think about them. In fact, we often think ahead and that determines the words we use. Some kind of loop or relay goes on where we are ahead of ourselves and relay back to a choice of words.
2. That we think one word at a time. I've used the word 'word' and at first glance this is about the word 'bumble bee' but a close look tells me that most of what I'm writing about here is the grammar of what you put in front of nouns in English in order to convey a meaning and yet the words (with the possible exception of 'few') are really 'grammatical' words ie they do a grammatical job on 'bumble bee'. This leads me to think that I'm not really talking about individual words here at all (even though I might talk loosely about choosing or using words). In fact, I'm talking about phrases or groups. Each of the 8 examples are examples of phrases.
I take from this that when I write I'm thinking ahead in order to find a phrase or group of words - which M.A.K. Halliday also called the 'wording'.
Finally, because this is a poem, I will already be thinking of something else - 'prosody' - that strange word which means the musicality or sounds made by the wording of the poem. This is also going to operate at the level of groups of words because it is only in the grouping that rhythms, cadences, echoes, repetitions are going to be felt.
I'm enjoying thinking about all this.
1. Bumble bees are...
2. The bumble bees are...
3. A bumble bee is....
4. Some bumble bees are..
5. A few bumble bees are...
6. The bumble bee is...
7. O bumble bee...
8. Bumble bee, you are...
The reason why I'll choose one or other of these is down to what aspect of bumble-bee-ness I'm going to write about, or have been thinking about before I even started to write.
1. Bumble bees are...
This is me thinking that I'm writing about what all the bumble bees I know about are doing or thinking or saying. It's one great big generalised bumble-bee-ness. In fact, whatever I write is almost certainly not going to be true, so there may be an element of irony in it.
2. The bumble bees are...
Much more specific. These are the bumble bees over there or over here or on that hedge over there. This might make for more truth and less irony. Perhaps.
3. A bumble bee is...
This is very specific. It's that bumble bee I've just noticed that I'm trying to draw your attention to.
4. Some bumble bees are...
A bit loose this one...though in this story not much different from 'The bumble bees...'.
5. A few bumble bees are...
A little bit more specific than 'some'. There are just two or three, maybe.
6. The bumble bee is...
Very interesting this one. If it's an opener of a poem, it could either be the very specific bumble bee that I'm going to tell you about, or it could be an emblematic bumble bee...as in 'the bumble bee is full of love but do not anger him...' That makes it sound like an entry in a bestiary, or a Puritan poem drawing our attention to the significance of the bumble bee.
7. O bumble bee
Once could have been a genuine paean, but nowadays mock-heroic. Not a bad gag, actually.
8. Bumble bee, you are
Same grammar, is it the 'vocative' as we used to call it in Latin? But because it hasn't got the 'O', it can be quite friendly, and child-like...or like a hermit or castaway starting to talk to his or her little animal friends...
I said before that it is how I'm thinking about the bumblebee(s) that will determine which of these I might begin my poem with - which flies in the face of two things:
1. The idea that when we write, we choose words in the same time-frame as we think about them. In fact, we often think ahead and that determines the words we use. Some kind of loop or relay goes on where we are ahead of ourselves and relay back to a choice of words.
2. That we think one word at a time. I've used the word 'word' and at first glance this is about the word 'bumble bee' but a close look tells me that most of what I'm writing about here is the grammar of what you put in front of nouns in English in order to convey a meaning and yet the words (with the possible exception of 'few') are really 'grammatical' words ie they do a grammatical job on 'bumble bee'. This leads me to think that I'm not really talking about individual words here at all (even though I might talk loosely about choosing or using words). In fact, I'm talking about phrases or groups. Each of the 8 examples are examples of phrases.
I take from this that when I write I'm thinking ahead in order to find a phrase or group of words - which M.A.K. Halliday also called the 'wording'.
Finally, because this is a poem, I will already be thinking of something else - 'prosody' - that strange word which means the musicality or sounds made by the wording of the poem. This is also going to operate at the level of groups of words because it is only in the grouping that rhythms, cadences, echoes, repetitions are going to be felt.
I'm enjoying thinking about all this.
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Pupils' terrible English 1921, 1955 shock horror
I am very grateful to Will Littlejohn, a twitter acquaintance who has sent me these.
He points out that they are mostly about Grammar School pupils ie this the 20 per cent or so children who were creamed off as a result of taking the 11-plus exam at the end of primary school.
So when present day commentators, policy-makers and politicians try to imply that the problems pupils have with reading and writing are new, and that employers' complaints are some recent phenomenon, you can show them this.
Another way of looking at it is that there is a special appeal of what's been called the 'narrative of decline'. In the mouths of reactionary politicians this is their ammo to prove that all went wrong when 'liberals' took over.
1921 Newbolt Report:
Vickers Ltd – “…there is difficulty obtaining junior clerks who can speak and write English clearly and correctly, especially those aged 15 to 16 years”.
Lever Brothers – “…it is a great surprise and disappointment to us to find that our young employees are so hopelessly deficient in their command of English”.
Boots – “…teaching of English in present day schools produces very limited command of the English language”.
JMB Examiners’ Reports:
“Many candidates cannot bring themselves to say what they know or think in comprehensible terms arranged in a clear, correct prose form”. (S Level English literature 1955).
“The root cause of a serious decline in competence; out od well over 900 scripts all but a small number showed that the candidate could not understand the plain sense of Englisj words singly and in combination (with) weak, loose vocabulary and appalling punctuation”. (S level Literature 1960).
“Too many scripts contain flippant spelling and punctuation”. (O level Language 1955).
Scripts contain, “slang, colloquialism (as) part of their natural, limited vocabulary”. (A level Literature 1965).
“Ignorance of parts of speech and of elementary grammar”. “Narrow range of vocabulary”. “General inability to use language accurately and concisely”. “Superficiality of ideas”. (All extracts from O level language 1960).
He points out that they are mostly about Grammar School pupils ie this the 20 per cent or so children who were creamed off as a result of taking the 11-plus exam at the end of primary school.
So when present day commentators, policy-makers and politicians try to imply that the problems pupils have with reading and writing are new, and that employers' complaints are some recent phenomenon, you can show them this.
Another way of looking at it is that there is a special appeal of what's been called the 'narrative of decline'. In the mouths of reactionary politicians this is their ammo to prove that all went wrong when 'liberals' took over.
1921 Newbolt Report:
Vickers Ltd – “…there is difficulty obtaining junior clerks who can speak and write English clearly and correctly, especially those aged 15 to 16 years”.
Lever Brothers – “…it is a great surprise and disappointment to us to find that our young employees are so hopelessly deficient in their command of English”.
Boots – “…teaching of English in present day schools produces very limited command of the English language”.
JMB Examiners’ Reports:
“Many candidates cannot bring themselves to say what they know or think in comprehensible terms arranged in a clear, correct prose form”. (S Level English literature 1955).
“The root cause of a serious decline in competence; out od well over 900 scripts all but a small number showed that the candidate could not understand the plain sense of Englisj words singly and in combination (with) weak, loose vocabulary and appalling punctuation”. (S level Literature 1960).
“Too many scripts contain flippant spelling and punctuation”. (O level Language 1955).
Scripts contain, “slang, colloquialism (as) part of their natural, limited vocabulary”. (A level Literature 1965).
“Ignorance of parts of speech and of elementary grammar”. “Narrow range of vocabulary”. “General inability to use language accurately and concisely”. “Superficiality of ideas”. (All extracts from O level language 1960).
Rupert to James
"Right sonny bloody jim, finally you've done the right fucking thing. You've put your dick on the block and chopped it off. It's the first decent thing you've done in years. Couldn't you have kept the fucking lid on the fucking hacking thing? How come I did that and more fifty fucking years ago and no one knew a blind bloody thing but you're in the job for two fucking minutes and the cat isn't just out of the bag, it's shitting on the steps of number fucking ten downing street. How do you figure this makes me bloody look? Like some loudmouthed crook who spends his fucking time looking up women's skirts? Well I'm fucking not, am I? I fly the fucking flag for decency, you know. No paediatrician is safe once I've got him in my sights. I'm the one who first uncovered their paedo secret societies. And I'm the one who made Britain safe from trade union bully boys.Not bloody screech-in-yer-earoles Thatcher. I did it. And I'm the one who was going to be running the show from inside Number fucking 10 with Coulson. And then what happens? The whole thing collapses like a stack of fucking canasta cards and next thing I know it all my dear old pals in the Met are up against the fucking wall with Cressida fucking Dick sticking her truncheon up their arses. Decency, sonny bloody jim. That's what I've been about. And the whole fucking party is over. And that little stuck-up tit Cameron is going to have to watch his fucking arse too. Every time I look at him, he's got pinker and more puffed up. It's touch and go which is going to happen first, him bursting or some legal eagle pricking him. We're stuffed, sonny jim, fucking stuffed and you've done sweet bloody prune juice to stem the tide. Now get out of my fucking sight till the next century. Who's talking any fucking sense in the world today apart from me? How about that Michael Gove pal? I like him. He's got class. I'll give him a call...'Michael...Michael...pick up, will yer...I wanna talk to someone sane....Michael...Michael....hello...hello...where the fuck is everybody?'
An experiment with teaching 'good writing'
As I've written about here before, I'm pretty sceptical about these structures and formulas being handed out to children to help them write. I've seen quite a few of them in action. However, let's say I'm just sceptical and I'm not condemning them. Let's say that I understand that they're a means to an end and more often than not they get some kind of end...
So that's that.
Or not.
You see there are some of these structures and tips that really make me wonder what it's all about. One of them is 'wow words' and the other is 'connectives'.
Re: wow words. I don't believe that any word is any more or any less 'wow' than any other word. Everything that matters about words and writing is what the words are doing in context. So, here is an example of what I think is brilliant writing:
It's raining
It's pouring
The old man's snoring.
He want to bed
and bumped his head
and couldn't get up in the morning,.
For me this is brilliant picture-painting with a huge hinterland implied by what's not said. It's snappy, neat and economical. It is the 'banana-skin' principle of taking someone down and leaving him there for us to contemplate. It also operates in two time-frames - now, when it's raining, he's snoring and can't get up; and an earlier time frame when he went to bed. It does this like a film, simply cutting from present to past and back again, without connectives !
So, what do I think teachers and children could do to help children write well?
Here's a suggestion for any children or students above, say, the age of 8 or 9 (I would reckon).
Homework - or time out in class - or both - is to for every child to find what he or she thinks is an example of 'good writing'. This could be broken down into genres - if it helps - so one time you do this, you do it with fiction, another time with poetry, another time with writing about science, another time a 'news story' from the newspaper, another time a 'recount' of something and so on. The teacher can help the children/students find some stuff, or recommend books, newspapers, websites etc for places to look. The hunt is on to find 'good writing' in each of the genres that the children/students have to produce. This could be broken down into micro-genres eg 'horror writing' or 'sports writing' or anything that comes up.
In class, they work in pairs comparing and contrasting. The teacher has prepared some questions to help decide why or how it might or might not be 'good'.
Did the writing interest you? is that because of what it's about? Or is it because of something in how it is 'told' or 'written'?
To help...have a look at any of these aspects of writing:
Are the sentences long or short or both? Can you explain this?
In the piece of writing you have chosen, are 'actions' being described? Is this done with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs? More of one or less of one than another?
Are feelings described? How is this done? Do you know what the 'narrator' feels? Do you know what only one person 'feels' or do you know how everyone 'feels'?
Is there dialogue? What does the dialogue tell you? Does the dialogue feel like real people talking?
Are there any ways other than what the person is actually saying, which tell you what the people are thinking?
When you read is there stuff that you know about that the character in the writing doesn't know about?
Sometimes in writing, it's hard - or easy - to understand why someone has done something. In your piece was it easy or hard? Does this matter?
Sometimes in a piece of writing, someone seems to be 'trying to make a point' or 'convince you of something'. How do they do that? Here are some ways of doing it:
weighing up views that agree with writer against views that disagree with the writer?
Proving that there's something unfair about something.
Proving that a person who disagrees with the writer is not being 'logical' - that's to say, partly, it doesn't make sense.
and so on....
[I'm sure people reading this could adapt and change this adding or taking away all sorts of stuff.
The key thing is to get children looking at writing that they like,comparing it and contrasting it with what other people think is good.]
After doing it in pairs, the pairs choose the better of the two.
The pairs come together in groups and choose one from the group.
The groups come together in class and choose the best.
So there's a sequence of looking, reading, examining,comparing, choosing in relation to the writing.
One point that underlies all this is that there is no universal agreement on what is good writing. Good writing is what a group of people talking and thinking end up regarding as good writing. On the way, there are many aspects of writing that start to appear as good in context.
I suggest you can attempt to 'instruct' children and students about this, but this only really has impact on those children and students who read a lot anyway and are picking up good writing from there. For those who don't, this method (above) gives them a chance to see what writing does,what it can do and might engender an interest in them in books or articles being advocated by their peers.
Anyway, I'm just throwing this into the mix for teachers to play about with. At the heart of it though, is an idea about children and students discussing pieces of writing they have chosen. They have something invested in it.
So that's that.
Or not.
You see there are some of these structures and tips that really make me wonder what it's all about. One of them is 'wow words' and the other is 'connectives'.
Re: wow words. I don't believe that any word is any more or any less 'wow' than any other word. Everything that matters about words and writing is what the words are doing in context. So, here is an example of what I think is brilliant writing:
It's raining
It's pouring
The old man's snoring.
He want to bed
and bumped his head
and couldn't get up in the morning,.
For me this is brilliant picture-painting with a huge hinterland implied by what's not said. It's snappy, neat and economical. It is the 'banana-skin' principle of taking someone down and leaving him there for us to contemplate. It also operates in two time-frames - now, when it's raining, he's snoring and can't get up; and an earlier time frame when he went to bed. It does this like a film, simply cutting from present to past and back again, without connectives !
So, what do I think teachers and children could do to help children write well?
Here's a suggestion for any children or students above, say, the age of 8 or 9 (I would reckon).
Homework - or time out in class - or both - is to for every child to find what he or she thinks is an example of 'good writing'. This could be broken down into genres - if it helps - so one time you do this, you do it with fiction, another time with poetry, another time with writing about science, another time a 'news story' from the newspaper, another time a 'recount' of something and so on. The teacher can help the children/students find some stuff, or recommend books, newspapers, websites etc for places to look. The hunt is on to find 'good writing' in each of the genres that the children/students have to produce. This could be broken down into micro-genres eg 'horror writing' or 'sports writing' or anything that comes up.
In class, they work in pairs comparing and contrasting. The teacher has prepared some questions to help decide why or how it might or might not be 'good'.
Did the writing interest you? is that because of what it's about? Or is it because of something in how it is 'told' or 'written'?
To help...have a look at any of these aspects of writing:
Are the sentences long or short or both? Can you explain this?
In the piece of writing you have chosen, are 'actions' being described? Is this done with nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs? More of one or less of one than another?
Are feelings described? How is this done? Do you know what the 'narrator' feels? Do you know what only one person 'feels' or do you know how everyone 'feels'?
Is there dialogue? What does the dialogue tell you? Does the dialogue feel like real people talking?
Are there any ways other than what the person is actually saying, which tell you what the people are thinking?
When you read is there stuff that you know about that the character in the writing doesn't know about?
Sometimes in writing, it's hard - or easy - to understand why someone has done something. In your piece was it easy or hard? Does this matter?
Sometimes in a piece of writing, someone seems to be 'trying to make a point' or 'convince you of something'. How do they do that? Here are some ways of doing it:
weighing up views that agree with writer against views that disagree with the writer?
Proving that there's something unfair about something.
Proving that a person who disagrees with the writer is not being 'logical' - that's to say, partly, it doesn't make sense.
and so on....
[I'm sure people reading this could adapt and change this adding or taking away all sorts of stuff.
The key thing is to get children looking at writing that they like,comparing it and contrasting it with what other people think is good.]
After doing it in pairs, the pairs choose the better of the two.
The pairs come together in groups and choose one from the group.
The groups come together in class and choose the best.
So there's a sequence of looking, reading, examining,comparing, choosing in relation to the writing.
One point that underlies all this is that there is no universal agreement on what is good writing. Good writing is what a group of people talking and thinking end up regarding as good writing. On the way, there are many aspects of writing that start to appear as good in context.
I suggest you can attempt to 'instruct' children and students about this, but this only really has impact on those children and students who read a lot anyway and are picking up good writing from there. For those who don't, this method (above) gives them a chance to see what writing does,what it can do and might engender an interest in them in books or articles being advocated by their peers.
Anyway, I'm just throwing this into the mix for teachers to play about with. At the heart of it though, is an idea about children and students discussing pieces of writing they have chosen. They have something invested in it.
This summer's phonics test is not a reading test.
Apologies for banging on about this again but I think it's crucial.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, there is going to be a 'phonics screening' test this June for all Year 1 pupils in state schools including Academies. The pass mark is going to be 32 words correctly read out of 40. Families of children failing will be informed that they have failed.
This test will be of individual words and non-words. Pupils will be asked to show that they can offer the correct readings for the real words and plausible readings for the non-words ie pronouncing the letters and letter-combinations with the sounds that the children have been taught. So, for example a non-word with the 'ou' letters in the middle could be pronounced either as 'ou' in 'sound' or as 'ou' in 'wound' (as in 'hurt') (all southern English pronunciations). Whether they could pronounce it as the 'ou' in 'touch' is, I think, unlikely. We shall see whether 'rare' pronunciations will be allowed when the actual test comes out.
Here is an article describing what's coming from the Mail Online:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123436/Terg-fape-ulf-Pupils-read-fake-words-initiative-test-year-olds-literacy-levels.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
The article is to my mind not unreasonable and quotes Dominic Wyse from the Institute of Education. However, there is one major misconception at the heart of the article: that is, this test is going to be testing 'reading'.
The word 'reading' is highly problematical. Yes, most of us will say of a child reading a page of print out loud that she is 'reading'. However, if we talk about 'reading' or try to come up with adequate definitions of reading, we will of course always include some sense of understanding what the signs on the page, screen or wherever signify in the culture that language is part of. Reading is about some kind of transfer of meaning, or interaction with meanings intended by authors and meanings made by readers. Meaning is at the heart of it. Why else would we bother?
So, why should this matter? If the children do the test, surely it doesn't matter what it's called...? I suggest the opposite. I believe there is a massive push going on to treat 'decoding' (ie reading phonically) as a sufficient condition of that broader meaning of 'reading' I'm talking about. There is much, much more anxiety going on about 'decoding' than there is about 'understanding' or any other forms of reaction to writing eg 're-enactment', 're-presentation' through other art forms, informed discussion and so on.
In other words, by isolating and elevating phonics into this prime method, testing it and then describing it as 'reading', we are in serious danger of losing sight of what reading is for. Or put another way, we're in serious danger of producing some (how many?) five, six and seven year olds who can 'bark at print' but who are 'getting' very little from what they're reading. In which case, I and most of us would say, what's the point?
To be fair to the inventors and advocates of synthetic phonics, they by and large are careful to talk about 'decoding' and 'phonic screening'. In part, this is a matter of how politicians talk, their press offices deliver press releases and unthinking journalists circulate what they're told. The big irony here is that journalists spend hours every day wrestling with words in order that they should be read for meaning!
Further, watch this space for all kinds of analyses when the test results come in, where again, people of all sorts will talk about this or that percentage of children 'failing' a 'reading-test'. Again, they won't have done. They will have failed a decoding test. We should remember here that the phenomenon of barking at print is matched by its opposite, the child who is understanding a good deal but might not be able to produce accurate decoding to the level of 32 out of 40 words.
If either of these two propositions sounds a bit far-fetched, then if you have tried to learn a language other than your primary language, it doesn't seem so far fetched at all. I was taught how to pronounce Italian - it's pretty regular with strong correspondence between letters and sounds. So, give me a page of Italian, I can read it out loud. I can decode it. What I can't do,. though is understand it.
Alternatively, there are some people who are good at learning languages who put together meanings of phrases in simple passages of prose who may well not have bothered too much about matching exact letters or letter-combinations with the appropriate sounds.
Of course, this latter category is what phonics people think of as bad reading. However, it may not necessarily be so. Parents who have sat with their children reading to them and with them night after night, can often recall a moment where the child appeared to make a breakthrough - or several. That is, moments where the child appeared to suddenly 'get' it. It is quite possible that the way such children 'get' it, might not correspond to what is being tested in a phonics screening/decoding test. If this test hits such children at an early point in the way such children (I'm thinking of mine, actually) are learning to read, I could well imagine them failing and me being told they have failed, them asking me if they've failed and me telling them they've failed....
At six or seven years old.
Again, I know that many people will talk about them failing a 'reading' test. We'll be saying to them, you're no good at 'reading'. Telling very young children that they have failed something is a lousy way of getting them to do something well. In fact, it's a crap way.
So what's happening here is that a system of teaching to decode which many tests show is indeed efficient at getting children to decode is getting inflated into a practice of 'reading' ability. On that basis I can foresee an expansion of phonics catch-up into Year 2 where more of the same will expand and take up yet more time, even though the remedy for some reading difficulties may be different approaches not more of the same...and even more time being spent neglecting the meaning of writing, even though ultimately, that's what it's all for.
Luckily, most schools are spending a good deal of time and effort trying to keep going with the 'meaning' side of writing ie books, poems, stories, rhymes, good non-fiction and of course the children's own writing. Even though there is very little on this coming from government, they know that phonics without reading for meaning doesn't work in the long term for the children they teach. People who bark at print, don't know what's going on.
As anyone who reads this blog knows, there is going to be a 'phonics screening' test this June for all Year 1 pupils in state schools including Academies. The pass mark is going to be 32 words correctly read out of 40. Families of children failing will be informed that they have failed.
This test will be of individual words and non-words. Pupils will be asked to show that they can offer the correct readings for the real words and plausible readings for the non-words ie pronouncing the letters and letter-combinations with the sounds that the children have been taught. So, for example a non-word with the 'ou' letters in the middle could be pronounced either as 'ou' in 'sound' or as 'ou' in 'wound' (as in 'hurt') (all southern English pronunciations). Whether they could pronounce it as the 'ou' in 'touch' is, I think, unlikely. We shall see whether 'rare' pronunciations will be allowed when the actual test comes out.
Here is an article describing what's coming from the Mail Online:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2123436/Terg-fape-ulf-Pupils-read-fake-words-initiative-test-year-olds-literacy-levels.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
The article is to my mind not unreasonable and quotes Dominic Wyse from the Institute of Education. However, there is one major misconception at the heart of the article: that is, this test is going to be testing 'reading'.
The word 'reading' is highly problematical. Yes, most of us will say of a child reading a page of print out loud that she is 'reading'. However, if we talk about 'reading' or try to come up with adequate definitions of reading, we will of course always include some sense of understanding what the signs on the page, screen or wherever signify in the culture that language is part of. Reading is about some kind of transfer of meaning, or interaction with meanings intended by authors and meanings made by readers. Meaning is at the heart of it. Why else would we bother?
So, why should this matter? If the children do the test, surely it doesn't matter what it's called...? I suggest the opposite. I believe there is a massive push going on to treat 'decoding' (ie reading phonically) as a sufficient condition of that broader meaning of 'reading' I'm talking about. There is much, much more anxiety going on about 'decoding' than there is about 'understanding' or any other forms of reaction to writing eg 're-enactment', 're-presentation' through other art forms, informed discussion and so on.
In other words, by isolating and elevating phonics into this prime method, testing it and then describing it as 'reading', we are in serious danger of losing sight of what reading is for. Or put another way, we're in serious danger of producing some (how many?) five, six and seven year olds who can 'bark at print' but who are 'getting' very little from what they're reading. In which case, I and most of us would say, what's the point?
To be fair to the inventors and advocates of synthetic phonics, they by and large are careful to talk about 'decoding' and 'phonic screening'. In part, this is a matter of how politicians talk, their press offices deliver press releases and unthinking journalists circulate what they're told. The big irony here is that journalists spend hours every day wrestling with words in order that they should be read for meaning!
Further, watch this space for all kinds of analyses when the test results come in, where again, people of all sorts will talk about this or that percentage of children 'failing' a 'reading-test'. Again, they won't have done. They will have failed a decoding test. We should remember here that the phenomenon of barking at print is matched by its opposite, the child who is understanding a good deal but might not be able to produce accurate decoding to the level of 32 out of 40 words.
If either of these two propositions sounds a bit far-fetched, then if you have tried to learn a language other than your primary language, it doesn't seem so far fetched at all. I was taught how to pronounce Italian - it's pretty regular with strong correspondence between letters and sounds. So, give me a page of Italian, I can read it out loud. I can decode it. What I can't do,. though is understand it.
Alternatively, there are some people who are good at learning languages who put together meanings of phrases in simple passages of prose who may well not have bothered too much about matching exact letters or letter-combinations with the appropriate sounds.
Of course, this latter category is what phonics people think of as bad reading. However, it may not necessarily be so. Parents who have sat with their children reading to them and with them night after night, can often recall a moment where the child appeared to make a breakthrough - or several. That is, moments where the child appeared to suddenly 'get' it. It is quite possible that the way such children 'get' it, might not correspond to what is being tested in a phonics screening/decoding test. If this test hits such children at an early point in the way such children (I'm thinking of mine, actually) are learning to read, I could well imagine them failing and me being told they have failed, them asking me if they've failed and me telling them they've failed....
At six or seven years old.
Again, I know that many people will talk about them failing a 'reading' test. We'll be saying to them, you're no good at 'reading'. Telling very young children that they have failed something is a lousy way of getting them to do something well. In fact, it's a crap way.
So what's happening here is that a system of teaching to decode which many tests show is indeed efficient at getting children to decode is getting inflated into a practice of 'reading' ability. On that basis I can foresee an expansion of phonics catch-up into Year 2 where more of the same will expand and take up yet more time, even though the remedy for some reading difficulties may be different approaches not more of the same...and even more time being spent neglecting the meaning of writing, even though ultimately, that's what it's all for.
Luckily, most schools are spending a good deal of time and effort trying to keep going with the 'meaning' side of writing ie books, poems, stories, rhymes, good non-fiction and of course the children's own writing. Even though there is very little on this coming from government, they know that phonics without reading for meaning doesn't work in the long term for the children they teach. People who bark at print, don't know what's going on.
Sunday, 1 April 2012
What do you think of phonics,Michael?
Someone has written to me and asked me my views on phonics.
I've replied with this:
" For my own views: I'm not against the teaching of phonics.
I'm against :1. Trying to kid teachers and children that the phonics packages are only teaching phonics. They're not, they're also teaching 'look and say' ie through 'tricky words' 'red words' or 'high frequency words'.
2. Schools which neglect the reading of whole books, telling stories, hearing and reading poems, doing plays in the years they're doing phonics.
I would add:
3. There is a clear problem emerging of some children 'barking at print' ie they 'can read' but seem not to understand what they're reading. This suggests to me that the move to get children to learn how to 'decode' has run ahead of reading for meaning - which is why we read anyway.
4. Many of us learned how to read without a specific phonics education. How did this happen? Why have the government brought in a universal method when many children didn't learn to read that way? It's now emerging that some children can read quite well but aren't very good at phonics. Such children may well be penalised or stigmatised as 'not good at reading' or who even 'fail' their phonics test at the end of year 1. (Families will have to be told that their child has failed the test ie not read outloud perfectly 32 out of the 40 words in the test).
5. Free schools will not have to teach synthetic phonics and will not have to do the Year 1 phonics test. Why is that?
6. Research by Dr Charles Hulme has shown that comprehension with Year 4 children is not improved with more phonics teaching. It is improved with more 'talk' ie children's discussions. However, reading skills in years 2-6 are being treated more often than not as problems with phonics ie 'catch-up'.
7. The government is investing a good deal of effort and money through subsidising phonics schemes, training and re-training teachers etc into phonics teaching. Why hitherto has it not invested the same kind of effort and money in 'reading for pleasure' even though it is now acknowledged by the Rose report, PISA, PIRLs, the major 'social mobility' study from the University of Nevada (Mariah Evans et al), and now most recently Ofsted 'Moving English Forward') that reading for pleasure is a crucial component of success with reading and success with school?
8. My position is that 'phonics is not enough'. It isn't 'enough' because reading is much more than 'decoding'. You cannot rely on a notion that children understand what they decode. It's not 'enough' because decoding English cannot be done by phonics alone. It isn't 'enough' because the written language in its extended prose form is a different 'mode' or 'dialect' from the spoken one. It not only has be 'decoded', it also has to be learned in its 'phrasing' or 'wording' or 'cadences' ie in the way words, sentences and paragraphs are put together in ways that are not like the spoken mode. This too has to be learned if we are to become readers."
I've replied with this:
" For my own views: I'm not against the teaching of phonics.
I'm against :1. Trying to kid teachers and children that the phonics packages are only teaching phonics. They're not, they're also teaching 'look and say' ie through 'tricky words' 'red words' or 'high frequency words'.
2. Schools which neglect the reading of whole books, telling stories, hearing and reading poems, doing plays in the years they're doing phonics.
I would add:
3. There is a clear problem emerging of some children 'barking at print' ie they 'can read' but seem not to understand what they're reading. This suggests to me that the move to get children to learn how to 'decode' has run ahead of reading for meaning - which is why we read anyway.
4. Many of us learned how to read without a specific phonics education. How did this happen? Why have the government brought in a universal method when many children didn't learn to read that way? It's now emerging that some children can read quite well but aren't very good at phonics. Such children may well be penalised or stigmatised as 'not good at reading' or who even 'fail' their phonics test at the end of year 1. (Families will have to be told that their child has failed the test ie not read outloud perfectly 32 out of the 40 words in the test).
5. Free schools will not have to teach synthetic phonics and will not have to do the Year 1 phonics test. Why is that?
6. Research by Dr Charles Hulme has shown that comprehension with Year 4 children is not improved with more phonics teaching. It is improved with more 'talk' ie children's discussions. However, reading skills in years 2-6 are being treated more often than not as problems with phonics ie 'catch-up'.
7. The government is investing a good deal of effort and money through subsidising phonics schemes, training and re-training teachers etc into phonics teaching. Why hitherto has it not invested the same kind of effort and money in 'reading for pleasure' even though it is now acknowledged by the Rose report, PISA, PIRLs, the major 'social mobility' study from the University of Nevada (Mariah Evans et al), and now most recently Ofsted 'Moving English Forward') that reading for pleasure is a crucial component of success with reading and success with school?
8. My position is that 'phonics is not enough'. It isn't 'enough' because reading is much more than 'decoding'. You cannot rely on a notion that children understand what they decode. It's not 'enough' because decoding English cannot be done by phonics alone. It isn't 'enough' because the written language in its extended prose form is a different 'mode' or 'dialect' from the spoken one. It not only has be 'decoded', it also has to be learned in its 'phrasing' or 'wording' or 'cadences' ie in the way words, sentences and paragraphs are put together in ways that are not like the spoken mode. This too has to be learned if we are to become readers."
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