How 'knowledge about language' for schools could be so much better

If you think of language as a whole, then 'knowledge about language' is made up of anything and everything that describes language or can explain why and how we use it in the ways that we do.

Over the last few years, 'knowledge about language' in the hands of the government, the DfE and Michael Gove has been reduced to 'grammar' and 'grammar' has been reduced to one model, one form of what 'grammar' might be - a so-called 'structure and function' model.

This single model of 'grammar' (treated as if it's the only model) and enforced through the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test, then holds sway over primary education, and primary aged children. 

First, to be clear, there are other models of grammar, which, say,  treat that word 'function', not as how words 'function' inside sentences (e.g. this noun is the subject of the sentence) but as social functions (e.g. why have so many of us started saying 'So...' at the beginning of our utterances). 

For some reason, this form of grammar was not the one implemented and enforced. 


There is, though, an even more important criticism to make. 'Knowledge about language' is a massive subject and can't be reduced to 'grammar' of any kind. Since the time of Aristotle, linguists have tried to examine language, describe it and explain it. Aristotle was particularly interested in the 'effects' of particular uses of language and did a damned good job of it. We all know, for example, what 'catharsis' is, thanks to him, but he did more than that in his book 'Poetics'. 

Over the last 150 years, a huge amount of work has gone into examining how the many different uses of language work and have created disciplines such as narratology, stylistics, pragmatics and intertextuality. Though these are mostly written about in very academic ways, they can be broken down into very accessible (and enjoyable) ways for children and school students to use. To be clear: these are also 'knowledge about language', and because they are tied very closely to 'language in specific uses' and not 'abstract ideals', they are especially useful in helping children speak and write. 

Narratology, for example, enables us to examine how stories (or any kind of writing) are 'told': e.g. who narrates? how does the narration change? what kind of narrator is narrating? what devices does the narrator use to 'talk' to us? 

Narratology can help us look at how the narration enables us to know how characters think. There are several very different devices that have grown up, all the way from 'she thought' to the 'free indirect discourse' favoured by Jane Austen and many writers of children's books. 

Narratology can help us look at 'foregrounding' and 'point of view' - how these shift, favouring one or more characters and why?

Narratology is very useful at helping us with time frames which often change via flashback, flash forward and invocations of continuous time or continuous existence. 

Stylistics  can take us into how texts 'sound' (prosody) - showing us how repetition of structure and letter sounds make rhythms in texts. 

Stylistics can draw attention to sentence length, sentence complexity or simplicity, how paragraphs are constructed across texts, why and how these change as the need to express different things change. 

Stylistics can draw attention to 'register' - how informal/formal a text is? How much does it draw on modes of text from which sources - does the writing empty speech modes? Are there deliberate attempts to 'borrow' language from specific sources e.g. from a field different from the one in the text, e.g. from science in a novel? 

Stylistics can draw attention to which class of words are repeated e.g. many adjectives, many adverbs - or none? 

Pragmatics can draw attention to how dialogue is structured and where the narrator dialogues with the audience/readership. Dialogue can be structured in many different ways in fiction and pragmatics can help us make distinctions.

Intertextuality can help us with the matter of 'borrowing' that I mentioned earlier. In essence, all writing is borrowing in that it borrows the sounds, structures and meanings that have gone before in order to do whatever it does. However, some borrowings are more obvious than others and/or more significant. This can be at the level of a whole genre e.g. Hamlet as 'revenge tragedy' or at the level say of using literary motifs or tropes e.g. 'the pathetic fallacy'. Or again allusion to writing or speech that comes before (as Dickens does in the opening pages of 'A Christmas Carol') and so on. 

If the government and the DfE had been really interested in a holistic view of language and 'knowledge about language' it would have talked to applied linguists about all this, and then got hold of people who know about pedagogy and asked them to produce materials which applied this 'knowledge about language' in age-appropriate ways, using imitation, and practice and investigation as much as description and direct instruction, so that this 'knowledge about language' could have been applied directly to helping children write well.

But they didn't.

The main reason why they didn't is because the Bew Report of 2011 imposed the SPaG test instead. This was because Michael Gove told them to. 

Some short thoughts on why picture books are so important

The young child hearing the words of a picture book being read, and looking at the pictures all the while, 'knows more' than the voice only saying the words! The child 'sees' what the text is not saying. This is great for a child's self-awareness and confidence.




Parents who share hundreds of picture books with their under-5s enable their children to make cognitive leaps through trying to interpret the logic and meanings suggested by the unstated differences between the pictures and the text.




I think it's much more than 'inference'. It's interpretation, cognition, logic, symbolism, holding several ideas in the head at the same time, the germs of abstract thought through analogy etc etc.




Curriculum which narrows responses to books to ‘retrieval’, ‘inference’, ‘chronology’ and ‘presentation’ cut off the ‘interpreting response’ which explores logic, cognition, emotion, empathy and ideas.Irony: this disadvantages those who didn’t have hundreds of picture books!




Tweeter: “...early reading books must include words which may be hard to decode to keep a child's interest.”




(My reply) ...or ideas, mysteries, excitements, tensions, fears, loss, hope, yearnings, wishes, dreams, reveries, boasts, downfalls, musicality...




Let’s not get trapped by the word ‘vocabulary’. Language is much more than vocab. What helps children is providing processes (books, games, experiments,outings) that are conceptually rich and which encourage leaps of interpretation.




Every time a child tells a story in response to a story they’ve read or heard, they’re selecting a common element from both and creating or affirming a schema. It’s the first step in abstract thought. We should aid this and not cut it off with a plethora of ‘retrieval’ questions.




Prediction is one of the pleasures of reading. Authors embed deliberate prediction-potential situations in their writing as if to say, ‘I hope you do some predicting now!’




Literature can’t be dismissed or patronised as ‘pure imagination’. It’s the mix of feelings and ideas attached to beings we recognise and care about. So literature can enable us to grapple with abstractions while we think we’re dealing with emotion. Or vice versa.




Starting from speech bubbles on murals at Pompeii, picture books, cartoons and graphic novels have evolved to tell multimodal stories in ways that ask readers to make leaps of understanding as they hop between text and image.



Picture books enable children to make cognitive leaps between text and picture as they figure out the relationship between word and image. This advances logic, perception, reason...and much more.

Why Tell Stories on YouTube?

Just in case anyone was wondering, there is a logic and rationale to what I do, even in cases where I seem to be 'just' telling jokes, or 'just' telling stories. 

For example, my son Joe has filmed me telling the stories of 'Till Owlyglass' (Till Eulenspiegel). These originate as short tales first written down in a cycle of tales in 1515 probably authored by someone called Herman Bote. I had an English adaptation of these when I was a child, loved them, and wrote my own adaptation of them as 'The Wicked Tricks of Till Owlyglass' published by Walker Books, illustrated by Fritz Wegener. 

I believe the stories are powerful, funny, subversive tales which defy the 'natural' social order, in much the same way as the Robin Hood tales. When he is a child, he defies adults, when he's a peasant, he defies the artisans, and when he's a full adult on the move across central Europe, he defies Lords, Dukes, university professors and, in his own way, ends up defying death. Though the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin doesn't refer to him, Eulenspiegel is the perfect fit for what Bakhtin called the 'carnivalesque' and one who produces 'subversive laughter', often through turning the world upside down, and indeed turning the human body upside down, making it 'talk' through its backside. Bakhtin's prototype was the works of the French writer, Rabelais.

In telling the stories direct to camera, I wanted to do several things: use the popular medium of the day, the internet, to show that story-telling still works, is still a great way to give people events, scenes, the interaction of characters through the use of our faces and bodies. It's what we all do every day telling each other about things that have happened to us. Story-telling is like a distilled or concentrated way of doing something that belongs to nearly every single one of us. 

I also wanted to do something else. In truth, it may look from the videos as if I'm telling the stories, but I am in fact reading an autocue. I am reading word for word what I wrote in my book. Of course, I wrote it with an ear to the sound, so that parents, teachers and children reading the book would get a sense of that oral storytelling world. In the present day world, then, I am offering what I hope is a 'bridge' between the oral and the written, via new technology. As part of that, we're putting the stories up 'day by day',  just as I've written the book, each chapter representing a 'day' when my brother and I (according to the book) hear the stories. 

It's the job of us adults - whether as parents, carers, teachers - to help children become familiar with the written way of saying things. It's a bit like learning another dialect or even another language: familiarity is crucial for getting the flow of sentences, plots, events, consequences, imagined possibilities. It's hard to do this if you're not familiar with the written way of doing this. I think of these stories (and indeed my own poems and stories) as half-way houses between the oral and the written. As I say, they are in a way 'bridges'. 

These re-tellings, then, as I see them bring together several interests of mine: the history of stories, the 'carnivalesque' and 'subversive laughter', and the role of the 'bridge' in language, literacy and learning. 

Here's the wiki entry on Till Eulenspiegel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Eulenspiegel

Here's the wiki entry on Bakhtin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin

Here's our video channel on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos

Applying media methods of talking about Russian Revolution to Luther and the Reformation

Media analysis of the Russian Revolution is hardly getting beyond the idea that
a) it happened
b) some bad stuff happened later
c) QED the RR was bad.
d) PS Lenin had bad breath. And shaved his beard off.


I think we should apply this method to some other areas of history. How about Luther and the Reformation?
a) it happened
b) some bad stuff happened later (wars, famine, persecution, tyrannical regimes)
c)QED it was bad.
d) sorted.
e) PS Luther talked a lot about farting.

Unethical TV programme: Channel 4 'Secret Life of 4,5 and 6 year olds

I watched episode 1 of this series of the 'Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds' on Channel 4 and since seeing it have become increasingly disturbed.

Some context: when our students (most of whom are teachers), doing the MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, conduct research with a class of children they have to fill in a rigorous ethics form, which is intended to ensure that children are not in any way endangered or distressed by the research. The guidelines are in 'Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research' published by the British Educational Research Association.

The programme claimed from its title that it was revealing the 'secret life'. In fact, it was a series of experiments on the children, in which situations were set up, sometimes putting the children in conflict with each other and on one occasion creating a situation in which it was likely that some of the children would be scared.

Needless to say, the contests or competitions were presented to the children as fixed and rule-bound according to the rules set by the adults - a mixture of the people running the nursery and the academics who watched what happened on video, making comments. Remember - the claim being made here is that these contests showed the 'secret life' of these children. In fact, it showed the children responding to fixed rule contests devised by adults in order to show that one or more children would be distressed by losing. In fact, it emerged that the child in question was probably more distressed that he didn't win the prize than actually losing. Educationally speaking, what is a TV programme doing telling children that if you answer some questions right, you win chocolates? Or, worse, if you answer them wrong, you don't get chocolates! In the aftermath of the contest, the child in question cried and seemed to be uncomforted for a while. Then we watched while the experts discussed why and how the child was distressed without any commentary on the fact that the whole situation had been engineered - unethically - by the researchers. 

Later in the programme, they set up another experiment which caused the same child distress. They showed that the boy knew a lot about dinosaurs. They asked him if he was scared of dinosaurs. No he wasn't. Then a man dressed as a 'keeper' brought in on a leash, a 6-7 foot tyrannosaurus rex (with someone inside). The boy was clearly scared. This was presented to us as revealing that in some way or another the boy was dishonest about his real state of fear. This again was clearly unethical and at the same time absurd. The more we know about T-Rex the more scared we should be, especially if grown-ups surround us with nonsense of notions that dinosaurs co-existed or still co-exist with humans! So the little boy cowered and - again - was distressed.  

What was all this for? What did it prove? Who benefitted from this 'research'? All it did was assert the right of adults to limit the choices of children, set up situations in which it could be predicted that one or more children would be distressed. This was done for our entertainment, showing us...what precisely? That grown-up researchers are clever people who know how to make 4 year olds cry? 

Of course there are programmes that can be made about the 'secret life' of young children. All you have to do is set up situations in which young children can discuss things, make things, play with things, plan things. To be fair to the programme, we did see scenes where children played in the home corner a couple of times, but these seemed to be interludes between the real 'knowledge' of the programme in these adult-led experiments, with predictable outcomes of conflict and distress. 

What is particularly worrying is that two academics were involved in this, sitting as it were to one side, commenting on and laughing at what the children were doing. 

Excuse me while I say something extreme. On many occasions in the history of psychological testing over the last 120 years there have been experiments conducted on children and adults. Some of these have been unethical and at a distance, we can easily see how monstrous they've been, with terrible consequences for the participants. Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder how could people calling themselves psychologists have done such things? I think the answer to that question lies precisely in the way this programme was set up and carried out: the children were treated as if they were fodder for experiments, with no volition, sanctity of the person, no sense of their potential, no sense that an experiment could open up new possibilities, new educational insights. In fact, the educational value of the dinosaur experiment was precisely the opposite: it was educational rubbish from several perspectives at the same time.

If anyone reading this runs an education or psychology course, could I please recommend using this 'documentary' as a perfect example of how not to run educational or psychological research?