A new editon of What's Whole in Whole Language with much added

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Thanks to Denny Taylor

Where was George Bush on 911 and whY?

NCLB, 911 and Ken Goodman  

 Here’s a trivia question: Where was George Bush, the younger, on the morning of September 11, 2001?  And what was he doing there?   Which is not the same question as ,  Why was he there?

Where was he? In an inner city second grade reading a story written by Sigfried (Ziggy) Engelmann for his Mastery Learning Program

Why was he there/ thereby hangs a tale.

It’s a tale of Karl Rove, Margaret Spelling, Sandy Kress, Reid Lyon, Laura Bush and a few others who advised George Bush using a plan that Karl Rove had devised that had worked well in Texas to frame his conservative agenda  as compassionate conservative by “reform” of the teaching of reading the major goal of his first term agenda. It had the benefit of coopting democrat s who could not be seen as against educational reform. And it could even make minority groups who were not served well think he was on their side.
.

If Bush used this “reform” of reading as his central focus as he had in Texas he could then portray the rest of his conservative agenda  as compassionate reform. He would then be able to use the “reading wars” to portray himself as the savior of liitle children from the evil of whole language and be champion of phonics . Though Margret Spelling said we won’t call it phonics we’ll call it Scientifically Based Reading instruction and we’ll make that the focus of your first term.

Bush brought the black Football coach turned Houston School Superintendent to Washington as Secretary of education and would send him around the country to preside over grand rallies whipping  up support for NCLB.  Kress, Lyon and Robert Sweet (of right wing National RIght to Read Foundation) had rewritten the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to now be called No Child Left Behind. And Scientific Based Reading Research occurs many times throughout that document. Note that NCLB promised to make every child reading at grade level by 2014. Though NCLB is still the law of the land  Congress has never refunded it or reconsidered it after scathing reports of conflicts of interest by the DOE Inspector General and independent evaluaters writing that 6 billion dollars had been spent with no results.

Bush would announce NCLB to the press  in that classroom on Sept 9 2001.

In a book published in 2004, a Matter of Character: Inside the White House of George W. Bush The author(Ronald Kessler) lays out this plan In interviews with all of those cited above interwoven with an extensive interview with (I kid you not) Ken Goodman.

In Chapter 7 (Dick and Jane) and chapter 10 (Why Johnny Still Can’t read) I am liberally quoted (pun intended) to provide comic relief and to lay out the premises of the campaign. Ken Goodman says “ What we’re doing is turning our schools into drill camps for  testing”. Laura Bush says ,”If you’re teaching to the test you are teaching what you want children to know.”

It goes on like that, I’m quoted and then Karl Rove responds, “People say “Don’t drill”. “What they’re saying is you don’t need to sound out a word or know its meaning. I say how can that make sense to anybody”.

Finally, Margaret Spellings says: “ I don’t know why Ken Goodman was put on this planet, but I don’t think it’s to teach kids to read.”

Perhaps that's  a good title for my next book.

Assembly Line First Grade

9/11/2014

On my screen this morning was an unsolicited ad with the headline, “Is your child happy in school?” It advertises an online K-12 school. On-line kindergarten? What has the world of education come to?

But the answer to their question for my oldest great grandchild, now two weeks into first grade at Klenk school in Klein district in the Houston area, is ”Please don’t make me go to school.” This is a child who happily survived her all day sweat shop kindergarten by turning the drudgery into play.

But now I know what follows the Sweat shop kindergarten

. It is an Assembly Line First Grade. 

On the first day of school things seemed to be ok. She came home and announced they were going to have music and PE every morning. It turned out that was alternating mornings. She was having science and learning about safety and she liked that.

 On the third day she brought home enough homework that after two hours her father just finished it for her.  And every night was like that.

On Friday she brought home a sheet of paper that has a row on numbers with her hand written letters next to them. And 61% at the top written in red. That was her test on what? She knew she had failed. She thinks she’s a failure in the second week of first grade?

Judging only by the homework, there seems to be the assumption that beginning first graders are already literate and capable of functioning as middle grade pupils can function.

Our little one survived sweatshop kindergarten. She is not likely to survive assembly line first grade.

I’ve asked the principal for an explanation.

To be continued.

Sweat shop kindergartens

August 26 2014

My first born great granddaughter, Ezrial, started first grade today. In June when I read about  some kindergarten curricula in Valeria Strauss ‘s Washington Post Blog I sent her an email describing Ezrial’s kindergarten in Klein School district m Houston. As a Sweat Shop Kindergarten. Apparently that phrase put a frame on what many parents and teachers were dismayed at what they were seeing in kindergartens near them.

Google Sweat Shop Kindergarten and you’ll be amazed at the response the term is getting. As they say in web talk it’s going viral.

One labor group is shocked that I would use a phrase from labor history to describe kindergartens. So I thought I’d take this space to explain my use.

It is no coincidence that the campaign in the United States for universal, free compulsory education coincided with the union movement’s campaign to end child labor, which was widespread and pulling down wages of adults. Kathryn Patterspn’s masterpiece Lydie, is the story of children working in the New England textile mills.

Kindergartens came late to America- the term borrowed from the progressive educators of the enlightenment in Germany of the mid-19^th century was apt: Kinder garten, a garden for children. It became a bridge between home and school. A place in school for children to spend a few hours with other five year olds, learning to socialize and play. Piaget said "play is the work of children". Vygotsky said "In play a child is a head taller than himself."

 In Highland Park Michigan, where I started my research and where Henry Ford had his first factory, every kindergarten had a fire place and its own play yard. Often there was a piano and autoharps and rhythm instruments for the children to experiment with music. Early kindergartens had sets of hollow wooden blocks big enough so it took two children to lift and maneuver. There was a sand box and a water table. And there were easels and finger paints and plastic clay for playing with art. And of course there were trikes and wagons in the play area.

 But what has happened in the last decade and a half has turned kindergarten into something quite different. No longer is there time or even a place for play. The half day has turned into a full day- difficult for little children in need of a nap. Naps are gone, no more rug to gather and hear a story or sing a song. Children are sitting at desks- all day doing work sheets. Kindergarteners are bringing home more work sheets for homework. They are learning phonics rules before they have had a chance to find out what reading and writing are for. And they are being tested on their ability to name letters and sound out two and three letter nonsense syllables the first week of kindergarten.

They are counting by 2’s and 5’s- chanting them anyway- before they have a sense  of number or one to one correspondence - There is no sand box or water table, no play house to pretend in. And kids who are barely five are getting report cards saying they may be retained – in kindergarten. And the old  joke of flunking sand box is hauntingly true.

There is only work. What kind of work? School work. That’s why I call what is happening in Ezrial’s school a sweat shop kindergarten. We have taken the children out of the factories and put them now in factory like kindergartens.

Ezrial’s lucky. She can play school with the school work. She doesn’t mind being praised for doing something meaningless well. She was six in January; some of her classmates are almost a year younger than she is. But when she comes home from school she’ll run around the house with her sister and brother or jump on the trampoline in her back yard.

Let’s give the right to be little kids back to our littlest scholars.

Dear Mr. Huey

 

Huey and the early reading researchers started by looking at reading as a visual act
Studied what the eye does.
Intention to inform teaching.
Wanted to know what the brain does. But didn't know how
Kohlers revived Huey in 1968 affected research but not that of psychologists
Slide 2

When I decided to study the reading process I had children read texts they hadn't seen before and discovered a window on what happens in the brain through miscue analysis,
Bringing both together in Emma gives powerful view of brain
Slide 3

But I would like to differ from you in two respects.

1. You say if we understood reading we would understand "the most intricate workings of the human mind" and I agree with that but you said it would be psychology which would achieve this understanding. Psychology alone is not enough partly because psychology became too narrowly experimental and not sufficiently open to seeking broad theoretically sound ways of studying the structures and processes of reading. It took a few educationalists like Margaret Spencer and Harold Rosen and my mate Brian Cambourne, just honored by your Queen. Literacy wonks like Brian Street and David Barton and linguists like Michael Halliday and Peter Fries and neurologists like my colleague Steve Strauss and Child Development folks like Marie Clay And a few synthesizers like Frank Smith to pull it all together. But from all vantage points we have to be looking at the organic, dynamic process of reading as an integrated whole. Otherwise we are like the blind men of Hindustan- each examining a piece of the elephant but not seeing what it is as a whole. I have this drive to make it all fit – and just enough arrogance to call what I've found a comprehensive theory of the reading process. I promised in my title to bring you up to date on what we've learned in the last half century about reading but I should be honest and admit that I am mostly sharing what I've learned from these great colleagues and from my own miscue research and that of my students and colleagues and my life companion Yetta Goodman.

 
2. Language is the real miracle. Reading and writing are part of a language continuum that extends the range of language.
A general mistake reading researchers made was not recognizing that reading is language not some abstract code for language.

 
We have so taken oral language development as granted that we have failed to recognize why and how language is so easy for humans to learn and use.
Slide4

All human children are born with three characteristics that produce the remarkable ability to invent and use language.

1. They have the ability to think symbolically- that is to let meaningless signs represent things, experiences, ideas, and feelings.

2. They are born immature and totally dependent on others into an inter-dependent family with complex needs to connect with others as they mature. From birth they must make their needs evident to survive and thrive.

1. They are intelligent- what would be the point of language if we didn't have something to say to each other.

Within the first three years of life they have developed ability to speak comprehensibly and to understand one or more very complex languages. I say or more because there are many children who simultaneously learn two or more languages by the same age. Ironically these multilingual children are at both ends of the continuum –rich kids with nannies and poor kids in Africa who are growing up in multilingual communities.
This achievement is so amazing that some very smart people have decided it must be innate and not learned at all. I disagree with that. I believe that there is a reason why language development happens so rapidly: that is human language parallels the way the human mind works- the way we organize and store what we learn in our brains.
Language is consistent with the way the brain works The brain must represent everything it understands and stores with patterns of signs which are part of patterns that are organized into more complex patterns. And we know that the brain must have flexible rules for how all this system works because it has both a set for ambiguity: the signs can change their values within the same utterance and it can take advantage of the redundancy of language to be very efficient in the way it makes sense and generates responses.
Slide 5

1.Language is both a personal and social invention. Each of us has the ability to invent language and we do but the need to connect with others serves as a constraint on our inventions. The interaction of our personal inventions with the conventions of the language(s) that surround us cause the language to move toward the language of family and community.

 
2. But the creative process never ends- that's why language is continuously evolving both to meet new needs but also as users are divided by time space, class or experience.
Slide 51. it is language and not just reading that is mankind's most profound achievement; reading and writing are the inevitable extensions of humanity's really most amazing achievement: Language
To illustrate how each child invents language consider four of my great grandchildren ( the other two are not yet a year old and only beginning to talk.On father's day I had a visit from Arabella who at 9 months took her first steps at our house. She and I had a great time turn taking she would say mamamama and I would repeat it then she would say wawawawa and I would say wawawa. This went on for several minutes until I lost interest.
Ezrial, the oldest, focused in her language development on intonation. For a very long time her speech was eloquently dynamic- even dramatic accompanied by gestures as she expressed herself . But the phonology was missing. One time she picked up a spring type door stop, held it in front of her mouth and clearly was imitating a news person on television. Now she is six, graduate of a sweat shop kindergarten and fully conversational.
Juliette, her sister, is now four, She followed a more typical pattern, gradually producing short utterances that were comprehensible within appropriate contexts and steadily developing toward comprehensible English.
Her cousin Madison took a somewhat different path. Her language became grammatical before she fully had control of English phonology. Her language had that charming characteristic of not quite the conventional sounds. Twa wa wa wa wa uh she sang in one song.
Levi with two older sisters had picked up on social pragmatics. He focused on semantic units in appropriate contexts. At two and half in a science museum I said to him "Levi, did you know this place is about science?" He responded. "I knew that " " At one time when his maternal grandmother was visiting he introduced her to his paternal grandfather," Zafta, this is Pops"
What all my dear little ones have in common is that without any instruction they themselves have become conversational in English. That means that they control the phonological system, the grammar, a considerable vocabulary and much of the social pragmatics such as thank you. Please, I love you etc. Madison told me she wanted to go to the "book area" in our house.
Slide 6

What have these 2-3 year olds learned?

 
They've learned that :

• people connect through language (it's social).
  
• people use language to express their needs (It's communicative)
  
• people share their experiences and feelings through language (It's interpersonal)
  
• how to organize their thoughts and learn through language.(It's psycholinguistic
  

They've also learned:

• the systems of one or more languages (However many they need)
  
•     They can produce and attend to the systems of sounds that are
  

the signs of a language

• They've learned the wording and grammar of the languages
  
• They've learned to use the language to express what they need to
  

say and understand what others say to them and others


 

 
But these children of the 21^st century are also digital natives. Ezrial has a partly functional cell phone and with her mother's help writes me text messages. Juliette and Madison are masters of the Ipad and Levi's been talking into a toy cell phone since he could walk. We skype so often that the children have been somewhat startled to see us in person.
I mention this digital competence to introduce another important concept I have learned.
Written language is the inevitable extension of oral language. It comes about when our human need to connect is beyond the capacity of voice and ears. We need to connect over time and space. It's a parallel language system sharing grammar and vocabulary.
Written language is not a secondary representation of oral language. It is an alternate way of connection. It uses sight more than sound but it is language in every sense and it is no harder to learn than oral language in fact it is easier because it shares so much with oral language
There always have been children who moved into literacy easily and without instruction. My middle daughter Karen was reading before she started school. In a combined kindergarten first grade the teacher had kindergarten Karen listening to the first grade children as they learned to read. At home she lined up her dolls and read to them. The first article Yetta and I did together was on her spelling ability when she started kindergarten.
But now many more children are reading online and on mobile devices and merrily texting with their thumbs well before they start school.
Slide 7

The more complex society becomes the more we humans need to connect with each other. I've said elsewhere that Gutenberg's invention of the
printing press didn't make mass literacy possible rather the need for expanded literacy made the printing press necessary.
I'm briefly share some important things I've learned about how our species makes sense of print but I'll be coming back to this amazing ability of children to learn language and how that relates to them becoming literate.
Slide 8

 
Einstein has been quoted as saying that all scientific discovery begins with intuition.
Early in my research with miscue analysis I had such an intuition, I characterized reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game. At first I considered that a metaphor. But modern brain theory is confirming my intuition. Our brains are continuously predicting what will happen

It uses those predictions to tell the senses what to look for and where to look and it is selective about what it chooses to use from the sensory input. What I called psycholinguistic strategies in reading are general strategies of the brain. Reading is a very good example of the brain at work.

 
Now, in this digital ag, the functions overlap. Oral language can be preserved and written can be immediate as in texting. Reading as language then cannot have basic differences with how any language process works.

With this mind here are some key ideas we've learned about reading.

Slide9

Idea 1: Reading

is a process by which the brain constructs meaning from printed texts

.

 
Making sense and constructing meaning are two ways of saying the same thing
Reading is an active process in which meaning is created by the reader.
Though reading begins with the eye scanning the text to provide input to the brain. The brain specifically in the cortex is where meaning is constructed.
Slide 10

A common sense view is that the eye scans word by word and the brain then makes sense of the words. In that view accurate word recognition is very important and the letters in the words are used to identify the words.
But a century of eye tracking and half a century of miscue analysis has shown something quite different.
    About a third of all words are not fixated in reading. At times the eye regresses.
Words may be fixated but omitted in oral reading and words may be read in oral reading which were not fixated.
We've identified what we call the grand illusion in reading: Readers think they see all the words but they don't. The brain constructs perceptions based on visual input but also based on what it knows and what it expects to see.

 
What the reader thinks he/she sees is more important than what is actually seen. Prediction makes it possible for the eye to be selective in where it fixates. That's efficient because it saves time and energy.
Slide 11

 
Within our construction of meaning, the brain (specifically the cortex) predicts what the eye will see and constructs mental images based on the visual information but also on the predictions it has made. It only needs enough input to confirm what is expected or not and to make further predictions
It uses these perceptions to construct the wording and other features of the text. The brain actually constructs a mental text—we call it the reader's text—based on the published text. Remember what you are seeing as you read is not meaning but patterns of ink. You as the reader must construct from them a meaningful text and make sense of it. It is this reader's text which the reader comprehends.
There are two elements in how the cortex controls an ongoing process The lements are looping and corrective mechanisms. In driving a car in traffic or in reading, a series of decisions are continuously made; each maintains a connection between the cortex, the sensory systems, and the organs of the body. Each decision involves predictions on the basis of perceptions based on sensory inputs. But they also contain predictions of what is likely to follow.
Consider a few seconds of driving:

I'm driving in the speed lane but my exit on the motorway is coming up:

Cortex to foot: keep the foot steady on the accelerator but get ready to change lanes.

Cortex to eyes /eyes to cortex: check the mirrors for a break in traffic, start turning the wheel—whoa, where did that guy come from? Nice recovery, feet and hands!

Reading is much like that:

Cortex: message to eyes, eyes to cortex. Ready: hands on page: Initiate reading.     Eyes get me some input from left of line. Here's what we're looking for: quick few hundredths of second focus eyes. Thanks eyes: got a hunch of the pattern, predicting, wording, skip ahead now pretty sure what's coming…yeah we know what's coming—got the image yeah that's it. Understood! And here's what we're expecting. That's nice input—Whoa, eyes go back to the way this began—hold on—never mind I already know what it said..

 

Comprehending is this rapid continuous looping: sensing, thinking, muscle action: cortex makes sense. Occasionally the eye is sent back reversing gears to recheck input and then rolling on.

Idea 2: Any text—whether oral or written—is a complex system of abstract symbols with no intrinsic meaning.

And here is the miracle of human language: We are able to think symbolically—that is, use abstract symbols to represent meaning. We connect with each other, communicate our needs, our thoughts, our experiences, our feelings. But there is no meaning in the symbols themselves. The meaning cannot pass from one head to another. It is in the head of the writer who creates the text and the reader who makes sense of the text.
The meaning that we produce is never exactly the meaning the writer had—we all bring our own views and experience into the meaning construction. Poets particularly have understood this.

Idea 3: To make sense of what is read the reader must bring meaning to the text.

Both oral and written language texts have the potential to be understood. But understanding, to any degree, depends on readers bringing meaning to the text. We have it wrong when we say, "Does that make sense to you?" Rather, we should say, "Can you make sense of that?" We don't "get meaning" from the written text, we make our own meaning .By that we mean that the writer creates a representation of what he or she means but the writing itself is an array of abstract symbols that has no intrinsic meaning. If the text is well written, a reader who shares the language constructs meaning from it.
    Both the reader and the writer are trying to communicate through language. How well they succeed depends on two things:
    1. That they share the same language, at least substantially enough to understand each other. (Indeed they may share the same language but use it differently.)
    2. That the reader brings to the reading the background of knowledge and experience the writer has assumed the intended readers will have. The writer has a sense of audience.

Slide 12

Idea 4: Making sense of written language uses basically the same processes as making sense of oral language

.

Another common illusion is that it is necessary to first turn print into sounds (sound out) and then understand it as we do speech. In this view, written language is not real language but a code for language. But in our extensive research on oral reading miscues we found no evidence for that. We all read silently much faster than we speak. Rather, the two systems—oral and written language—are parallel. If reading were dependent on turning print to speech then deaf people lacking hearing could not learn to read. Deaf sign languages such as American Sign Language constitute a third parallel language system. The symbols are manual signs and they represent meaning directly just as speech and writing does. Sometimes people talk about "cracking the code" in reading. But language systems are all codes. The symbols have no meaning but in the systematic way they encode meaning.
Of course in listening you make sense of the language as you hear it. If you don't understand something in normal conversation, you can ask the speaker a question. In reading you can reread to get more understanding. In both cases, though, both thought and language are involved.
We use language to represent ideas. Whether the input is oral, written, or sign. We construct our own meaning in comprehending what is being said. And we are not limited by speech in how we can connect with each other.
    In any case, there is an ongoing transaction in which meaning is expressed in language and comprehended from language. So in reading, the text the reader comprehends is the text the reader is constructing parallel to but not identical to the writer's text. It is no longer just the writer's text, the parallel text is based on what the reader perceives, knows, believes, and understands. So what is comprehended will be a composite of author's and reader's meaning. Exactly the same thing happens in listening. The listener is also constructing a personal text and that is what is comprehended. So when a husband insists that his wife said one thing while his wife insists she said something else, they are both right since what they understood were two different but related texts.

Idea 5: How well any reader can make sense of anything that is being read depends on how efficient and effective the reader is and what they knew before reading.

An effective reader, like an effective listener has a good understanding of what is being said. But efficiency is a matter of how much time and energy the reader must expend to make sense.
Efficient readers use the least amount of time, energy, and cues from the text to make sense of what they are reading. Research has shown for a long time that there is a correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension. That has led to the mistaken notion that if we teach readers to read faster their comprehension would improve. Fortunes have been made from speed reading courses.
However, it isn't speed but efficiency that is related to comprehension. Efficient reading is relatively fast. That's because the reader uses the least amount of cues from the text, selectively, to make sense of what is being read. But proficient reading is always a combination of how efficient the reading is and how effective. Proficient readers are also flexible—they vary the speed at which they read to suit the density or the quality of the text, speeding up when the going is easy and slowing down when they need to use more cues from the text to get to the meaning (even rereading when the reader is unsure of the meaning). And many readers read more slowly or reread when they relish the text they are reading.
The general admonition of teachers is to read carefully. But reading efficiency will vary depending on the nature of the text, the purposes for reading and how predictable the text is for the reader. So efficiency and effectiveness are not general attributes but specific to each transaction between a reader and a text.    
Each of us is illiterate to some extent. We read some texts with great efficiency using fewer fixations, sampling the text very effectively, making highly successful predictions. And there are other texts that we have to read ploddingly and repetitiously to get some tentative sense of the meaning. In texts of great interest to us we bring the necessary background to fit ourselves into the intended audience it is written for. When I have to sign an important document such as a mortgage agreement, I get a lawyer to do my reading for me.
So let's come back now to what all this means for how teacher support literacy development.
Consider one eight year old child. Now finishing third grade, he had been subjected to DIBELS from his first day in kindergarten, He was thoroughly convinced that he was a non-reader because nothing worked for him. He was indeed a non-writer because all his time was spent on being tested taught to the test and then retested with DIBELS,
DIBELS is a test funded by the US Department of education developed at the University of Oregon by a group of direct instruction advocates who were put in charge of determining what states could put in their funding proposals under NCLB. That meant that without review by state and local authorities it was mandated in many states for all k-3 students.
Slide 13 and 14

The sub tests purport to test the five big things in reading according to the findings of the National Reading Panel, Each of the sub tests is given one to one preferably by someone other than the teacher on the school staff. Each test is timed at one minute and the child has three seconds to respond, Only correct responses are counted, each test is considered prerequisite to the next. Only the last of the five is a connected "story" and it is scored by the number of words read correctly in one minute.
After some pressure from teachers a retelling was added but the score is the number of words used in the retelling.
At one point this boy became so agitated by the time pressure of the test that he knocked the timer off the desk and left school and walked all the way home.
Now comes the happy ending. A neighbor began tutoring the young boy using retrospective miscue analysis. That's a process where he reads orally a story or article which is recorded. Then his tutor selects some of the miscues starting with those that show some evidence of some success in constructing meaning. In the short period of four months the boy began to be more comfortable in trusting his own learning and letting go of the nonproductive strategies he'd been drilled on. He had indeed been learning all the time he was in school and through the RMA sessions he began to revalue himself and the reading process. At school the DIBELS instruction continued but now a reader he even did better on that- his grades improved and his teachers noting the progress attribute to the success of his school instruction. But they told the tutor that he had the bad habit of making "educated guesses" and would need more instruction to get him to stop doing that.
I've told this sad story because it illustrates the great irony that the more explicit and virulent instruction becomes the more it interferes with the language learning children are capable of accomplishing on their own.
On teaching and learning of literacy 

Slide 15

 
Let's consider what are we teaching if we teach kids to read and write? We should be trying to support their learning to do what readers and writers do.
And let's consider how children- virtually all children learn language at a tender age without our help.: through the dialectic of invention and convention. They invent their language as they try to connect to those around them but they are constrained by the language others are using to communicate among themselves and with the child.
This dialectic is very productive because the universal ability to represent things, ideas, experiences feelings symbolically is also the way the brain organizes what if learns and remembers. The oral and written symbols move from random to those effective in connecting with others and the grammatical structures and morphology or wording of language are learned at the same time- since grammatical designs and morphemes must match and be assigned at the same time. Since what the child is learning: connecting through language the social conventions shape the inventions and they move closer while the grammar and lexicon grow together.

 
The ability to think symbolically is totally flexible and recursive, Signs can change their values in the same unit and signs can represent signs. As complex as the system is it is easy to learn because the brain works in much the same way.- organizing what it learns and storing the patterns that it creates to store and learn meanings.
Linguists understand that natural languages only exist as they are used in some context for some purpose and that the functions are processes and not isolatable skills.
From this it follows that language is universally developed and continues to be developed in the context of its use to connect people.

 
While language can be studied as any dynamic system can be studied. It cannot be learned by deconstructing it into pieces or constituents like pieces of a jig saw puzzle
This understanding of how language is learned leads to a conclusion others have discovered. The role of teaching is to support and facilitate learning in the context of using language to connect.
Furthermore this natural way of learning while using language is going on continuously
regardless of how young learners are taught.
Now let's compare this with the almost universal view that reading and writing are school subjects, that written language needs to be broken down to its components- building on the smallest and moving toward the largest. Reading then becomes learning part by part and bit by bit, letter by letter, word by word, rule by rule, skill by skill.

 
While young children are remarkably able to learn language, they are notably much less able to deal with abstraction. No wonder then they do not succeed well in learning sets of abstractions which not only are what they are taught but which are reified as reading in their tests.
Every attempt to create a scope and sequence for learning to read and write- what must be learned in each grade or as prerequisite to further learning is arbitrary and is likely to interfere with learning rather than support it. Fortunately most children will learn anyway though some will doubt their success and others will come to consider what they are taught more important than what they are learning themselves. Even when they are successful they think they have somehow cheated in making sense the wrong way.

 
Reading from the point of the school is what the tests test and the fact that a child is reading is not valued – what is valued is performance on the tests. Reading then is not making sense of print it is moving through an instrructional sequence and pasing tests.

 
Though I gave you an extreme example of dysfunctional instruction, it is the logical extension of what happens when the instructional program is reified as reading, It reaches the level I call the pedagogy of the absurd.

 
Vygotsky understood that language is learned in its use. Frank Smith has his 12 easy ways to make learning to read hard and one hard way to make it easy: Find out what the child is doing and help child do it. With informed teachers who understand what reading and writing are and how they are learned, every child can learn easily and effectively.

 
Then the role of the teacher is to provide challenging experiences in school that will expand on the growing literacy and produce more critical readers and more effective writers.
Happily children with access to digital devices, wherever and whoever they are, are finding their way into literacy much as they have found their to oral language as they use it to connect with their peers.
And predictably they are told when they arrive at school to put away their cellphones and tablets and get ready to be taught to read and write.
Slide 16

Responsive teaching for Literacy

• There is no sequence of skills in literacy development
  
• Reading and writing are not school subjects
  
• Like all language literacy develops in the context of its use
  
• Digital natives are already developing literates before they come to school:
  
• Teachers need to build on what learners are naturally doing and provide access for those that haven't had it
  
  • Provide access to materials and experience of literacy
    
  • Immerse in literacy activities
    
  • Accept and build on texting and email
    
  • Plan literacy activities that expand need to read and write
    
• The Double Agenda
  
  • Students are focused on what they are doing with written language
    
  • Teachers are monitoring both what they are doing and how they are doing it
    

• The key is to support learning and avoid teaching anything which is at cross purposes to that learning or has to be unlearned

On teaching and learning of literacy

 

How do readers make sense of print?

They construct a text parallel to the text they are reading using cues from three levels of language (signal, lexicogrammar and semantic)

They comprehend that text drawing heavily on linguistic and conceptual knowledge they already possess.

What are we teaching if we teach kids to read and write? We are trying to support their learning to do what readers do.

People learn language: through the dialectic of invention and convention. They invent their language as they try to connect to those around them but they are constrained by the language others are using to communicate among themselves and with the child.

This dialectic is very productive because the universal ability to represent things, ideas, experiences feelings symbolically is also the way the brain organizes what if learns and remembers. The oral and written symbols move from random to those effective in connecting with others and the grammatical structures and morphology or wording of language are learned at the same time- since grammatical designs and morphemes must match and be assigned at the same time. Since what the child is learning: connecting through language the social conventions shape the inventions and they move closer while the grammar and lexicon grow together.

The ability to think symbolically is totally flexible and recursive, Signs can change their values in the same unit and signs can represent signs. As complex as the system is it is easy to learn because the brain works in much the same way.- organizing what it learns and storing the patterns that it creates to store and learn meanings.

Linguists understand that natural languages only exist as they are used in some context for some purpose and that the functions are processes and not isolatable skills.

From this it follows that language is universally developed and continues to be developed in the context of its use to connect people.

While language can be studied as any dynamic system can be studied. It cannot be learned by deconstructing it into pieces or constituents like pieces of a jig saw puzzle

This understanding of how language is learned leads to a conclusion others have discovered. The role of teaching is to support and facilitate learning in the context of using language to connect.

Furthermore this natural way of learning while using language is going on continuously

regardless of how young learners are taught.

 

Now let's compare this with the almost universal view that reading and writing are school subjects, that there needs to be broken down to its components- building on the smallest and moving toward the largest. Reading then becomes learning part by part and bit by bit, letter by letter, word by word, rule by rule skill by skill.

While young children are remarkably able to learn language, they are notably much less able to deal with abstraction. No wonder then they do not succeed well in learning sets of abstractions which not only are what they are taught but which are reified as reading in their tests.

Every attempt to create a scope and sequence for learning to read and write- what must be learned in each grade or as prerequisite to further learning is arbitrary and is likely to interfere with learning rather than support it. Fortunately most children will learn anyway though some will doubt their success and others will come to consider what they are taught more important than what they are learning themselves. Even when they are successful they think they have somehow cheated in making sense the wrong way.

Consider one eight year old child. Midway through third grade he had been subjected to DIBELS from his first day in kindergarten, He was thoroughly convinced that he was a non-reader because nothing worked for him. He was indeed a non-writer because all his time was spent on being tested taught to the test and then retested with DIBELS,

DIBELS is a test funded by the US Department of education developed at the University by a group of direct instruction advocates who were put in charge of determining what states could put in their funding proposals under NCLB. That meant that without review by state and local authorities it was mandated in many states for all k-3 students,

The sub tests purport to test the five big things in reading according to the findings of the National Reading Panel, Each of the sub tests is given one-one by a teacher preferably by someone other than the teacher on the school staff. Each test is timed at one minute and each the child has three seconds to respond, Ony correct responses are counted, each test is considered prerequisite to the next. Only the last of the five is a connected "story" and it is scored by the number of words read correctly in one minute.

After some pressure from teachers a retelling was added but the score is the number of words used in the retelling.

At one point this boy became so agitated by the time pressure of the test that he knocked the timer off the desk and left school and walked all the way home.

Now comes the happy ending. A neighbor began tutoring the young boy using retrospective miscue analysis. That's a process where he reads orally a story or article which is recorded. Then his tutor selects some of the miscues starting with those that show some evidence of some success in constructing meaning. In the short period of four months the boy began to be more comfortable in trusting his own learning and letting go of the nonproductive strategies he'd been drilled on. He had indeed been learning all the time he was in school and through the RMI sessions he began to revalue himself and the reading process. At school the DIBELS instruction continued but now a reader he even did better on that- his grades improved and his teachers noting the progress attribute to the success of his school instruction. But they told the tutor that he had the bad habit of making "educated guesses" and would need more instruction to get him to stop doing that.

Reading from the point of the school is what the tests test and the fact that a child is reading is not valued – what is valued is performance on the tests.

Though this is an extreme example of dysfunctional instruction, it is the logical extension of what happens when the instructional program is reified as reading, It reaches the level I call the pedagogy of the absurd.

Vygotsky understood that language is learned in its use. Frank Smith has his 12 easy ways to make learning to read hard and one hard way to make it easy: Find out what the child is doing and help child do it. With informed teachers who understand what reading and writing are and how they are learned, every child can learn easily and effectively.

Then the role of the teacher is to provide challenging experiences in school that will expand on the growing literacy and produce more critical readers and more effective writers.

 

 

 

 

Response to learning not to intervention

Ken Goodman, Professor Emeritus University of Arizona

Kgoodman@u.arizona.edu

Consider that without instruction virtually every human infant becomes able to use one or more languages before the age of three. They have learned the grammar, the phonology and the set of abstract combinations of sounds that their community uses to symbolically represent their world. And they can use that in connecting socially, emotionally, physically and communicatively. Every human has the ability to learn relatively easily one or more languages and that ability is equally available to learn alternate forms of those languages as they become necessary and available. This facility does not require any high degree of intelligence- you don’t have to be smart to learn language- nor do you have to be privileged. Language is easy to learn because it corresponds to the way the brain works. It learns and stores what it learns by using a semiotic system - a system of symbols.

Fortunately we grow up surrounded by language in use. All we need to join the community of language users is to be immersed in its use.  Our universal ease at learning language is not confined to oral language. Children who can’t hear the language around them can and do learn to use manual signs as easily as any hearing child learns to talk.  Human brains are brilliantly equipped to make sense of the world through language. Any child who has learned to speak one or more languages without any help is fully capable of learning to read and write. Written language is in fact an extension of oral language: it comes about wherever there is the need for connecting beyond face to face immediate situations.

So why are some children not successful in learning to read and write in school? It’s because those who create instructional materials have not understood the necessary conditions of learning and have constructed programs to teach literacy as a school subject. By making literacy school subjects they created curricula for teaching reading and writing based on arbitrary sequences.

Reading has been taught from part to whole, skill by skill, word by word. Programs start with little things. In this attempt to create an instructional sequence learning language becomes learning a series of abstractions which are harder to learn than language itself.

There is no sequence in language learning (It must be whole and in the context of its use). Any attempt to impose a sequence or to teach something less than language as it is used makes learning harder. What is worse the arbitrary sequence becomes reified: it becomes reading itself to such an extant that children who are successful readers are still required to go through the sequence and judged by tests of the components rather than reading.

If children are not learning to read and write in school, it is because the instructional program is interfering with the normal development that should be taking place.

The ability to learn to read and write is so universal that there is no instructional program that is so bad that it has prevented most students form learning to read and write. In truth, success in becoming literate in many school programs is in spite of rather than because of instruction.

The real problem in the teaching of reading and writing is instruction that treats reading and writing as school subjects.

Supporting children – all children - in becoming literate is of central importance. Literacy development should be part of all school learning and curriculum. But that means continuous attention to opportunities to use language in all its forms.

There is no reason why poor children in advanced societies or children in developing nations, or in fact any child anywhere should be unable to learn to read and write having already learned one or more oral languages. Isn’t it ironic that little African children are very likely bilingual or multilingual at the same age as most other children have become competent in one language.

The only factors that can explain differences between groups are :

Access: Children and adults who live in remote places with little contact with the outside world may not have access to written language. If life in their communities does not require written language they are not likely to acquire literacy or feel the need to do so. And ironically the communities may be suspicious about literacy education because it makes the learners less likely to stay in the community.

Children in literate communities may suffer from lack of access either because they are not able to afford books, magazines or digital devices or more commonly now because the very programs imposed on them in schools deprive them of opportunities to read and write by requiring them to master decontextualized “skills” before they are permitted to use literacy.

Ironically the less successful the program is the more intensively it is applied to the end that by the time many children have learned to read and write they still consider themselves unsuccessful – how many times can you hear yourself described as a failure before you start believing it? And many others have learned to consider reading and writing so unpleasant that they use them only when they have to. The effect of structured literacy programs in developing nations is likely to cause school drop outs. If parents are worried about what school is doing to alienate their children what’s the point of keeping the child in school if he or she is failing anyway.

Most literacy learners overcome the dysfunctional instruction and become literate. But some become discouraged to the point of literally or figuratively dropping out.

Lack of success is then blamed on the learner who goes through a series of intensive repeating of increasingly decontextualized skill instruction. In short term trials these appear to work as the pupils do a bit better on the inappropriate exercises. But the long term effects are devastating.

SO what should happen in school:

Reading and writing (as part of a language arts program) should focus on participation and gradual development of making sense of written texts. Fortunately many children at early ages have access to devices such as email, ipad, and smart phones. They are often becoming literate as they learn oral language just because it is accessible and needed to connect with their peers. 

Many modern children are digital natives who, with access to digital devices, are learning to read and write as easily as they learn to talk. Modern teens’ favorite way to hang out is through texting. Chatting now applies also to written language. Ironically children are considering failing in kindergarten who are already reading because they can’t handle the speed drills on abstract bits and pieces of words. 

Any attempt to teach reading and writing as school subjects is at odds with  how language is learned and the conditions necessary for literacy to be a natural extension of the language learning virtually all children have already achieve

Other children need rich experience and access to literacy experiences in school. School is where the social uses of literacy become accessible and the ability to connect with peers is supported.

Subsequently the focus should be on expanding on efficiency, effectiveness and choice in a widening range of uses of language including literacy. That requires a school atmosphere that encourages conversation, presentation, creativity, engagement and critical use of language.

That means teachers must be expert kidwatchers and be highly educated in understanding and promoting language development.

It means access for every student to a wide range of experiences with the authentic materials and forms of written and oral language and with continuous encouragement to learn language while learning about language and learning through language.

Instruction must be a response to learning rather than limiting learning to a response to instruction. By responding to language learning, we build on what has worked for all children in learning language without our help. 

The Plus in Google plus

This morning my wife got an email message with the title:

You may have missed this post from Ken Goodman.

 When she opened it it was an ad for Samsung gear , the watch that is supposed to work with smart phones. I say supposed because it was sold as compatible with my  Verizon Samsung GalaxyIII phone- but it is not.

This supposed endorsement was sent to everyone in my google plus circles. In  trying vainly to find who to complain to I discovered that google plus markets a service cleverly called Hoot that permits advertisers to produce such targeted ads. Everyone on my “circles” got this ad disguised as something I had posted.

This corporate Chutzpah is mind blowing. Could someone tell all my family and friends that I support a candidate that I don’t? Could I be sued for someone who bought a bad product supposedly on my advice?

Isn’t this the ultimate in identity theft? And what can you or I do about it.  I can’t even figure out how to unsubscribe to Google plus.

I use google for everything- calendar, browser, even watching  Pac 12 games. And now I find all the time Google has been using me. I consider myself a computer savvy person (more or less)  I use it for my professional writing and for maintaining my wide contacts. Now I must tell my friends and associates be careful what you see with my name on it.

Even my name is fair game for these cyber vultures.

Ken Goodman