The Linguist - language learning should be fun

Let kids read, no questions asked - more wisdom from #Krashen

Here is another excellent letter from Stephen Krashen. This is of course the same position as that of Brazilian educator, Rubem Alves, who said ( I am paraphrasing) that nothing spoils the pleasure of reading as much as being asked to analyze and answer comprehension questions. This applies to kids in school reading their own language, and it applies to learning a foreign language.

Does accelerated reader work?

Sent to the Washington Post, Dec 17.

Accelerated Reader (AR) may be "the most influential reading program
in the country" ("If you're shopping, find the books that work for
kids," December 17) but there is no clear evidence that it works. It
fact, it might be harmful.

AR has four components: It makes sure children have access to books,
provides time to read, quizzes children on what they read with a focus
on details, and awards prizes for performance on the quizzes.

It is well-established that providing books and time to read are
effective, but AR research does not show that the quizzes and prizes
are helpful. Studies claiming AR is effective compare AR to doing
nothing; gains were probably due to the reading, not the tests and
prizes.

AR encourages an unnatural form of reading, reading focusing on often
irrelevant details in order to pass tests.

AR rewards children for doing something that is already pleasant:
self-selected reading. Substantial research shows that rewarding an
intrinsically pleasant activity sends the message that the activity is
not pleasant, and that nobody would do it without a bribe. AR might be
convincing children that reading is not pleasant. No studies have been
done to see if this is true.

Stephen Krashen

#Krashen - Just let them read.

Here is the text  of an interesting email from Stephen Krashen. I fully agree with his comments on the importance of enjoyable input.. It holds for language learning as well,

BTW I regularly receive emails from Krashen as I am on his distribution list. I gather that there are schools without adequately stocked libraries. They probably have reading specialists though. I hope that they buy their books at second hand stores, or do they buy special "scholastic editions" at inflated prices?

Dr. Jerome Groopman, interviewed in the New York Review of Books

(12/17/09), points out that in medicine, clinical guidelines drawn up
by committees don't last long: "A recent analysis of more than a
hundred evidence-based conclusions about clinical practice reported
that after two years more than a quarter of the conclusions were
contradicted by new data, and that nearly half of the 'best practices'
were overturned at five years." (see "Evidence-Based Practice, Best
Practices, and Other Lies " by Susan Ohanian,
http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=734)

The LEARN Act insists on direct instruction, reinforced by frequent
testing (sometimes known as "skill-building"). A great deal of
research, done over decades, shows that direct instruction has very
limited value in the areas mentioned by LEARN (phonemic awareness,
phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, reading fluency, knowledge
of text structure), and that most of our competence in these areas is
absorbed through extensive reading.

Dr. Goopman points out that half of the pronouncements of committees
on clinical guidelines were overturned in five years. Some of the
guidelines in the LEARN Act were overturned before the Act was
written.

Whose fault is that kids can't read and other thoughts.

Download Whose fault?

Here is a discussion of reading as it relates to language improvement. I also touch on who is responsible for the apparent decline of reading skills in our society.

Krashen on reading

Stephen Krashen copied me on this letter to the editor, sent to a newspaper in Florida that published an article about declining reading skills.

The real reading problem in Pasco County Florida

Sent to the Tampa Tribune, September 22, 2009

The real "reading problem" in Pasco County is that administrators
have not read the reading research ("Pasco educators trying to improve
reading scores," Sept. 21). Research and common sense tell us that the
only way we become expert readers is by doing a voluminous amount of
self-selected reading. Studies show that those who read more read
better, write better, spell better, and have larger vocabularies than
those who read less.

The obvious steps to take are for teachers to stimulate interest in a
number of topics, and to make sure the books are accessible to
students. This means making sure schools have quality school
libraries. Studies show that students in schools with better libraries
and qualified librarians do better on reading tests.

Instead, Pasco has decided to try yet another commercial program,
filled with instruction on skills and strategies that experienced
readers acquire anyway as they read.

Stephen Krashen

Raise-a-reader campaign

The CanWest newspaper chain is on a full PR campaign to promote their newspapers, to promote "literacy awareness" and raise money for literacy in their annual Raise-a-reader campaign. In the local newspaper one can read the usual alarmist numbers that 40% of people cannot make sense of what they read and so forth. Famous personalities are out on the street corner handing out free newspapers, collecting money and raising literacy awareness.

I have real problems with all of this. Why can the school system not teach people to read? I do not believe that 40% of people cannot read properly. Everyone I know can read.

Where does all the money that they raise go? If I judge by the opinions of the literacy teachers who are on my NIFL listserv, I think any money that they get is largely wasted, or at least will not come even close to dealing with the problems of literacy in our society.

Has the level of illiteracy increased or decreased with all of this literacy awareness? Or has it really just stayed the same.

If we assume that there are that many people who need reading help, handing out newspapers, and some of the other things that Canwest sponsors, like their Canwest spelling bee and the Canwest obsucre word of the day in their newspapers are not going to help much. Just a lot of "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

People need to take responsibility for their own learning and read more. And schools need to take responsibility for the kids they are supposed to teach. They all need to find a way to make reading more fun, and not an obligation.

Can someone explain the debate between phonics and whole language?

There was an article in the Globe and Mail by Margaret Wente called My third grader still cannot read. What do I do?. In the comments to the article there is a lot of discussion about why 30% of third graders in Toronto schools cannot read well. There seems to be agreement that poor readers in grade 3 will have trouble throughout the school system. Part of the discussion was about a debate between teaching phonics and teaching whole language. I got the sense that the whole language approach was related to the critical "thinking/higher level thinking" "auditory learner/visual learner" "literacy is a social construct" hogwash that I encountered on my literacy listserv, but I could be wrong.

It seems to be that the "experts" have not had much success in fixing the problem, so I feel no compunction in giving it my two cents worth. Here goes.

You cannot learn to read if you do not know what the letters represent in terms of sounds, it seems to me. And when, as you inevitably will in English, you find out that some letters can be pronounced in a variety of ways, you need to be told that as well. However, if the child can be motivated, or cajoled into reading, the more he or she reads the better he or she will read. The more interesting the content is to the child, the more the child will read. If you begin by reading to the child, eventually the child may get interested in reading him or herself. So if the child learns what the letters stand for, and is encouraged to read, and gets interesting things to read, and hears and sees people around him or her reading, she he will read more and more and improve.

If the child is forced to read things he does not like, or asked to explain things, or given strategies for reading, these things will reduce his or her eagerness to read.

I have never been a teacher. I see my grandchildren all read. They think it is normal to read. They choose what to read. Now the 30% of kids who cannot read, what do they do? Was it the phonics versus whole language thing that caused them not to be able to read?

I welcome all comments on this.

How do we learn how to write well ? Stanley Fish in the NY Times

Stanley Fish has an interesting article in the NY Times on how to improve the writing skills of college students. He has a number of suggested drills and exercizes that he would use in class such as the following.

"I have devised a number of exercises designed to reinforce and extend the basic insight. These include (1) asking students to make a sentence out of a random list of words, and then explain what they did; (2) asking students to turn a three-word sentence like “Jane likes cake” into a 100-word sentence without losing control of the basic structure and then explain, word-by-word, clause-by-clause, what they did; (3) asking students to replace the nonsense words in the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” with ordinary English words in a way that makes coherent (if silly) sense, and then explain what they did, and how they knew what kind of word to put into each “slot.” (The answer is that even in the absence of sense or content, the stanzas’ formal structure tells them what to do and what not to do.)"

I would resist doing any of this stuff. I would rather read, and then have to write. Yes, I think it is a good idea to insist on a certain structure in writing. In the US there is the five point essay. At my French university it was the balanced formal exposé; with an intro, part 1, part 2 and conclusion. A formula gives you an easy to use framework that you can either stick to or abandon later on as you see fit. It helps get you started and helps you organize your thoughts.

However, Fish's artificial exercizes would annoy me.

I cannot help feel that LingQ could be a great tool for improving writing skills. We save key words and phrases that we can use to make our language flow better. LingQ also offers writing correction, in a way that enable us to try out new words and phrases,and then if we get them wrong we can import and integrate the corrected usage into our learning.

In any case, lots of reading of well written material on the one hand, and writing and being corrected, on the other hand, are the best ways to become a better writer IMHO. I would not take Stanley Fish's class on writing.

What is literacy?

After a few months on a Forum with teachers of language and literacy to immigrants, it is hard not to become very negative about them. The bulk of the posts are either ideologically motivated or unintelligible pseudo-intellectual bafflegab.

First, an example of what passes for intelligent commentary,

Talking about teaching English to Mexican immigrants, one teacher says "in fact literacy may be higher in Mexico than in the US". I reply saying "what is your source for this information?". He answers " I remember reading this about 10 years ago, but things may have changed". Another person chimes in that discussing literacy rates is heading us into "murky waters" since "in some country literacy is measured based on the ability to recite the Koran or the Bible."

Hello teachers! Literacy rates in the US and Mexico have not changed much in ten years. The official statistics that report literacy in the US as 99% and in Mexico as 90% may be inaccurate, but they are not based on reading the Bible or the Koran. Most anecdotal evidence suggests that Mexico has a bigger problem with literacy, at least in the rural areas, and to suggest the opposite should require some evidence, regardless of the ideological motivation to show American society as inherently bad and Mexican society (source of most immigrants to the US) as inherently good.

There are some serious posts at this Forum, few and far between.

Are we smarter than a 4th grader?

Colleagues: Following a lengthy discussion on the list by several of us I
wrote what I thought was the upshot of the discussion and wrote:

Question: What is literacy?
Answer: Literacy is the ability to read and write.

Question: How does literacy develop?
Answer: Reading and writing leads to reading and writing.

Question: How should we teach literacy?
Answer: We should motivate learners to engage in lots of reading and
writing.

Now the Longitudinal Study of Adult Literacy by Steve Reder and associates
has found that one of the most important outcomes of participating in adult
literacy education (ESL,ABE,ASE) was that after people left programs they
tended to engage in more literacy practices and that engaging in more
literacy practices (i.e., reading more and more) caused people's literacy
proficiency to increase.

Earlier in 1994 in a report on Adult Literacy in the United States I called
attention to the interrelationships among education, skills, and engagment
in literacy pracitces. I called this the "triple helix" of literacy
development in which more education lead to more skill, more skill lead to
more engagement in literacy practices, this in turn lead to more skill and
then that lead to more education, etc. etc.

So at this time, much scholarly and research evidence has been found to
support the conclusions of a genuine expert whose work I frequently cite in
one of my workshops. This expert is Anthony, a 4th grade student in Tucson,
AZ at the time of his seminale insight in which he said, and I quote:

"I like reading because reading helps us get better at reading."

One again, as our colleagues in the United Kingdom would say, "Brilliant"!

Literacy and ideology..some more thoughts from literacy teachers.

I am amazed at the extent to which teachers, who are paid by the public purse to help immigrants and low literacy learners with language, have a powerful ideological perspective towards their task. Here are just a few examples. My answer is in italics at the bottom.

.........................................................................................................................................
I believe that it was in the early 70s that Freire went to the UNESCO conference on literacy to challenge the idea and approach of literacy. For Freire the UNESCO literacy campaigns intended to spread capitalism in poor countries, and capitalism could not function without literacy.  In other words, to buy coke and TVs and refrigerators, the natives needed to know how to read. The problem is that capitalism was introducing overwhelming poverty, disease, war, and all kinds of horrible things instead of a better quality of life. Freire proposed an alternative literacy to educate the oppressed to take control of their lives by raising up against economic exploitation by means of literacy.

Coke is a metaphor for the introduction of goods that require production, marketing and distribution. A minimal level of literacy is often required for these processes to occur. To buy coke you need to read the word COKE and COCA COLA. You need to learn about it and want it which is the result of adds in magazines, newspapers and TVs. All this requires a society with a minimal infrastructure that depends, to a certain extent, on print as a medium to pass information, to sell things, to buy things to produce things, etc.

 

I did not say that capitalism introduced poverty into poor countries. That is an oxymoron. I said that it introduced extreme poverty. What I mean by this is that differences between rich and poor emerge so that the conditions of the poor are extreme to abominable levels. Factories and assembly lines resulted in hyperurbanized areas, people's lost of self sustenance, of barter economies, of small farms, and the emergence of squalor, illness, prostitution and inhuman conditions that go beyond mere poverty

I think Andres is getting to the core of why we need to reexamine literacy pedagogy.  Contextually, students (be they traditional, adult, or special needs students) quite often experience something of an awakening, what Liberation Theologians often refer to as “la rupture” with their assumed versions of hegemony previously fostered upon them by forces of oppression and domination.  It is akin to the goldfish suddenly realizing she is in water after simply accepting it uncritically for most of her life.  If I am understanding Andres correctly, I think he may be suggesting that these various contexts may be more significant to our teaching than our strategies born of our doctoral dissertations or our own privileged status.  Just a thought…and by the way, one need not go to Brazil to see how “capitalism introduced poverty to poor countries.”  The poverty pockets of Appalachia, the ghettos of the nation’s Capitol, the reservations of our Native Americans, and a hundred other settings give ample evidence of the fact.

In fact capital accumulation has been happening for thousands of years, since man first developed agriculture. Inequality has been a fact of life since then. What distinguishes modern capitalism is the greater freedom of enterprise, more efficient means of raising investment capital and the expansion of world trade. The result has been a tremendous improvement in the average life expectancy, health, education and opportunity for most people. Modern capitalism did not invent slavery, agricultural serfdom, the caste system, and other evil practices, in many cases it caused these to stop because they were not competitive.

Modern China is the arch example of a society where hundreds of millions of people have, in a short period of time, achieved a degree of prosperity and hope that they did not have before. China is a very literate society.

Latin America has by far the highest income disparity index (Gini coefficient) of any continent, and the reasons must lie in its history and culture. The capitalist societies of Europe, Asia and North America show the lowest gini indexes, especially Europe and Japan. Without doing a study I suspect that literacy correlates quite closely to income equality.

Teaching people to read, and to enjoy reading, is an important step in enabling people to compete in society economically and to participate in a full life as citizens of the world in the 21st century. The more positive their attitude towards the task of learning to read well, the better they will learn. In my view, literacy practitioners have a heavy responsibility to encourage a positive attitude amongst learners, since the enthusiasm and commitment of the learner is much much more important than any "techniques" that the teacher intends to impart to the learner. Certainly the practitioner should not try to impose their ideological prejudices.

Literacy and the ability to make sense with words.

Literacy means, to me, the ability to read and write. The most literate people are those who use the language well. Somewhere between 10 and 40% (depending on definition) struggle to read and write well.

Literacy skills are very closely related to professional success in a society. Some people cannot decode letters either because they did not learn to do so at school or because they have a learning disability. This is the minority. Most poor readers simply do not read enough.

We know from cognitive science research that the brain learns from experience and example. For most people with poor literacy skills, simply reading more is the best way to improve reading skills. Mostly this requires the motivation of the person involved.

We know from experience that it is easier to read content that is of interest and where the context is familiar. We also know that we can read words that are totally misspelled and jumbled if we have heard these words before, know them, and are familiar with the context. Research has shown that there is a close connection between listening and reading. From an evolutionary perspective, our brains have been listening a lot longer than they have been reading.

So, it seems to me, for the vast majority of people with literacy problems, making available a large library of reading material for the learner to choose from, and making audio files of that material available, will be an inexpensive way to improve literacy skills. Some efficient way to look up new words, and to keep track of them, would also help. Dare I mention LingQ?

Most language skills are acquired independently of teachers. However, many teachers would prefer to be in charge of language learning. Here is part of a discussion of literacy amongst teachers, and a link to a paper on literacy education called Postpositivist Scientific Philosophy:  Mediating Convergences, for those who are interested.

------------------------------

Perhaps Sally’s work on Kegan’s ideas, George’s work based on Popper’s
ideas, and David’s interest in technology will provide solid evidence-based
approaches to adult literacy education in the future. If there already are
such studies available I would be interested to learn about them. Perhaps
references could be posted on the discussion list from which we all could
learn.
 

Hi Tom,

In my paper on postpositivism, I linked Popper's concept of "verisimilitude," approximation to the truth (and he uses the lower case t word) to recent work on balanced reading theory.  Clearly in that paper I did not provide an evidence based research report in that the paper is intentionally theoretical in design.  However, toward the end of the paper I laid out a 19 point hypothesis, which could serve as a basis for a more grounded book-length research study, linked in turn to an examination of the underlying precepts of the recent research on balanced or integrated reading theory.  The 19 thesis statements are grounded in the following four categories

 

1.      Literacy facilitates knowledge acquisition in the grappling with and mastery of print-based texts.

2.      Literacy is enhanced to the extent to which individuals gain the capacity to read and write print-based texts.

Growth in literacy is experienced to the extent to which readers progressively comprehend and draw meaning from texts and appropriate them into their lives.

4.      Literacy has a technological component in the mastery of reading, writing and the comprehension of texts and a metaphorical dimension that resides in transactions between the reader and the text in which meaning making and significance lies beyond the text into that of appropriation, however variously that may be defined.

 

These are further detailed here.  For the purposes of further reflection on the earlier note on Popper on the centrality of theory as a basis for grounding instruction, these hypothesis emerged in my mind as a result of grappling with theory.  While they certainly exist independently of any theoretical postulations in my mind, they were stimulated  in the very process of grappling with theory based in part on the following paragraph:

 

Whether learning to read or learning to learn is, or should be the central focus of adult literacy education, is a matter of some dispute, which has not been resolved within the literature of the field.  There is substantial middle ground within these perspectives via the medium of balanced reading theory and a context-derived educational program that focuses on employment, family education, civic literacy, and lifelong learning (Stein, 2000).  Nonetheless, tensions between the operative assumptions of the New Literacy Studies and advocates of phonemic-driven approaches to reading are particularly sharp in their articulation of competing definitions of literacy.  In moving toward a dialectical resolution that incorporates balanced reading theory within a context-based adult literacy framework, my working hypothesis, much clarification is required.

etc . etc.