First Days 1

Thursday, August 18, 2011

I intend to keep a very integrated blog on this experience. As such I will not be separating out the “research” from the “daily” experiences. It will be a bit of mental gymnastics to follow the jumps and contortions, but those of you reading that have spoken with me will recognize the (lack of) pattern.

We are in Cape Town.  The “we” are myself and my partner, Richard. The “Cape Town” is not yet known. The flights here were long, but largely uneventful. We are checked into the Forest Hills dorms with 2 bedrooms, lots of space, and little else. We have been inventoried, had our phone account topped up, and wait for an access card for the building services. When we arrived last night, I went grocery shopping for breakfast items.  Seeing prices in Rands makes me think before I buy. I know that the seemingly high numbers on food are the result of a 7 Rand to 1 dollar conversion factor, but R12.43 for a loaf of bread (not even “designer” bakery bread) makes me wonder how much I need bread.

People with whom I have interacted come in all gradations of hue, characteristics, and linguistics.  It is my habit to categorize, but I think my needs will be thwarted here. Probably a good exercise in diversity appreciation. Why sort? I also am aware that much of my apprehension about such is related to finishing The Covenant before leaving Tampa. Thanks, Chuck. A good primer and cautionary tale. So far I have been approached twice by panhandlers, not very different from Tampa, though Tampa panhandlers tend to be less aggressive and stick to intersections. Maybe the protection of the car as a skin helps shield from “the personal” of the panhanler’s request. I do notice that I get very gruff. HMM.  Last night, the young man who starred in the scenario assured me that he was not “a bad person.” What must he have thought about my brushoff?  How does one panhandle and not develop a sense of rejection? I remember when I used to ask strangers for money when I was part of a cooperative living group (not quite a commune). If we ran short of money, one of the house tasks was to “get some money.” I did not feel desperate, yet I imagine that my panhandlers are desperate. I want as much distance from the me of now, from the them of the situation.

Today, I need to get some situating done. Pick up an access card. Call Mastin about getting a UCT Internet access.  Begin learning the public transit. Go shopping for extended groceries and supplies (Richard is assembling a list.) I also want to visit Center City to get a dose of what this place is like.

Last night I woke in the middle of the night with an idea for this study of multilingual literacy training and teaching. The metaphor that came to mind is the grafted child. Gail Canella has a wonderful book on different metaphors that adults use when reasoning about childhoods. In it she details several metaphors for childhood. There is that “academic child,” needing and wanting instruction, the “wild child,” waiting to be tamed by the adult, etc. I remember there are four metaphors but can only call up these two.  In terms of the grafted child today while waiting to be vetted at UCT, I wrote:

(Subsequently) titled The Role of Teachers’ Linguistic Knowledge in Literacy Interventions.

There are different kinds of grafting. To what extent do these differentiated methods apply to language teaching and learning (metaphorically)? Notch binding, bud grafting, air layering. [return to these after a look at plant book].

When using Halliday model for language, must take into account the social structures that exist to make meaning (affordances). The intent, the illocutionary intent, exists in “mother-tongue.” The target for the expression of the intent is in an acquired, or second language, so the “grafted child” must put together the first level message, translate into the second, the target discourse, and do so in such a way that is sensitive enough to deploy appropriate pragmatics in order to frame the message for the receiver.

If the goal is making a sandwich, there objects to manipulate, something to do. When the thing to do is manipulate language, it reverses the situation that the grafted child has regularly encountered outside of school settings. For sandwich example, there is the knife, the bread, the peanut butter, and action routines that use those objects. In school, learning literacy, “vocabulary” are decontextualized, and the goal becomes learning the words/language bits, and not making the sandwich.

In contrast, learning the language while doing the task, risks conflating the acquired ability of making a sandwich with the talk that accompanies it. From a literacy learning perspective, acquiring literacy requires the learner to develop metacognitive knowledge about literacy: to talk about the acts of reading and writing. Metacognitive knowledge necessitates decontextualized understanding of literacy, awareness that literacy and language are happening while making the sandwich. The mentor steps out of modeling the doing in order to say “The word is peanut butter. You can see it has two parts, one for peanut and one for butter.” > “Peanut has two sound bits, pea- and nut.” > “Peanut starts with /p/.” > “/p/ is written with the letter p.” And of course each of these instructional choices has specific vocabulary that can be used to label a completed process (viz. compound word, syllable, phoneme/sound, and letter, respectively. It is a whole to part scaffolding that ends up at letter-level knowledge and skill. Thus, letters and sounds, phonemes and phonological awareness are available for up take “all at once,” in context, and at the decision of the scaffolder/mentor/teacher. It is the job of the more knowledgeable expert to know what level of linguistic investigation may lead the reader to productive work that results in keener knowledge about language and literacy processes.

For whole groups, these processes may be modeled through think-alouds, but in order to repair malfunctioning literacy learners, the intervention to get them back on track must be delivered one-to-one. In a first-grade literacy intervention project, based on Clay’s Reading Recovery, Dr. Susan Homan and I were able to stretch the teachers’ intervention delivery to a small group of maximum size three. In effect, the trained teachers were able to deliver and mediate three simultaneous, parallel lessons to three different, but closely matched (in literacy needs) struggling first graders. The lessons had some overlap in that two of the first graders might buddy read while the teacher collected a Running Record on the third. It might also necessitate that one of the children began the lesson with a Running Record rather than a warm-up familiar read. Perhaps only one child was a daily focus of the teacher during the writing segment, with the other two using a dry erase board for the target students’ sentence. The point here is that these modifications constituted one of the major modifications to Reading Recovery’s one-to-one tutorial lessons that were created in USF’s Accelerated Literacy Learning (ALL) program (Homan & King, )

But back to the point here, this kind of initial literacy instruction requires the scaffolder to be aware of the level of the level of learners’ sophistication with code, level of inquiry in linguistics, and which as aspect is breaking down for the learner. Here it is apparent to me that my thinking automatically goes to the struggling learner. What can be done to intervene when it isn’t going right? In the US, current responses to this legitimate question are framed in terms of programmatic interventions, and differentiated by the amount of time the learner spends in the program. I think that we need to consider a very different approach to understanding literacy glitches that occur for struggling students.

My first exposure to this arena was in what I call the “clinical moment” in the history of reading (King & Stahl, 2011). Reading teachers were to diagnose what was wrong with disabled readers, and design remediation. [Do you know how many of the words in the preceding sentence require quotes, italics, or some indication that they are vocabulary for professional literacy events (Heath) that are no longer held to be best practices?] The point here is that the reading cultural milieu, replete its own literacy habitus, offered certain kinds of affordances for working with the struggling readers it helped to create. Reading was enamored of the Medical Community’s Scientism, and modeled reading and its work after clinical discourses. That meant that etiology of a reading problem was located on the student, and then fixed. Weiner & Cromer delineated this paradigm in the Harvard Educational Review in the late 1960’s. The first break that I experienced in this happened in the early seventies when I learned about both Language Experience Approach (LEA) (Stauffer, Veatch, van Allen) and Reading Miscue Analysis (RMI) (Goodman & Burke) in a MA in Reading at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. To be sure, I also experienced much medical, clinical training in courses that were (in) appropriately called Reading Diagnosis and Reading Clinic. But changes in the way reading and its instruction were conceptualized were in the wind.

Language Experience Approach disrupted the clinical moment by moving the focus from the disability to the unique experiences, motivations, and desires of the learner. When struggling readers learn from dictating and decoding their own stories about what is important to them, a very different approach to learning literacy processes comes into play. It is again, whole to part. And the direction or path from whole to part is formulated by the teacher with the reader’s unique linguistic competence/performance mapping.

Reading Miscue Analysis was an approach that allowed trained teachers to systematically analyze readers’ deviations from text. But in order to effectively use RMI, teachers must first have internalized a linguistic approach to a cognitive modeling of literacy processes. This is why this approach was labeled a psycholinguistic approach (Weaver). Using the analytic charts that the RMI provided, teachers considered graphophonics, syntax, and semantics, from both paradigmatic and syntagmatic perspectives. In addition to immediate miscue analysis that used the three cueing systems (meaning, syntax, and grapho-phonics) readers were asked to provide a free recall of the passages they read. The recall generated was evaluated by the teacher for its inclusion, relative to the source text, of key propositions. Follow-up probes provided for assisted recall of any missing key content from the passages. A combination of analysis from multiple data sources allowed teachers a linguistic basis for their interventions. In deference and criticism to both of these innovations, I had no idea how to use them diagnostically when I initially “learned” how to work the procedures.

And that leads me to the point about these linguistically-based interventions for struggling readers:  they are complex, multi-factored teaching interventions. They require thoroughly trained teachers with both broad and deep functional knowledge of how linguistics works as a model for understanding literacy work. From my current perspective, re-mediating literacy requires that we rescale literacy as a linguistic detective story to find what part of the system is not working. My understanding here is highly influenced by a year-long sabbatical I took while a faculty member at Texas Woman’s University. The purpose of this sabbatical was to take training to become a Teacher Leader in Reading Recovery. Most Teacher Leaders are salaried school district people who work at the district-level, or building-level. The job that Teacher Leaders are training for is to train and manage the Reading Recovery program at a school district and train Reading Recovery teachers, who will work with struggling first grade readers.  Teacher Leaders each take 18 post-masters graduate course work over the course of the academic year. This I did. But since I was not employed by a school district, I was free to focus on the more theoretical aspects of the training (in contrast with the managerial competencies). 

The training site that I participated in (five days each week at a school and one full day in coursework, and one additional evening of training course observation and apprenticeship), was the first outside of Ohio State University. My trainer was Dr. Billie Askew, who was trained as a Teacher Leader Trainer (one who trains Teacher Leaders), at OSU, and was the first trainer to work off-site from OSU.  We trained in Richardson, Texas with a university graduate course credit affiliation with Texas Woman’s University. The bulk of the year long training for both teachers and trainers of teachers was to view beginning reading from a psycholinguistic perspective. Later, when, with Dr. Susan Homan,  I cloned Reading Recovery in an identical program called Accelerated Literacy Learning (ALL), I also taught teachers and trainers the following information:

Look at reading work of young children as a match/mismatch with the source texts. Conceptualize deviations from the source text (miscues, not mistakes) in terms of :

Cue Systems            Visual information            “looks right”                                     grapho-phonic

Language Structure            “sounds right”                        syntax

Meaning                        “makes sense”                        semantics/context 

In addition to the linguistic cueing systems is the teachers’ awareness that they are trying to create a “self improving system” (Clay) in the young struggling readers. This intent means that teachers work from a scaffolding stance in their support of the readers’ uptake of the linguistic cues available to them (Vygotsky; Wood, Bruner & Ross). Teachers never do for a reader what the reader can do for self. In addition to teaching first graders to know about linguistic cueing systems, teachers also embed strategic approaches to problem solving with text. This is where the self improving system comes into play. First a bit about the strategies and then the linguistic content upon which they are based.

It is safe to say that a fist level of knowledge for the potential reader is the alphabet, let names and their possible sounds. However, it is not necessary that early readers have the alphabet intact before they start learning to read. From a Halliday perspective, all of the parts are available in the immediate task context. It is the choice of focus that instantiates a learning goal.  So while teachers may be modeling and directly teaching letter and sound knowledge, they are doing so within an overlay of strategy modeling and direct instruction. Some of these strategies are:

Early Strategies (Book, Print as objects)

Locating: using fingers to point and frame particular text

Direction: Left to right, top to bottom

Matching: demonstrating one-to-one correspondence between the number of words                        said and the number of words printed

Book handling: book held in an efficient manner, page turning is proficient

Print and pictures carry the message: read pictures visually, read traditional text             graphophonically.

Later Strategies (linguistic analysis of print)

Self-monitoring: using the three cue systems to see if the reading work is going in a             productive way.

Self-Checking: a general use of cueing systems to support ongoing literacy output

Independence: less a strategy than a contextual framing, but important nonetheless,             as it guides teachers’ choices in how to frame an intended instructional point.

Cross-Checking: using at least two cueing systems simultaneously to validate a             reading output.

Self-Correction: a result of appropriate strategy use.

And given that these two sets of content, linguistic cue systems and reading strategies, are taught holistically, within real text-based interaction, it is the teacher who designs literacy and literacy lessons at the point of need for an emerging reader, a reader who (hopefully) changes rather rapidly in how print is managed. Therefore, what teachers choose is conveyed by what they say to the reader. As an already categorized at-risk learner (a somewhat curious label for a first grader), it is important that the teacher chooses productive paths that lead the learner to literacy. Choosing productively means a focus on the linguistic system that is not being deployed by the reader. For example, an overemphasis on visual (graphophonic) information results in reading performance that is plausible given the configuration of the letters (/l ae m b/ for lamb in North American English). Certainly all of the letters are represented by a possible phoneme in English. Yet, the reader might ask “Hmmm, does that sound like a word in English?” or /l a I p/ for lip, same check). A teacher aware of a student’s over use, or singular use, a graphophonic cued strategy would be moved to suggest using an alternative cue system for support. But what is the most productive way to get the student doing this. Only infrequently is telling a student the best way to go. The collection of prompts and situational understanding of prompt deployment of optimum student growth is called “teacher talk.” Teacher talk is a catch all that aligns a cue system (selected by teacher for focus) with a strategy (selected by teacher for focus). Teacher selection is context and situationally specific, not based on a curriculum guide, but drawn from the teachers’ wealth of knowledge about linguistics, language development, emergent literacy, and learning theory. Teachers can use linked cue systems and strategies to:

            Prompt for students specific strategy use (see above) connected to any of the                                    three or more cue systems (see above).

            Reinforce students’ independent use of strategies

            Correct students nonproductive strategy use.

All the while being mindful that creating the student as an independent user of these strategies is the goal. The teacher becomes the embodied literacy curriculum, the mediating linguistic context through which the emerging reader emerges with literate behavior.

OK, back to settling into Cape Town:  I now have a library pass card, on the way to having Internet access. Shopping today (with Richard, and after a night’s sleep) was much less traumatic. Mastin Prinsloo (Prof. at UCT in literacy) was in today getting ready for a conference in Beijing. So I was able to say hello, and let him know I arrived. Tomorrow, I will shift to University of the Western Cape (UWC) and get set up there. Since it rained in the late afternoon, glad we cut short our Cape Town center city trip. Will do that this weekend. I put my hand in the pool out back at out apt. complex. It is NOT heated. This will require some big motivation to start swimming again. May be exclusively running for exercise for some time. Our cabbie last night from the airport said that Spring begins at the end of August. So it should start warming up soon. R’s foot swelled up last night and it was difficult for him to put pressure on it. But today it was ok, maybe something stemming from flight swelling.