Friday, August 19, 2011
It is intermittently rainy and sunny. Saw Ms. Jacobs regarding keys, cables, Internet, and a TV. Arranging for the basic needs takes some time. I wonder what having a TV will do to our use of time? It has been good to not have the intrusion of the TV screen these last couple of days. I wonder how long we could have held out? Didn’t really even try, surrender to the screen.
Thought about taking the train out to Bellville to UWC and asked Ferozah about how to do this. She was very concerned that I should first call someone and arrange for how to get to the campus. She thought I might connect with someone who would take advantage of me. I asked if Bellville was a particularly dangerous area. I don’t remember her words, but yes, Bellville is not so safe. So be it.
Our bedroom is on the corner of a limited access highway and a main city street. Traffic noise is constant. Today’s rain had made the streets much more talkative. When I woke (or was woken) I listened to the sounds of the traffic. It is hard to what to pay attention to. I started listening to the whistles of a cab director at a bus stop across the street, then to the horns of the cab/vans. They both seemed patterned. There was a variety in the lengths and the sequence of both. Made me wonder if there is a communication pattern in their uses. Yesterday, I watched as the cab director also used his arms, hands generously as he also whistled.
It is later in the day. We now have a small TV on the table. I guess it will not be so bad, as there is nothing that interests me. The programming is not so good. It reminds me of the shows that we watched while caravanning though Australia, only now the shows are in color and we don’t need rabbit ears. Still no Internet, but maybe it will kick in soon, as paper work and notifications have all been done. Rode a first bus today. It was R3.60, or about 50 cents.
I called UWC to see how I might best go about getting there. UWC is in Bellville, about a 30-minute drive to the west of Cape Town. Avril Grovers, the program assistant in Linguistics at UWC suggested that I call Dept. Chair Chris Stroud, as he was at home, near where I am staying. Chris will call on Sunday to set up a time when he will pick me up for the trip to UWC on Monday. Avril again asked when I wanted to make my seminar date. I should bring this up with Chris, to see if there would be interest in the early literacy talk I am working on.
Disrupting literacies with linguistic training.
What have come to be common practice in literacy education is more like educational malpractice. Literacy has been caught out in a conflict of interest. Education is funded by offering its students’ necks on the chopping block. Malpractice because what is being offered in the name of reading education in the United States does little to create thoughtful, skilled readers. Those who do learn to read in schools would likely have learned to do so on their own, as they had been “teacher-proofed” by productive at home literacy experience. Furthermore, these more privileged students continue to receive support for their literacies from continuing parental and family support. The practices of schooling are in many pragmatic ways related to the pragmatics of the home language situation. Both parents and teachers “quiz their kids,” make worth contingent on performance, and are willing to make assessment of their kids with analogous, abstract rubrics. (spelling tests, oral reading accuracy, swim times, and beauty contests). In many ways, these “successful” children surrender their freedoms to adult reconstructions of who the children are thought to be. And these are the ones for whom school and home are thought to beneficial. In contrast are students who are not so well suited to the vicissitudes of classroom life. Kids who come from homes that are not patterned on middle class, US habitus do not do so well in school. The language patterns in reading groups are not so much like those at home. Tag questions, like “OK?” might be considered real questions at first by these linguistically different kids. The impelled self-regulation that is expected of even very young children can be interpreted by linguistically and culturally different children as lack of standards, a time to play it off. And yet, when these children from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (different that is, from an imagined middle class, white language performance) famously and consistently fail, educators at the top of the heap fob it off as lack of persistence, difference in value for education, lack of parental support – anything but the truth – that we have failed much of our clientele.
This is not to say that there are not caring and sometimes highly skilled and knowledgeable teachers in the classrooms. But something interesting and troubling is happening to those teachers and their classrooms. Since No Child Left Behind, an act that de-professionalizes teachers, removes their control, and redirects federal funding to insider cronies, struggling readers at all levels must receive a mandated intervention that is based on rote learning of word attack. This despite the fact that that literacy researcher Paris has marked word analysis as a “constrained” skill, or one with an early ceiling, or lack of room for growth and improvement. The upshot of these programmatic interventions is that struggling readers in the eighth grade are being taught initial grapheme/phoneme correspondence, taught phonemic segmentation and blending. The “differentiation” that is mandated by the NCLB is accommodated by varying the amount of time students are subjected to their prescribed intervention. Another technique is to train teachers to cause students to read accurately and rapidly with the mistaken belief that students are increasing their fluency. Both of these techniques fail to address the needs of older readers, who for the most part have mastered sound/symbol correspondences. Malfeasance.
A conflict of interest emerges when you learn that the testing for all of the states for all of the kids is based on the Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy Scale or DIBELS. The creators of DIBELS are currently under investigation for improper profiting from recommending the use of DIBELS as consultants for the US DOE. The DIBELS measures sound symbol correspondence, oral reading fluency. Students are orfed at least once per week, often daily. Oral reading fluency is a measure of number of words read accurately from standardized probe passages, minus the number of errors committed. Contrary to the title of the procedure, the ORF does not measure fluency. According to noted researchers such as Professor Risinki, fluency must also include consideration of intonation, prosodics, and other suprasegmentals that are indicative of meaningful language processing. Speed reading, my metaphor for ORF, may in fact be at odds with many of the more semantic features of oral reading. Further, without any attention to the creation of comprehension, a subtle message is created that reading does not entail any development of meaning. While the correct identification may be facilitated by the largely non aware sub-processing that is related to meaning development, students are never asked to verbalize what they think about these ORF passages.
Now a massive accountability project has grown up around NCLB. Individual school must show that their students are gaining on state mandated testing in reading (as well as math, and science). These results are disaggregated by race, gender, and learning disabilities. Schools are graded A – F on the performance of their students. But schools must also gain according to what is called Annual Yearly Progress, or AYP. AYP status is adjudged according to gains (or the lack of them) in individual cells of students. For example, Black, Hispanic, White, and disability each of 16 cells of differentiation must make gains or the school does not make AYP. After three years of failure to make AYP one of several remedies can occur. The school can be restaffed with a new principal, new teachers, or both. Parents of students have the right to choose a new, higher performing school, usually charters, or the state can take over the running of the school. The cheapest solution is to shuffle principals. That is what we have been doing. No new principals in a county-wide system, just move them. Of course, when a principal moves, he or she can take as many loyal staff members as he or she chooses. In all this movement or shuffle, the only ones who are not usually moving are the kids, especially the poor ones. While the state provide a voucher for the students who choose a charter school, it is seldom enough to cover the cost of tuition at the good schools. Therefore, parents are responsible for kicking in the rest. This public money for private school vouchers is a project from the Bush administration. It is not surprising therefore to read Bracey’s report that the inner circle of Bush’s former advisors, as well as large campaign downers have large stakes in the private, profit making charter school business. This is selling children cheaply.
From a literacy perspective, what is wrong is legion, but permit me a modest proposal.
(Subsequently) titled The Role of Teachers’ Linguistic Knowledge in Literacy Interventions.
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 addition to Halliday’s environmentally-induced functionalism, I want to reclaim the psycholinguistics that emerged from Chomsky’s formalism. I do realize that Chomsky and his minimalist project are both under serious questioning from the likes of linguists like Pietre Seuren and philosophers like Michael Devitt. Yet, education is still operating from a generative-transformational model, so cognitive framing is still not a palimpsest. Well, actually it is, but none of us know it. Secondly, even if I am consciously operating from externalist linguistic stance, I do not preclude a mediating cognitive interface. It is the same difference, I think, that occurred when Chomsky reviewed Skinner’s Verbal Performance. And finally, the only practices in US literacy education culture that are actively using a structural functionalist paradigm are those of us who work in what are being called the new literacies, based on the theorizing of the New London Group. So, using psycholinguistics may not be too much of an anachronism.
The story starts with a first-grade literacy intervention project, based on Clay’s Reading Recovery, in which 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, the teacher to be aware of the level of the level of learners’ sophistication with code, level of inquiry in linguistics, and which 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? As I mentioned in my blood letting prologue, 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 teaching arena where teachers fix broken kids 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. Usually constitutional blocks were hypothesized, and training was undertaken to the extent that Carl Doman had teenagers crawling around the clinic to make up for reading deficits. Weiner & Cromer delineated this medicalized paradigm for reading disorders in the Harvard Educational Review in the late 1960’s. The first break that I experienced in this delivery of medicalized services for broken readers 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. After all, the long running soap opera, General Hospital attests to the fact that we either want to be a doctor or marry one, well in the case of GH, maybe it is just to sleep with one. But I digress. 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. In many ways, Stauffer early work with LEA is consistent with Halliday’s structural functionalism. 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. Literacy learning is also predicated on the available affordances of the dictated story. There is no end to the kinds of instruction that can come from writing out a dictated story. LEA is what is happening on the outside.
Reading Miscue Analysis (RMI) was literacy modeling based on Chomsky’s generative transformational grammar. RMI 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, and the interventions were likely based on manipulating graphophonics (word families, elkonian boxes for phonemic segmentation and blending), syntax (Kellogg-Hunt’s, Combs’ sentence combining), and semantics (use of cloze, prediction/confirmation). 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 first level of knowledge for the potential reader is the alphabet, letter 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 Hallidayan 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, and attempting to bring it back into play so that the cue systems are being used reflexively, for balance. 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 eclusive use, of a graphophonic cued strategy would be moved to suggest using an alternative cue system for support. I teacher might say to a overly-graphophonic decoder “That certainly looks right, but does that sound like a word you know?” 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 for optimal 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 situation 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.
You can readily see, I think, that the teacher is directly teaching the very processes that the reader needs to add to his or her repertoire as a functioning reader.
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. Right now we have 4 undergraduate courses that are intended to ready teachers for their work with teaching reading. None of them is teaching what I have outlined here today. Either I go back to teaching undergraduate methods, or I keep my mouth shut.
