2 + 2

3 factoids:

• Public schools stopped teaching grammar decades ago because the NCTE believes teaching grammar in isolation does not improve writing. In lieu of explicit instruction, students are expected to acquire their knowledge of grammar via reading and writing. Grammar is "caught, not taught." (Phyllis Davenport)
• Reading comprehension falls apart in the 4th grade. The 4th grade slump was identified and named by Jeanne Chall in the early 1980s. 

• The syntactic complexity of the texts children read increases each year, eventually becoming more complex than anything children hear in conversation. This point is reached in the 4th grade. We have Jeanne Chall to thank for this insight, too.

So, starting in 4th grade children are supposed to learn grammar by reading texts written in a grammatical register they have never heard in conversation and never will hear in conversation. Writing is not talking, no matter how smart your parents are.

And, also starting in 4th grade, children's rate of progress in reading comprehension collapses.

Nobody seems to have noticed the coincidence. The National Reading Panel doesn't talk about syntax, E.D. Hirsch doesn't talk about syntax, and the NCTE is interested only in the question of whether formal instruction in grammar improves writing. Not reading.

No one seems to have asked himself whether it was all those precision diagrams of yore that brought children to the level of syntactical fluency that allowed 4th graders to read McGuffy Readers and 10th graders to read Dickens.

Instead, it's been left to speech-language pathologists to discover the fact that if you want children to read, you had better teach them how to read sentences, not just words.

reform writing (Robert Connors on the Erasure of the Sentence)

Horace Mann on letters and spelling

I came across the original source of Horace Mann's characterization of letters (and words!) as "skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions":

A LECTURE ON THE BEST MODE OF PREPARING AND USING SPELLING-BOOKS
Delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, August, 1841
by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
Common School Journal, Volumes 3-4 | p. 9-16; 25-32

My subject is Spelling-Books, and the manner in which they should be prepared and used for teaching the Alphabet, Orthography, and Pronunciation of the English language. I ought to say, of the English languages, for we have two English languages; one according to which we write, another according to which we speak.

True!

I need not occupy any time, to prove that the ability to spell with uniform correctness, is a rare possession amongst our people. It has not unfrequently been suggested that intelligence in the people is so necessary for the preservation of a republican government, that no person should be allowed to vote who could not both read and write. If, however, the suggestion means that no person should be allowed to vote, but such as could write without failures in spelling, I tremble at the almost universal disfranchisement. Our republic would be changed to an oligarchy at once.

[snip]

The advantages of teaching children, by beginning with whole words, are many. Nothing has to be untaught which has been once well taught. What is to be learned is affiliated to what is already known. The course of the pupil is constantly progressive. The acquisition of the language, even from its elements, becomes an intelligible process. The knowledge of new things is introduced through the knowledge of familiar things. At the age of three or four years, every child has command of a considerable vocabulary consisting of the names of persons, of animals, articles of dress, food, furniture, & c. The sounds of these names are familiar to the ear and to the organs of speech, and the ideas they represent are familiar to the mind. All that remains to be done, therefore, is to lead the eye to a like familiarity with their printed signs. But the alphabet, on the other hand, is wholly foreign to a child's existing knowledge. Having no relation to any thing known, it must be acquired entirely without collateral aids. In learning words, too, the child becomes accustomed to the form of the letters, and this acquaintance will assist him greatly in acquiring the alphabet, when the time for learning that shall arrive. I do not see, indeed, why a child should not learn to read as easily as he learns to talk, if taught in a similar manner.

[snip]

If we would know how to please children, we must know the sources of their pleasure. ... The principal sources are brilliant and variegated colrs, impressive forms, diversified motions, substances that can be lifted and weighed, and all whose dimensions, therefore, can be examined.

[snip]

In regard to all the other sources of pleasure, -- beauty, motion, music, memory, -- the alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness, and, as to signification, wholly void. They are skelton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions; and hence it is no wonder that the children look and feel so deathlike when compelled to face them. .... Now, it is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence, and death, that we compel children to fasten their eyes. To say nothing of the odor and fungousness of spelling-book paper, who can wonder at the energy of repulsion exerted upon quick-minded children by this exercise?

Apparently mimeograph paper sniffing was after Mann's time.

welcome to Kindergarten

CT's experience meeting her daughter's Kindergarten teachers:

Recent anecdote. My daughter is starting kindergarten (part-time) this year, and she and I just met with the kindergarten teachers. When I was talking with one teacher about something, the other quietly (without telling me she was about to do it) tested my child on the kindergarten sight words, which she read off quickly, having been taught to read already with Engelmann's Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

It was funny to see the teachers' faces change when I told them that my child had never done sight words. You'd think sight words were some sort of absolutely indispensable part of learning to read. A good phonetic reader can read most sight words without ever seeing a sight word flashcard; the rest can be taught as they come up in other reading instruction.

Jennie on what parents know

I think most parents have NO CLUE that this is how reading is being taught in the schools. This approach is used even in schools that claim they teach phonics. After all, they do teach some letter-sound correspondences for consonants and vowels, and they do encourage children to use that information when looking at the first letter of a word, as you see this adult doing with the "c" in "cat."

Many parents therefore assume, when their child struggles, that the problem lies within their child.

Until a year ago, I was in the NO CLUE category. Just a couple of years ago I would have looked at this video and thought the mom was using phonics.

Molly on strategies used by adults who can't read

re: the balanced literacy video

About 20 years I ago, I took part in a training program for Literacy Volunteers of America. It was a fairly intense training for volunteers who would be working with illiterate adults. One thing we learned was the coping strategies that illiterate adults use. This video is a great demonstration of those strategies. Figure out the first letter and look at the picture to guess. We are actively teaching children to use the coping strategies of illiterates, rather than teaching them to read. There is something very wrong with the whole process.

what do parents want?

Reading this Brian Mickelthwait post, I was inspired to conduct my own investigation.


whole language products for sale on eBay: 199



balanced literacy products for sale on eBay: 22




look and say products for sale on eBay: 60




phonics products for sale on eBay: 7,260




Of a piece with the observation that nobody ever hires a constructivist tutor.

Brian Mickelthwait explains look-and-say

Not long after teaching me to read, my mother got to know some teachers and found out about the “look-and-say” method for teaching reading, and from then on, whenever education was mentioned, she would complain about this doctrine.

This look-and-say method of “teaching” is to me so absurd that even now I am handicapped when describing it by sheer incredulity.... Instead of looking at letters, you look at entire words, and try to remember what each word, viewed as a single indivisible pattern, says. Look-and-say turns the deciphering of English into a project as daunting as the deciphering of Chinese or Japanese.

To make this daft process easier, you are given incidental clues. A sentence about a pig is shown next to a picture of a pig. If you get stuck at P I G, you guess — guessing being much encouraged — either from the picture or from the face of whoever is reading along with you. Then, while remaining confused about what you just “read” and how you did it, you bash on. The one thing you are not told is that P spells puh, I spells i and G spells guh, which means that P I G spells puh-i-guh pig, and you don’t need to guess about it. The one thing, in other words, that you are not told about, when subjected to the look-and-say method for learning to read is: reading.

On the harm done by "look-and-say": A reaction to Bonnie Macmillan's Why School Children Can't Read (pdf file)

And let us not forget: Thank you Whole Language.

balanced literacy

For some time now, I've wondered exactly what people are actually doing when they teach kids to read via balanced literacy. This video makes clear what "predictable text" is and why knowing the sound of the first letter in a word isn't the same thing as phonics. Watch what happens at the end of the tape (what doesn't happen, I should say) when this little girl encounters the word 'me.'

effect size

Dan Dempsey says:

By Golly .. the insanity just will not stop .. another educational pack of lemmings is ready to follow the "Whole Language" rodents into the sea of ignorance.

Hattie Visible Learning effect sizes:

Phonics = 0.60
Whole Language = 0.06
(1/10 as effective and good for a decade of educational malpractice)

So now we are off to the decade of the twins I trust: "Problem & Project Based Learning"

Nope we don't want any of that effective stuff like Worked Examples, Direct Instruction, or Mastery learning.

Not when Problem Based Learning = 0.15

You know what?

I'm going to start talking about effect size at school board meetings.

Something new and different.

Education Non-Myths

I couldn't resist sharing these maxims from a new blog :
www.incentiveseverywhere.com
whose author I know from a previous book he wrote entitled Power Teaching (it's in the list of books I recommended in a post a few months ago: http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/02/recommended-reading-from-palisadesk.html



What follows is from the "Book of Right", the set of assumptions which will produce learning.

1. Although students come from different backgrounds, and some are much easier to teach than others, what education brings to the student is much more important than what the student brings to education.

2. All subjects are hierarchically arranged by logic and there is a sequence of instruction which must be followed by all but the most exceptional of high-performing students.

3. Reinforcement is a very powerful determinant of student achievement. The main reinforcer in education is the improvement the student sees in his skills. Ill-constructed curricula, the kind found in almost every government school, result in a steady diet of failure for most students.

4. Having a system of education which is not a civil servant bureaucracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for effective education. You can’t do it with such a bureaucracy, but just because you don’t have a bureaucracy doesn’t mean you can do it.

5. Higher order thinking skills are explicitly taught, not fondly hoped for.

6. Methods of teaching are determined by scientific research, not consensus based on experience and sincere belief.

7. Teachers use a curriculum and lesson plans which have been demonstrated to work best and are not expected to create their own.

8. Psychological assessments are used rarely, but assessment of student progress, which means assessment of the effectiveness of teaching, occurs at least daily.

9. Teachers are taught how to teach in detail rather than being expected to apply vague philosophical maundering.

10. Special education is rarely needed because students are taught well on the first go round.

11. If a student does not learn, the blame is not placed on neurological impairment, but on faulty teaching methods.

12. Self-esteem is not taught because it does not have to be.

13. Students are not given "projects" until component skills have been mastered and rarely thereafter.

14. No attention is paid to individual "learning styles" because these hypothetical entities have no effect on learning.

15. Academic success can be measured by reliable and valid standardized tests, although many of these tests are too simple.

16. Students are expected to perform correctly in spelling, writing, reading, and mathematics and it does not stifle creativity.

17. The precepts of Whole Language are not used to teach reading because these precepts are wrong.

18. Students are not expected to create their own reality because this leads to frustration and slow learning.

19. Students are not expected to learn when it is developmentally appropriate but when they are taught.

20. The concept of multiple intelligences is ignored because it has no positive effect on learning.

21. The teacher is a teacher and not a facilitator.

22. The spiral curriculum is not used because things are taught properly the first time.

23. The customer is the parent and the customer must have the economic power to move his child to another teaching situation when unsatisfied.

24. In private education, the cost of education is known. In public education, the cost can never be known because there is no motivation to tell the truth and every motivation not to.

25. The curriculum must be tested on children and provision must be made for mastery learning. Passage of time or exposure does not guarantee learning.

26. Students are not tortured by "creative problem solving" because this is just another crude IQ test and has no value aside from categorizing students yet again. http://incentiveseverywhere.com/2009/10/09/education-non-myths/


I'm not sure I agree that "special education will rarely be needed," because I have observed that students with certain exceptionalities (autism, some LDs, some language impairments) need the same effective instruction but can't benefit from it in an inclusive setting, at least not initially. However, I agree with the general case, that much "special education" is simply ineffective general education, watered down in in a smaller group. As Lloyd Dunne (I think) observed, "It's not special, and it's not education."

All students deserve better.

precise & fluent thoughts

le radical galoisien writes:

For a writing system to express precise and fluent thoughts, it must be dependent on sound -- because that is the basis of communication. Sure there's art and music ... but you can't really communicate fluent and precise ideas with them, only gists. Could you communicate something like Newton's laws of physics to someone who didn't know them based on a picture, or a series of pictures?

That's what I thought!

Thank you!

This may be the aspect of 'balanced literacy' that makes me most crazy: the obsession with 'meaning.' For balanced literacy folk, reading is about extracting meaning from texts. That's if you're lucky; here in my district reading in Kindergarten is now about 'making meaning' from texts. So we are told.

Having Kindergarten children who can't read spend their time extracting meaning from (authentic!) texts is nonsense on stilts. The simple fact is that you cannot extract meaning from text without knowing what the words on the page are, which means knowing the sounds for which the printed words stand.

Spoken language is sound; printed language is a visual representation of sound. It is a translation of an aural medium into a visual medium. Like cued speech.

Thus, your basic 5-year old learning to read does not need to know the 'meaning' of the letters c-a-t. He needs to know the sounds that the letters c-a-t stand for; he needs to know that the letters c-a-t stand for the spoken word kat, or kæt in the IPA spelling.

That's because your basic 5-year old already knows the meaning of 'cat.' Seriously. Both my autistic kids knew what a cat was at age 5. They knew what a cat was at age 2, for god's sake.

What they didn't know was that the letters c-a-t, printed on a page, stood for the spoken word kat. That was the missing knowledge, not 'what is a cat?' or 'what do you make of cats?' or 'what is the author saying about cats?'

(Andrew also had to learn that the spoken word 'cat' stood for the animal. For many years he had severe auditory processing problems, if that is the correct term. I assume he still does. What I don't know - what I'd like to know - is whether he and Jimmy also have some kind of 'core' deficit in language per se. Why can't they talk? Is it because they can't 'hear' & thus can't learn the grammar of the English language the way typical children do, or is it because of .... something worse. I don't know.)

Back on topic: I remember, a couple of years ago, watching an online video of Siegfried Engelmann saying kids should be taught to read words in isolation. (Pretty sure that's what he said.) I remember finding that almost a scandalous statement at the time, and although I was inclined to take on faith anything Siegfried Engelmann said, I experienced a mild failure of nerve contemplating the image of young children reading aloud lists of words in isolation, outside of "connected text." I'd been too long in the public schools not to have had drilled into my very soul the notion that teaching anything in isolation is wicked.

It wasn't until I enlisted in the reading wars that I realized what Engelmann was talking about: he was talking about the fact that printed language is a representation of, or code for, spoken language. Printed words represent spoken words. Not meanings. Kids need to be able to read words fluently strictly from the printed letters on the page, without any context to "help" them. All good readers are able to read words outside of context.

This is not to say that good readers -- fast readers -- don't use context. They do:

Confirming the psychologists and educators who emphasize phonics, mechanistic letter decoding, L, accounts for the lion’s share (62%) of the adult reading rate. This is recognition by parts. Holistic word recognition, W, accounts for only a small fraction (16%) of reading rate. The contextual sentence process, S,^* accounts for 22% of reading rate, on average, but is variable across readers (mean +/- SD= 87630 word/min), which may reflect individual differences in print exposure.

[snip]

Understanding individual differences in reading rate would be invaluable. The breakdown in Table 2 compares the contributions of each process across observers. There is surprisingly little difference in the contributions of each of the 3 processes across our group of 11 normal readers. However, note that observers JS and KT, our fastest readers, also have the highest percent contribution of the S (context) process. This supports the idea that the context process reflects differences in print exposure [19]. Even so, these readers are fast mostly because their L processes are fast.

Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation by Denis G. Pelli*, Katharine A. Tillman

PLOS One August 2007 Issue 8

Fast readers are fast phonetic readers who also use context and word shape.

International Phonetic Association
International Phonetic Alphabet (pdf file)
Thank You, Whole Language at Illinois Loop
Whole Language Lives on by Louisa Moats
Whole Language High Jinks by Louisa Moats

^* "Contextual sentence process" = context, i.e. the meaning of the preceding text. When a fast reader reads the next word (partly) on the basis of the meaning of what he has read thus far, he is using "S." If you're reading a blog post about balanced literacy and you spot an upcoming word that starts with 'ba' you're going to very rapidly read 'balanced' instead of, say, 'ballast.' 

miscue analysis

at D-Ed Reckoning

Invaluable.

Check out this conclusion contained near the end of a 31-page case study of a 5th grade boy's reading:

John’s comprehension at his current fifth grade level is excellent when he is relieved of the task of recognizing words.

what is synthetic phonics?

What is Synthetic Phonics?

• Starts before children are introduced to reading scheme books, before any sight word recognition is established

• Teaches letter sounds very rapidly, explicitly showing children how to sound and blend letters in all positions of words right from the start

• Words are not pronounced for children prior to them

• Sounding and blending is taught in the first few weeks of formal sounding and blending them
schooling


What is Analytic Phonics?

• Children start out by recognising whole words.

• The sounds for the letters of the alphabet are taught in the context of alliterative words, often one week for each letter, e.g. gate, green, girl, glove etc

• Letter sounds are then taught at the end of words

• When letter sounds are taught in the middle of words, CVC words are introduced

• Sounding and blending is introduced when CVC words are taught

• It gradually progresses to teaching blends and digraphs, e.g. clip, coat, fast

What are the benefits of synthetic phonics teaching? (pdf file)
Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson
powerpoint presentation on their Clackmannanshire study:
A seven year study of the effects of synthetic phonics teaching on reading and spelling attainment
and see: the Jim Rose report (UK)
Q&A: synthetic phonics

Skills taught in isolation: a good thing.


preventing the tragedy of content isolation

down and out in New Zealand

The present study was carried out in New Zealand, which follows a predominantly constructivist, whole language approach to reading instruction and intervention in which literacy learning is largely seen as the natural by-product of active mental engagement (Wilkinson, Freebody, & Elkins, 2000). As Stanovich (1994) noted, this instructional approach assumes ‘‘that self-discovery is the most efficacious mode of learning, that most learning can be characterized as ‘natural’ and that cognitive components should never be isolated/fractionated during the learning process’’ (p. 264).

From the assumption that the ability to read evolves naturally and spontaneously out of children’s prereading experiences with ‘‘environmental print’’ (commonly occurring environmental labels accompanied by context or logos, such as the word stop appearing on an octagonally-shaped sign), whole language theorists concluded that literacy teaching should be modelled on first-language acquisition, where the focus is on meaning construction, not the abstract structural units that provide the basis for mapping print onto spoken language. If children are immersed in a print rich environment in which the focus is on the meaning of print, they will readily acquire reading skills, according to this view. Children can be taught what they need to know to learn to read ‘‘as the need arises’’ [ed.: when the child starts school possibly?] through frequent encounters with absorbing reading materials. The focus of this approach, then, is on learning to read by reading....

[snip]

Another key aspect of the constructivist approach to literacy education is the assumption that reading acquisition is primarily a process in which children learn to use multiple cues (syntactic, semantic, visual, graphophonic) to predict [ed.: guess] the next words in text (Snow & Juel, 2005; Tracey & Morrow, 2006; Tunmer & Chapman, 2002). The latest handbook for beginning reading teachers in New Zealand, Effective Literacy Practice in Years 1–4 (Ministry of Education, 2003a), recommends teaching children to identify unfamiliar words in text by encouraging them to use all sources of information (knowledge and experience, semantic sources of information, syntactic sources of information, and visual and graphophonic sources of information) simultaneously in predicting, cross-checking, confirming, and self correcting as they read text (pp. 28–31, 130). [ed.: that sounds efficient]

[snip]

New Zealand has a unified national education system in which almost everything relating to literacy education is controlled centrally by the Ministry of Education, including the setting and monitoring of the national curriculum, the production of beginning reading materials and instructional guides for beginning reading teachers, and the development and implementation of nationwide professional development programs for literacy teachers. Consequently, compared with other countries like the United States, there is considerably less variation in the reading methods and instructional strategies used in New Zealand classrooms.

Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills as an intervention strategy for struggling readers in whole language classrooms Janice F. Ryder1, William E. Tunmer1 and Keith T. Greaney1
Reading and Writing
Volume 21, Number 4 / June, 2008

When kids have trouble learning to read in New Zealand, they are put in Reading Recovery, a one-on one tutoring program that also uses whole language.

Reading Recovery sounds like the approach Michelle Weiner Davis says married people take to dealing with marital problems: if something isn't working, do it again & louder.

today's factoid: Reading Recovery was invented in New Zealand (pdf file).


less is more

In Reading Recovery a teacher teaches one student 30 minutes a day for approximately 12 weeks: 60 lessons in all. Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of Benefits and Costs (pdf file)

In the Ryder study, struggling readers were put in groups of 3s and taught 56 scripted lessons by a teacher's aide:

The intervention programme comprised 56 highly sequenced, semi-scripted lessons in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding strategies delivered to the 12 intervention group children by a teacher aide over a period of 24 weeks during the first three terms of a four-term school year. The children in the intervention group were divided into four groups of three. Each group received four lessons per week that varied between 20 and 30 min in duration, but typically lasted about 25 min.

results:

[T]he intervention group significantly outperformed the control group on measures of phonemic awareness, pseudoword decoding, and context free word recognition ability...

[snip]

The difference in mean reading age between the intervention group children and their matched controls was 9 months for the Burt Test and 14 months for Neale accuracy.

[snip]

Although the intervention group children performed somewhat below average in reading, their scores were clearly within the normal range after two years following the completion of the intervention program.

[snip]

Two-year follow-up data showed that the positive effects of the intervention program were not only maintained but had generalized to word recognition accuracy in text.

All this from groups of 3 taught by teacher's aides.

Of course, it probably would have been even more cost effective just to teach them phonics from the get-go.


Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of Benefits and Costs (pdf file)

bad habits are bad

Learning a habit is different from other kinds of learning: often we are not aware of developing a habit, and we develop it slowly over time. "The process doesn't seem to go in reverse, or else we don't have access to the means to reverse it," Graybiel said.

MIT researcher sheds light on why habits are hard to make and break

This is why you don't want your school using balanced literacy to teach your child to read: you don't want your child developing the habit of relying on "context cues" (i.e. pictures) or "word shapes" in order to decode text.

You want your child to learn to look at the first letter in a word and scan straight through to the final letter -- and to do it fast.

Period.

Bad habits are bad.


and see:

Habits, Rituals and the Evaluative Brain by Ann Graybiel
Annual Review of Neuroscience
Vol. 31: 359-387 (Volume publication date July 2008)
the mix-and-muck-up-the-children method of teaching reading

Is your child a word guesser?

Many of us know that poor reading instruction is often disguised as “balanced literacy” (revisit When Phonics Isn't). Schools like to sell it to parents this way because it sounds safe and well, it's balanced. How bad can it be? Throw in a little phonics and it's all good, right? The balance thing appeals to that nagging danger-of-extremes fear. On some level, balanced literacy sounds reasonable.

When parent-teacher conferences are limited to fifteen minutes a couple of times a year and the school is not open to allowing you watch the teacher teach or bring home the reading materials for careful review, how do you recognize the signs of poor reading instruction? How can you tell whether your child is being or has been taught to read the whole-word way?

Jessie Wise of The Well Trained Mind suggests paying attention to how children read.

Children who read by the whole-word method often did not learn to move their eyes from left to right through words and sentences. If you notice that your child’s eyes are wandering all over the page when he is reading, he is searching for clues to guess words.

So, your child's a word guesser. What can you do about it?

The only cure for word guessing is to go back to phonics.

What can you do to break the guessing habit?

If your child persists in this habit, you may have to sit across from him at a small table where you can see his eyes. This will allow you to move your pencil or finger above the line of print, so you will not get in the way of the child’s vision. You may also want to cut a window out of heavy paper that will reveal only one line at a time. Then, have the child run his finger under each word from left to right, sounding out each word as he comes to it. If a common word is too irregular to be easily sounded out, (such as come or said) tell him that word so that the sentence makes sense.

When the child gets to the end of a line, watch his eyes and make sure they move quickly back to the left, looking for the beginning of the next line rather than searching for “words I know.” Some children may even move their eyes down to the end of the next line. Both of these are common errors used by children who have been taught whole-language techniques. Have the child read out loud to you as long as necessary to make sure he gets into the habit of moving from one line to another.

“It is a tragedy that many school-based reading programs actually encourage guessing as a learning-to-read strategy,” say Jessie Wise and Sara Buffington of The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Reading. You might be surprised to find that your child's school uses a reading program that does precisely that.

You may not even realize there's a problem until your reader hits second, third or fourth grade when books have less pictures and the vocabulary becomes more complex and difficult to guess. The sooner you work to break the guessing habit and teach your child to depend upon a well-stocked phonics toolbox instead, the better for your child.

The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading
Jessie Wise and Sarah Buffington

JessieWise
Well-Trained Mind

French spelling

Ed's translation of Part 4 of Comment en est-on arrivé là?

4. Une orthographe ardue

Pas de chance pour les écoliers français. Notre orthographe est l’une des plus difficiles au monde. Pour une raison bête comme chou. Ce n’est pas parce qu’on entend un son qu’on saura l’écrire (« saint » se prononce comme « ceint », « sein » ou « sain », etc.) Les linguistes parlent de régularité entre les sons et les lettres. D’un pays a l’autre, elle varie du simple au double. Elle est de 97%, par exemple, pour l’espagnol ou l’italien, de 98-99% pour le finlandais ou le danois, mais seulement de 55% pour le français. Sans parler des problèmes d’accord, de lettres qui ne sont pas prononcées. De quoi s’arracher les cheveux. Là où un petit Espagnol mettra quelques mois à maîtriser les bases orthographiques, il faudra des années pour un Français. C’est que, dans beaucoup de pays, l’orthographe s’est simplifiée, « phonetisée », au fil des siècles. En France, non. « Notre langue est très conservatrice », reconnaît le linguiste Alain Bentolila, qui vient de publier « Urgence école : le droit d’apprendre, le devoir de transmettre » (Odile Jacob). Centralisme linguistique, institutionnalisation…Dès le XVII siècle, avec la naissance de l’Académie française, s’instaure le pouvoir du dictionnaire, référence de la langue. « Le français a été crée par des professionnels de l’écrit qui ont voulu faire une orthographe pour l’œil », indique Jean-Pierre Jaffre, linguiste au CNRS. Avec ses rigidités et ses absurdités. Pour la troisième édition du dictionnaire de l’Académie, en 1738, les imprimeurs n’avaient plus assez d’accents, ils ont mélangé les aigus, les graves et les circonflexes, quand ils n’en ont pas tout simplement oublié. Et les écoliers, trois siècles plus tard, continuent d’apprendre consciencieusement la liste des exceptions. D’où le débat, récurrent, sur une simplification de l’orthographe française. Les tentatives sont pour l’instant restées lettre morte. L’ »arrêté de tolérances orthographiques », en 1901, qui nettoyait notamment les règles des accords, n’a jamais été applique. Pas plus que le toilettage de 1990, qui a modifié la graphie d’environ 2 000 mots.Vous ne le savez sans doute pas, mais vous avez le droit d’écrire portemonnaie, naitre, évènement, nénufar et ognon…
N.F.

No luck for French school children. Our spelling is one of the most difficult in the world. For one simple reason: just because we hear a sound doesn’t mean we know how to write it (“saint” is pronounced as “ceint,” “sein” the same as “sain.”). Linguists refer to “transparency” between sounds and letters. From one country to another that transparency varies by a factor of two. For Spanish and Italian, the transparency of sounds and letters is 97%; for Finish and Danish it’s 98-99%. But for French, it’s only 55%. And that’s without taking account of agreement problems [e.g. noun-adjective], with so many letters not pronounced. It’s enough to make you yank out your hair. While it takes a young Spanish student a few months to master the basics of spelling, it takes his French counterpart several years. In many countries, spelling has been simplified, “phoneticized” over the centuries. But not in France. “Our language is very conservative,” explains the linguist Alain Bentolila, who has just published, School Emergency: the Right to Learn, the Duty to Transmit (Odile Jacob). Linguistic centralism, institutionalization: With the birth of the Academic Francaise in the 17th century, we see the beginning of dictionary’s reign as the supreme arbiter of the language. “The French language was created by professionals of the written word who devised a spelling system to please the eye,” says Jean-Pierre Jaffre, a linguist at the CNRS. It’s rigid and absurd. For the 3rd edition of the Academie Francaise’s dictionary, in 1738, the printers didn’t have enough accents, so they mixed up the aigu accents with the grave accents and both with circonflexes—and that’s when they didn’t just forget accents altogether. Three centuries later, school kids continue to conscientiously learn the messy list of exceptions these early printers created. Thus the recurrent debate over simplifying French spelling, though all efforts to do so have remained a dead letter. The 1901 “decree on orthographic tolerance,” designed to cleanse the rules of agreement, was never applied. Just like the language sprucing effort of 1990 that did nonetheless modify the spelling of 2000 words. You doubtless didn’t know it, but you’re allowed to write “portemonnaie,” “naitre” “évènement,” “nénufar” and “ognon”…




Le scandale de l'illetrrisme (nouvel obs: the scandal of illiteracy)
dyslexie, vraiment? ) (nouvel obs: true dyslexia? - whole language in France)
Comment en est-on arrivé là? (nouvel obs: How did we get here?)
French spelling

4 year olds learning to read in 10 to 12 weeks
Why English speaking children can't read

Lucy Calkins on teaching children to write
Becky C on starting at the top

instructional casualties in America
curriculum casualties: figures
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
decline at the top: hidden reading deficits in good students
Rory: I frickin' hate whole language!

thank you, whole language