Although it is some years
since I have worked clinically, my initial qualification was in Speech Language
Pathology and I have always had a particular interest in, and passion for
language – both spoken and written. I love spending time with infants and toddlers
and observing their amazing emergent grasp of the linguistic code – surely one of
the greatest wonders of being human. My research activities in recent years
have had a strong focus on “vulnerable” learners and I’ve had the enormous privilege
of spending a lot of time in primary schools, interacting with teachers about
(in particular) the teaching of reading in the early years.
A large focus of the
presentations I give to teachers is explaining the linguistic basis of
learning to read. This entails discussion of the fact that unlike learning to
talk and understand, learning to read and write is biologically “unnatural” – i.e.
humans are pre-programmed in an evolutionary sense for the former, but not the
latter. This concept is often quite a revelation for teachers and I see many “ah
hah!” moments in the course of these discussions.
I often use an analogy of a child having to “cross a bridge” in the early years of
school – from talking and listening on one side, to reading and writing on the
other. If I’m feeling particularly prosaic on a given day, I might mention the
crocodile-infested waters underneath….
While some fortunate
children will metaphorically “skip” across the bridge and suddenly find
themselves on the other side without having had much awareness that they were
even on a bridge, many will find the experience one that requires conscious
focus, guidance and support from adults, and carefully-paced milestones. Complex genetic and social factors no doubt account for such variability, but classrooms need to cater to all children, not just the very able.
Proponents of Whole Language-based approaches to the teaching of reading argue that reading is as
natural as talking, and so simply requires immersion in text-rich experiences,
in order for children to find themselves on the far side of the bridge.
This argument fails a number
of reality checks however, the first of which is that children’s acquisition of
oral language, while strongly “pre-programmed” in an evolutionary sense, still
requires enormous environmental input and interaction, in the form of exposure,
simplification, repetition, imitation, expansions, recasts, and so on. There is
something of a “dose-response” relationship between early language exposure and
verbal skills in early childhood, such that this is a phenomenon that sits on a
social gradient (see references below).
Secondly, decades of cognitive
psychology research tells us that the acquisition of skilled reading draws
heavily on the child’s psycholinguistic knowledge about how their
language works. Now of course we can’t sit down and interview a four-year old
about her psycholinguistic knowledge, but we can extrapolate important
information from spontaneous language samples and from the 1:1 administration
of formal language measures.
By “psycholinguistic
knowledge”, we are referring to the child’s grasp of grammatical rules (e.g. in
English, the fact that in order to make a noun plural, we generally add an “s”),
knowledge of narrative structure (the logical and sequential way in which experiences
are organised and presented for the benefit of a listener), vocabulary use and
comprehension, and knowledge of grammatical conventions to link words and
express increasingly complex (e.g. embedded) ideas. Knowledge of the sound
system (phonology / phonemic awareness) is critical, as it is the means by which
a child can segment and blend sounds to manipulate and integrate word
components. Finally, knowledge of pragmatics teaches the child the subtle and
sometimes confusing social conventions around how language is used in a variety
of communicative contexts. We typically
learn many of these rules through the process of breaking them, and then receiving
some kind of corrective input from a nearby adult, such as a parent or teacher.
Bear in mind too that all of
these psycholinguistic milestones need to be mastered in both the receptive
(comprehension) and expressive (spoken) modalities. Further, children need
to master the understanding and use of literal language as well as figurative,
or idiomatic language. Everyday communication would be quite boring if we
only ever said exactly what we mean. Instead, we make our exchanges more
interesting and entertaining (but often more confusing!) by using linguistic devices
such as metaphor, sarcasm, and humour.
As children's grasp of oral language develops, they acquire the ability to think and talk about language and how it works, i.e., metalinguisitic abilities, and these can then be drawn on in the early years classroom and in everyday life, e.g. to explain why a joke is funny.
Oral language, then, is one of those deceptively complex processes that by virtue of its pervasive presence in our lives can appear simple, or even inconsequential, as a developmental achievement.
Oral language, then, is one of those deceptively complex processes that by virtue of its pervasive presence in our lives can appear simple, or even inconsequential, as a developmental achievement.
It is neither.
So when educators argue the
virtues of Whole Language as a reading instruction approach, they are
conveniently lumping together a raft of linguistic microskills that the child
is (a) still acquiring and refining and (b) needs to draw on in order to cross the
bridge from talking and listening on this side, to reading and writing on the
other. To the untrained eye, however these skills are not observable or accessible.
The fact that “Whole Language”
has the word “language” in its name is both unfortunate and misleading, because
learning to read IS a linguistic task, but Whole Language does not deliver, unpack, decipher and value-add the linguistic goods that all children
need to acquire in order to learn to read. The fact that some (fortunate)
children will learn to read in Whole Language classrooms simply attests to the enormous
variability that teachers in early years settings need to address.
My driving motivation is to provide
all children with access to the life-changing opportunities that await their
arrival on the other side of the bridge. I'm sure this is the driving motivation of all who are invested in early years education, however examination of the research evidence shows uneven results.
That Whole Language is an approach that fosters passion about children's literature is laudable. However, direct instruction by teachers who understand the psycholinguistic properties of the language of instruction is key
to shepherding more children to the other side of the reading bridge, safe from those crocodile-jaws of early academic failure.
References
Hart, B. & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful
Differences in Everyday Parenting and Intellectual Development in Young
American Children. Baltimore: Brookes.
Hoff, E. (2003).
The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early
vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development (74), 1368-1378.
Locke, A., Ginsborg, J. & Peers, I.
(2002). Development and disadvantage: Implications for the early years and
beyond. International Journal of Language
and Communication Disorders, 37, 3-15.
Weisleder, A. & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: Early language
experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological
Science, 24(11), 2143-2152.
(C) Pamela Snow 2014
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