As one would expect in a career spanning 35 years, I have seen
many changes regarding our understanding of children who struggle to make the
transition to literacy in the first three years of school. When I was an
undergraduate student, the prevailing wisdom was that children who we now
describe as having a developmental
language disorder, should be defined under the label of "childhood
aphasia". In between, we had a longish dalliance with "specific
language impairment", a term that bugged me from the outset, because of my
sense that very few children have "only" an isolated (specific) difficulty
with language, expressively and/or receptively. My clinical experience and my
own research showed that comorbidities with other developmental challenges,
such as neurodevelopmental disorders, emotional/behavioural difficulties, and
learning difficulties, are common.
Happily, in 2017, we do have a
more nuanced understanding of the complex needs of children with developmental
language disorders, and we know (e.g., from the large-scale,
pioneering work of Professor Courtenay Norbury in the UK) that such
children turn up in mainstream classrooms with far greater frequency than
previously thought. These children often go on to have reading difficulties, but do not on their own, account for all of the struggling readers in an early years classroom.
We know that learning to read is
fundamentally a linguistic task. This means that in the early years of
school, children need to "draw down" on the expressive and receptive linguistic
capital they have acquired prior to school entry - across such domains as
phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, knowledge of the alphabetic
principle, vocabulary, syntactic and morphological complexity, world knowledge,
and narrative language abilities - to name a few.
Learning how to read has also been
described as a "biologically unnatural act", or as
"biologically secondary", meaning that it is a human contrivance, for
which the human brain has had to adapt existing neural pathways, as outlined in
the work of Stanislas
Dehaene. It is not, as claimed by pervasively influential advocates of
Whole Language instruction (e.g. Kenneth
Goodman), as natural as learning how to use and understand oral language.
This point is critical in two respects: firstly, such misinformation led a
generation of teacher educators to dismiss decades of cognitive science
research on how children acquire the critical, but unnatural skill of reading.
Secondly, it overlooks the fact that there is wide variability with respect to
the amount
and type of language exposure that children have experienced in the
pre-school years. Oral language may be "natural" but it is also experience-dependent.
As most readers of this blog
will be aware, the recommendations of the Australian 2005 National Inquiry into the
Teaching of Literacy (NITL) emphasised the importance of explicit instruction in early years
classrooms. Recommendation 2 is reproduced in full below
The Committee
recommends that teachers provide systematic, direct and explicit phonics
instruction so that children master the essential alphabetic code-breaking
skills required for foundational reading profiency. Equally, that teachers
provide an integrated approach to reading that supports the development of oral
language, vocabulary, grammar, reading fluency, comprehension and the
literacies of new technologies.
I emphasise here that I am
reproducing this recommendation in full, because I and other speech
pathologists (and educational and developmental psychologists, and indeed many
teachers) position early decoding ability (the skill encompassed by “systematic,
direct and explicit phonics instruction”), within the broader
framework of early oral language competence. I note, however, that
this report does not refer to so-called "Balanced
Literacy", in spite of the fact that selective quote mining is
sometimes used to invent such a position. The NITL (and its cognate reports
in the USA and UK) also did not
refer to multi-cueing
(sometimes referred to as three-cueing), which remains a cornerstone of early
reading instruction in Australian classrooms.
No state or territory in
Australia has formally adopted the recommendations of the NITL, and in many
respects, we have seen some version of business-as-usual in the ensuing 12
years. This is unfortunate at many levels. It not only serves to deprive a
large proportion of children (notably those who start from behind) of the
opportunity to succeed in the transition to literacy (and subsequent academic
engagement), but it has also done nothing to turn around the gaps in teacher knowledge regarding those
aspects of linguistics that are essentials in the teacher tool-kit.
Evidence from overseas and
Australia (see references
here) consistently shows that teachers have inadequate explicit knowledge
of the structural aspects of language, e.g., how to identify and count
morphemes in words, knowing what a schwa vowel is and why this matters to
beginning readers, understanding the difference between a cluster and a
digraph, and knowing how the etymology of English underpins the
semi-transparent nature of English orthography.
It is easy to trivialise such knowledge, but to do so
betrays a superficial understanding of why so many children struggle to learn
to read. We do not trivialise doctors’ knowledge of anatomy and physiology,
with its seemingly isolated units of information that can be simplistically
divorced from the everyday context of a medical condition. Instead, we are all grateful beneficiaries when medical practitioners draw on that knowledge to diagnose and
manage our ailments.
At the same time that this linguistic
knowledge-base on the foundations of reading has been eroded in the teaching
profession, however, it has been steadily built up in the speech pathology
profession, keeping pace with the growing evidence on the language-to-literacy nexus.
It is entirely appropriate and
necessary that speech pathologists have a sound theoretical and practical grasp
of this link, however there are some unintended consequences of the fact that
they do not always find themselves in an inter-disciplinary space in which such
knowledge is shared by teaching colleagues.
Teachers need to be
experts on theories
of how children learn to read, the underlying linguistic processes at work, and
optimal ways of promoting success for a wide range of children. Where teachers
do not have this expert knowledge, there is a risk that children who struggle
to learn to read because of instructional approaches that are insufficiently
explicit and systematic (children Reid
Lyon has referred to as "instructional casualties"), will be
mis-identified as having language-learning difficulties, and referred off for
specialist assessment (e.g., by a speech pathologist). This stands to distance
educational policies and practices from accountability for outcomes, and
bolsters the sometimes noisy, but flawed argument that all that schools need is
more funding for students with disabilities. It is also not clever use of limited clinical resources.
Teachers and speech pathologists
need to have a vast and closely intersecting knowledge of the
language-to-literacy transition. That is not to say they need identical knowledge. Teachers will
be more knowledgeable than speech pathologists on curriculum, and speech
pathologists will be more knowledgeable than teachers on typical and disordered
communication skills. However, they should each expect that they share a detailed
knowledge of how the language-literacy nexus works, and how beginning readers
are best supported.
This requires us to move past the trite accusations of “phonics
only” or “one size fits all” that are sometimes levelled against practitioners
(be they teachers or speech pathologists) who argue that there is a preferred scope
and sequence to be followed in early reading instruction.
In the long-run, we need to
ensure too that speech pathologists' special expertise is maximised in Tiers 2 and 3 (within a Response to
Intervention framework). While I know many speech pathologists and
teachers enjoy productive and collaborative relationships at Tier 1, this may
not be the optimal place to make use of sparse clinical resources. Both
professions (and their educators) need to reflect on how we arrived at this
juncture and consider the best way forward.
When we put our prized
knowledge and intellectual capital out on the proverbial footpath, with a
"please take" sign attached, we should not be surprised when someone
comes past and says "Wow. Are you sure you don't want that?
Because we can really use it in our work".
I’d like to see education
academics rescuing and recycling some of this discarded treasure and making it
readily accessible and available to teachers. This needs to occur in pre-service
education, not just as bolted-on professional learning in the lives of busy
teachers.
Maybe it’s time for everything old to be new again.
(C) Pamela Snow (2017)
