Happy 2019!
It’s 20 years this year since I
published my first paper (with a Psychology Honours student, Eugenie Humber) on the oral language skills of adolescent males in the youth justice system. That experience was associated
with all kinds of academic naiveté on my part, and on reflection, is a good
example of how discovery-based approaches to initial learning can be just as inefficient for adult novices as they are with children and adolescents.
For those of you too young to
remember, 1999 was also notable for the Y2K Bug.
Oh the time, money, and mental resources that we wasted on that!
With my newly-minted PhD and a
newly-created academic appointment in a different university from where I had
undertaken my PhD, I found myself cut adrift from easy access to mentors and
was thrust into that most awful and disempowering (some might even say
dangerous) state of ignorance: not
knowing what I didn’t know. It’s easy, in hindsight, to make a light-hearted
virtue of my sink-or-swim circumstances and to take some satisfaction from the
fact that I did eventually swim (albeit swallowing and spluttering a lot of
water at the same time). But looking back, I can see how the lack of explicit
instruction (or guidelines, if you prefer) to a new academic about the process
of Honours supervision could have brought me, and three Honours students undone
(yes, that’s right, they let me supervise three
Honours students in my very first year as a Level B academic. That’s another
story altogether). Without realising it at the time, I was already learning
something important about learning.
The journey that this first study
heralded for me concerns the vulnerability of a significant proportion of children
before they even enter a school-yard, and the role of education as a means of
off-setting that vulnerability, as far as is humanly possible. It also caused
me to dig deep into the literature on early reading instruction, so that I
could gain a better understanding of the early years of school. I knew, as a
speech-language pathologist (and at that stage, provisionally-registered psychologist), and from my experiences as a parent of primary-school
aged children in the early ‘90s that reading instruction was a contested space.
I really didn’t know just how contested,
nor what lay below the surface of the debate. Those realisations grew as my
immersion in the research deepened, and as my engagement in discussions via platforms
such as Twitter developed (not even thought of in 1999 of course).
My research in the two decades
that have followed that first Honours project, has been (amongst other things)
on the language and literacy skills of young people in custody, those in
out-of-home (foster) care, and those in flexible/alternative education settings.
Obviously, there’s a significant group of students whose life circumstances
mean that they can tick all three boxes, as cross-over between these service silos
is sadly common. I’ve also conducted research on optimal ways to support early
years teachers in promoting early oral language skills and the transition to
literacy. You will find a list of publications here, many of which are open-access (though not as many as I would like).
As one would expect (or at least
hope), I’ve learnt a great deal in the last two decades, some of it a deepening
of subject knowledge on my part, not to mention a more nuanced understanding of
the logistics and other challenges associated with conceptualising, funding,
conducting, and publishing research. I’ve also learnt a great deal about the
sometimes inexplicable forces at work when it comes to translating research evidence
into everyday practice, particularly in education. Coming from a health and
social sciences background, this has involved me running up against some real,
but invisible barriers. I’ll discuss both sets of learnings below.
But first, a point of definitional
clarification: when I refer to “language competence” I am not just referring to
a young person’s expressive language abilities. Sure, they are important – the
size of their spoken vocabulary, their ability to put words together in
syntactically complex sentences, to represent conceptually complex ideas; their
ability to share their experiences via the medium of narrative discourse; their
ability to display socially and culturally appropriate conversational
behaviours, and so on. It is also critically important to consider receptive language abilities – the young
person’s ability to “take in” and understand the language of others. This is particularly
important in the classroom context, where sometimes quite complex verbal
instructions are issued by teachers. Some of this language is idiomatic and
figurative, meaning that the student needs to make a mental leap from a literal
(stated) meaning to a non-literal (implied) meaning. This is particularly necessary
in the case of sarcasm, humour, and implicature.
Sometimes this kind of
non-literal language is used quite unconsciously by teachers, because it is so
much a part of everyday discourse. For example, the teacher who casually
comments “Well you’re making a big effort
today Madison”, but actually means “Madison I think you are capable of much
better work. What’s up?” What fourteen-year old Madison makes of this comment can be anyone’s
guess, because the literal interpretation of the teacher’s comment may or may
not align with how Madison views her effort, or her output, and she may have no
idea that there is a literal, and a non-literal way of interpreting the teacher’s
comment. Sarcasm, even when mild, as in this case, can create a slippery-slope of misunderstanding and confusion between students and teachers.
Similarly, the teacher who tells
seven-year old Harrison “I’d really
rather you didn’t do that”, assuming that Harrison will infer an instruction to stop kicking his
legs against his chair/sharpening his pencil onto the floor/bumping the person
next to him, or whatever it is he is doing at the time. When Harrison makes no
such inference and continues said activity, it’s easy to see how his behaviour
will be called into question, ahead of questions being raised about his
language comprehension. When he continues, the teacher may then tell a confused
Harrison “I told you not to do that”, but
that was not his experience at all. Harrison heard a preference, not an instruction.
Now he looks like a smart-a**e.
What have I gleaned about vulnerable students and the role of
language and literacy success along the way?
- High rates of undiagnosed language disorder are common in
young people in the youth justice system, the
overwhelming majority (~90%) of whom have experienced school suspensions and
exclusions. If we accept the notion of a School-to-Prison pipeline (see below),
it is reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of young people whose
behaviour is problematic at school also have undiagnosed language difficulties,
if not disorders. This has been borne out in a number of published studies, for
example by Clegg et al., 2009,
Ripley and Yuill (2005), and Cohen et al., (1993).
- In the academic version of scissors-paper-rock
(academic achievement; language skills; behavioural self-regulation), language
fares poorly against both academic achievement and behavioural self-regulation
as a focus for the key adults around a child (parents and teachers). We tend to
notice the noticeable, and poor behaviour and low academic achievement are more
noticeable than poor language skills. The problem is that poor language skills
may be the invisible driver of both of the more noticeable factors. Where language disorder
co-exists with behaviour difficulties and/or academic under-achievement, the chances of a formal assessment and
diagnosis by a speech-language pathologist (SLP) are disappointingly slim.
- Suspensions and exclusions
are sometimes necessary, in order to provide safe workplaces for teachers and
other school staff, and safe learning spaces for students. They are sometimes
the circuit-breaker that is needed to give everyone time-out and the chance to
re-set. However, suspensions and exclusions don’t have a good track-record as
tools to improve the educational trajectory of a young person who is seriously
disengaged and/or acting out .
A more “clinical” lens is often needed, to provide an understanding of the
problematic behaviour, and how it can be minimised or managed over time.
- The idea that “behaviour is a form of communication”
is simply a lens through which behaviour can be (re)conceptualised. It is a
particularly important lens for young people with developmental language
disorders, many of whom will not have a diagnosis as such, but will, like Madison
and Harrison in the examples above, simply appear to be “tuned out”,
uncooperative, disinterested, and/or too easily-distracted by what’s going on
around them. Young people with developmental language disorders will also be poor at
“reading the play” in social situations, with their difficulty following social
banter sometimes resulting in misunderstandings and social exclusion. Social
exclusion, in turn, is painful for humans, and we sometimes behave in
dysfunctional ways to overcome it.
- The other group for whom the notion of behaviour as a form of communication is
helpful is children who have experienced trauma in their early lives. Maltreatment (abuse and/or neglect of various
forms) provides children with an over-representation of dysfunctional interpersonal
behaviour experiences and an under-representation of experiences in which
adults are caring, trustworthy, helpful, and supportive. This can create conditions
of hyper-vigilance to threat and expectations that adults are unreliable and
unsafe to be around. Sadly, young people in the child protection system (meaning
that a notification has been substantiated and their home environment lacks the
basics with respect to safety and care) are 12 times more likely than others in the community to be engaged with the youth justice system.
This is not the fault of affected children, but it will play out very vividly
in their everyday classroom behaviour. It’s worth remembering too, that young
people in the child protection and youth justice systems sit at the extreme end
of a dimension of risk and vulnerability. There are many more whose language,
behaviour and emotional self-regulation profiles are compromised, but not sufficiently
to reach threshold for notifications and/or apprehension by police.
- There is, unfortunately a phenomenon
that has been described in the developmental psychology literature as the School-to-Prison Pipeline.
This research resonates with the fact that risk and protective factors sit
across four levels for all children and adolescents: the individual, the family,
the school, and the community. Research on the School-to-Prison Pipeline identifies
characteristics of both high and low-performing schools with respect to preventing
and responding to disruptive behaviour (which is invariably accompanied by low
academic achievement).
Not everyone in education is fond of the fact that there is a literature on the
School-to-Prison Pipeline, but it is disingenuous of any of us to pretend that
these students are masters of their own destinies. They are not. The vast
majority have experienced all forms of maltreatment and are living examples of
the poor job the state does when it steps in as “parent”, either through its child protection or youth justice arms (or both).
This does not mean that I am saying that all students who act up at school have
been victims of maltreatment. However, it does mean that we should consider developmental
influences on the child when we are selecting ways of responding to their
behaviour – because we do have a range of choices from which to select. Some of
these will worsen the behaviour, some will improve it, and some will not make
much difference either way. It’s not always easy to know which is which, and
schools need much better resourcing than is typically currently on offer, in their
endeavours to support such students. Ideally, this means an interdisciplinary
team around the child and strong mentoring and support for teachers. I know
from my experience in working with teachers at postgraduate level about dealing
with mental health problems in the classroom, that teachers are hungry for knowledge
and skills in this space.
- While children don’t
literally die from poor reading instruction in the early years, faring so
poorly in early life that you end up in the youth justice system drastically increases your probability of dying before the age of 21.
Being a youth offender is a serious health issue and one that the whole
community needs to take seriously (we all end up paying, one way or the other).
- Our research on the language
skills of young people in the youth justice system also has implications for restorative justice conferencing, an
approach of which I am cautiously supportive, provided it is implemented with
great care with respect to its verbal demands. Restorative justice conferencing can be
high-stakes in some jurisdictions, so we need to ask whether placing linguistically-compromised
young people in a highly verbal exchange that will be taken into account at
sentencing is always a fair thing. We have written about this here (open access). That said, we need to be
cognisant too, of the often low success rates of punitive responses to young
people’s offending, as opposed to promising evidence in support of diversion away from the clutches of the criminal justice system. Tabloid responses to an issue as complex as youth offending are not helpful,
and research about which young people (and which victims) are likely to benefit
from this approach, is ongoing. As a relatively recent entrant to the youth
justice space, the degree of rigour in many studies about restorative justice
conferencing is pleasing, and makes this a space to watch.
- We should not rely on the youth justice system to back-fill the
years of knowledge and skills that vulnerable young people have missed
out on along the way. Once incarcerated, youth offenders need to deal
with complex mental health and/or substance abuse problems, and may be
mandated by the court to engage in certain therapeutic interventions,
such as sex-offender treatment or anger management programs. This in itself is problematic, because of the verbally-mediated basis of these interventions.
But a few hours a week over three-six months with a remedial reading
specialist will not magically convert a 15 year-old with a reading age
of 7 to a 15 year old with a reading age of 15. Schools, not prisons are where young people need to learn to read.
- Finally, our work (and
that of overseas colleagues) has been well-received by members of the
judiciary, who have been nothing but gracious and humble in acknowledging that the
language used in children’s and magistrates’
courts is typically dense and inaccessible, even to the most skilled
speaker, and can further marginalise young people who may be on the verge of
giving up completely on being part of the social and economic mainstream. I have
spent many hours delivering professional development to members of the
judiciary and would struggle to find a more receptive, self-reflective,
willing-to-change group of stakeholders. This is in spite of the centuries of tradition in which their practice is steeped. They are a breath of fresh air and
make every minute of our research feel worthwhile.
What is the role of early reading instruction in the lives vulnerable children and adolescents?
My research on young people in
contact with youth justice and child protection has inevitably led me to wander
back “upstream” to the education system
and to want to better understand how education can off-set some of the enormous
risks and vulnerabilities some children face. This is particularly important
when we consider the appallingly low rates of literacy among youth offenders and also of their adult counterparts.
In public health parlance, I've wondered many times, how we might build better fences at the top of the cliff, rather than parking more ambulances at the bottom of the cliff. For me, the answer to this always comes back to better reading instruction for all. And no, that does not necessarily mean more money.
Some of my key learnings from
researching in and delivering many hours of professional development in the education
sector are as follows:
1.
Learning how to read is
fundamentally a linguistic task. Children draw on their knowledge of words (their morpho-phonemic structure
and meaning), sentences, cohesion, different discourse genres, direct and
indirect meaning, etc) and their knowledge of the world, in making the transition from the biologically natural
process of talking and listening, to the biologically unnatural process of
reading and writing.
2.
The translation of research
evidence into the hands of classroom teachers is a perplexingly perilous, fraught journey. Much of it never makes it. It's pleasing that many in education recognise the need for the field to take a more robust approach to generating and critiquing evidence, but there is still a way to go on this.
Alongside difficulty translating robust science into classroom
practice, there is a paradoxical express-lane for neuroflapdoodle
to make its way from the thought-bubble factories
that abound around the world, into a classroom near you. The
proliferation of
whacky, pseudo-science in schools (learning styles, coloured lenses,
brain gym, left-brain, right-brain learners and so on) is nothing if not
incredible, as discussed by
Dr Caroline Bowen and me in our 2017 publication, Making Sense of Interventions for Children with Developmental Disorders.
3.
Socio-economic status is important in influencing both early language exposure and risk of engagement in
anti-social activity, but it should not be used to explain away academic
under-achievement by children from disadvantaged families and communities. Teachers
can’t cure poverty (if they could, I am sure they would have done so by now), however
they can select instructional approaches that afford the greatest likelihood of
accelerating the progress of children who start from behind, rather than cementing
their place at the back of life’s queue.
4.
Most research on the cognitive
psychology of how children learn to read is carried out by researchers in disciplines
other than education, and little of it sees the light of day in education
faculties. This may be because education academics lack the content knowledge
and research-appraisal expertise needed in order to be critical consumers of
such research, but this is unlikely to be publicly admitted. Instead, this body
of research is shunned as being “irrelevant”, because reading is a process of “making
meaning” and all that this requires is language-rich classrooms, exposure to
beautiful children’s literature, a bank of sight-words, a collection of predictable, levelled readers, and perhaps most curiously of all, reliance on a rubric that encourages the novice to guess, rather than learn the written code. Imagine teaching children to learn a musical instrument in this back-to-front, inefficient way.
Mention the Simple View of Reading to a group of primary school teachers, and you will most likely be met with expressions of curious "tell me more", but I am yet to encounter teachers who report that they learnt about this model (introduced in the 1980s) in their initial teacher education. If The Simple View of Reading is not the intellectual property of teachers, for heaven's sake, whose intellectual property is it?
5.
There does not appear to
be the same appreciation in education circles, as there is in health, of the
notion of levels of evidence. Just
because you can find one study, somewhere in the last twenty years, that seems
to vaguely support a position that you want to cling on to, does not mean that
you are ticking the evidence-based practice box.
6.
Pre-service teachers don’t
even seem to be informed that there is an ongoing debate about how best to
teach children how to read. They are simply presented with the world view agreed-upon
by the academics in their particular faculty. Imagine a corollary, in which we
don’t tell medical students about ongoing deliberations about how and when to
prescribe antibiotics to children with middle ear infections; or about the fierce
debates concerning the pros and cons of population-level screening for prostate
cancer. It is simply unthinkable that we would withhold from future doctors,
the notion that the state of knowledge about a particular area of practice is
contested and likely to undergo change. However, that is what happens in
education faculties. I have yet to meet a practising teacher who has graduated
since the publication of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy(2005)
and is aware of its existence by any means other than social media. They
typically respond in wide-eyed wonder when I explain it is a publicly accessible
document that calls into question much of what they were taught as gospel in
their initial teacher education. I wonder if that has anything to do with why it's not shared with pre-service teachers?
7.
In addition to the need to strengthen and focus phonics instruction, we have not been placing
enough emphasis on morphology in the
teaching of reading and in extending children’s knowledge of etymology and
relationships between words. This is an important and missed opportunity, but like
all other areas in which reading instruction needs to be strengthened, will
require significant up-skilling in the knowledge and practices of the teaching
workforce.
8. Some in education, attribute the
high rates of low literacy that persist in nations such as Australia to children’s home environments, rather than to their classroom instruction.
This is a particularly pernicious claim, but ironically, we typically don’t see
its inverse being asserted by education academics: that children who succeed academically do so on the
strength of their home environments, not because of good teaching. Classroom
instruction does matter and early career teachers should be encouraged to maximise
their impact by understanding that some approaches work well-enough for around
60% of children, but we can’t afford to be a society in which only 60% of citizens are literate.
Apart from the intellectual canyon that creates in our social and human capital,
those citizens will not find employment in economies that are increasingly
reliant on technology and in which jobs for unskilled workers are disappearing.
Further, Whole Language-based instruction and its various descendants, including
Balanced Literacy unwittingly create thriving industries in educational assessment and support and
remedial education, in many cases for students who are instructional casualties,
rather than having intrinsic barriers to learning such as a developmental
language disorder. This is a shocking waste of human potential and diverts
scarce clinical resources away from the most needy students, who will not catch
up without intensive specialist support.
9.
Cognitive Load Theory is
probably one of the most important theoretical frameworks for teachers, for
guiding their design and delivery of initial instruction and instructional
support to students who are struggling. I strongly recommend a read of the
article at the link above – produced by the NSW Centre Education Statistics and
Evaluation. When teachers understand the basics of information processing,
working memory, short and long-term memory, and cognitive load, they have valuable tools to refine their
instruction, and to cater for the needs of students at different ability levels
within the one classroom.
10. Another oddity I have had to get my head around, in shifting
from health and social sciences to education, is the resistance displayed by
some, to the notion that non-teachers
might have something to contribute to consideration of what goes on in the
classroom. In health, we are accustomed to working in interdisciplinary
teams, and recognise that no one professional has all the answers. I have
(only occasionally) met with push-back when discussing the implications of our
research for either behaviour management or early instruction, though happily
this seems to be less common as time goes by. An analogous situation in
medicine would be a general practitioner rejecting the findings of a
pharmacologist on the side-effects of a medication, on the grounds that the
pharmacologist does not work in a clinical setting (never mind that her
research was conducted in a clinical setting). Everyone in this game needs to
be humble about the challenges and complexities we collectively face in trying
to improve the life chances of all students. That, after all, is the shared endeavour
in which we are engaged.
11. To be very clear, my
criticisms here are not of teachers. I work formally and informally with
both primary and secondary teachers and am invariably struck by their
dedication, intellectual curiosity, and professionalism. I think it’s
unreasonable, however, that teachers have to experience their own painful epiphany
about the low-impact of many of their initial reading instructional practices, and
then undergo years of often expensive re-training and new learning, in order to
learn what they could have been taught the first time round. We’ve known for
decades that Whole Language-based instruction is too hit-and-miss for children
who start from behind
but the ideological fervour that has gone into resisting the translation of cognitive
science evidence into classroom practice would rival that seen in some fundamentalist
religions.
So – these are my musings,
reflections, and learnings, twenty years on. They continue to evolve, as I read
new research and a range of blogs, engage with teachers, parents, and other researchers via social media and
conferences, conduct new research, and interact with government policy makers,
in both youth justice and education.
I am frustrated by what seems
sometimes like glacial progress, but uplifted by the energy and commitment of
those with whom I share this journey.
Whether we are on the same or different
sides of the debate, I have no doubt that better outcomes for children is the
unifying force that drives us all.
I hope that 2019 will be the year in which
the ground shifts under us all, and we honour the by-line of The Reading League,
that when we know better, we do better.
(C) Pamela Snow (2019)
