In the
context of early years reading instruction, one of the most helpful entry-points
for understanding the difference between oral language and written language is
the distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary skills,
as articulated in the work of US (University of Missouri) evolutionary
psychologist, Professor
David Geary.
Geary has collaborated with Dr
Dan Berch on what is known as “an evolutionarily informed theory” which holds
that ‘Folk domains represent universal forms of knowledge and competencies that
emerge from a combination of inherent cognitive biases and evolutionarily
expectant experiences’ (Geary
& Berch, 2016, p. 219).
By folk domains, Geary and Berch mean those
knowledge and skill sets that humans have an evolved, and hence biologically
primary advantage for developing. These include social domains such
as recognition of the meaning behind each other’s facial expressions (e.g.,
friendly or hostile), the development of oral language (expressive and
receptive verbal skills), the emergence of theory of mind*, and ecological
domains such as folk biology and folk physics, i.e., our “commonsense”
understandings, acquired early in life, about how the world around us works. An
example of folk biology is the inherent understanding that parents are older
than their children. Folk physics on the other hand, takes in concepts such as
gravity, and the inability of humans to fly unassisted.
Geary and Berch explained that biologically primary
skills have assisted humans to hone capacities that support vital physical and
social survival in groups – hence the nod to human evolution in the name of the
theory.
So - this is a theory that asks us to think about
what knowledge and skills we might expect children to absorb or “intuit”
through everyday life experiences “in the village”, as opposed to the knowledge
and skills that they can learn, if appropriate instructional experiences
are provided. Here we might think of playing a musical instrument, learning how
to play chess, and of course, the icing on the life-trajectory cake…..learning
to read, and then to write.
In his commentary on Geary’s work and its
applications to education, David
Didau (2017) summed up its significance for educators this way:
If it’s a primary adaptation, then maybe we don’t need
to teach it at all as children will have an innate ability to pick it up from
their environments. That said, maybe we do need to make sure that children’s
environments are conducive to acquiring the folk knowledge we all take for
granted.
As can be seen, a close read of Didau’s words
highlights that there may need to be some qualifications to this conceptual
framework. While I think the biologically primary-biologically secondary
distinction is profoundly important as a macro lens on education, I also think
there are some notable caveats to bear in mind.
I
have written previously that “. . .
although oral language development is biologically primary and ‘natural’, it
is by no means ‘set and forget’”. This is because a range of biological, ecological
and circumstantial factors come into play in children’s lives that result in
them experiencing different home language and literacy environments in the
preschool years, and different instructional environments in the school years.
We have known for decades that there is a social gradient, for example, that
impacts the quality and quantity of language exposure children experience in
the preschool years (see
here for references). Language development is not configured to succeed
without adult input. Adults (parents and teachers in particular) invest
considerable time into encouraging and supporting the development of connected
discourse skills (especially conversation and narrative genres in the early
years) through repeated serve-and-return interactions across the day, real-time
modelling, and expansions and elaborations as part of everyday feedback and
encouragement. Oral language is clever, but it doesn't get there on its own.
I often make the observation when I present
professional learning, that oral language is a paradox. It is both
biologically primary and highly fragile. Certain neurodevelopmental
disorders (otherwise known as forms of neurodiversity - sometimes diagnosed,
sometimes not) impact on children’s oral language development, notably
developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various forms of
syndromal and non-syndromal intellectual disability, to name a few.
It’s often said that
walking and oral language are both biologically primary, which they are.
BUT - by age 4 there’s large differences between children with respect to their oral language
skills and few with respect to their walking skills. They are not analogous.
Epidemiological research carried out by Professor
Courtenay Norbury and her team in the UK tells us that we should expect two
children in every class of 30 to meet diagnostic criteria for Language Disorder/Developmental Language Disorder
(DLD) on formal assessment at school entry. What we should not assume,
however, is that the remaining 28 are flying, unencumbered with respect to
their oral language skills. A significant, but unknown proportion of children
will have weak language skills that may go undetected and/or may be mistaken
for disinterest/poor motivation and/or lack of social skills. Some children’s
language disorder is not identified until they struggle with reading
comprehension, in spite of adequate decoding skills. This 2018
open-access paper by Adlof and Hogan is a recommended read on this and on DLD.
So, this capacity for which humans have evolved a
special evolutionary advantage is not quite as self-sufficient as it is
sometimes made out to be.
Nowhere is this lack of self-sufficiency more
evident, in fact, than in the expansion of children’s vocabulary beyond
everyday so-called “Tier 1” words, to the other side of what the late Dr
David Corson described as the “lexical bar”, to the higher-order,
more literate language that is needed for academic success. Corson observed
that (my emphasis):
To look at the impact that students’ life histories
have on their learning and use of academic English words, one starting point is
the commonplace fact that the vocabulary of English falls into two very
different categories. (There is a)….. striking incompatibility between
Anglo-Saxon and Graeco-Latin elements in English: ‘the familiar
homely-sounding and typically very short words’ that we learn very early in
life and use for most everyday purposes and ‘the more learned, foreign
sounding and characteristically rather long words’ (p. 138)” [that are used
for academic purposes].
Corson was, of course, referring to the categories of
words that we now commonly describe as Tier 2 (relatively common but less so
than Tier 1) literate language used by educated citizens, and Tier 3 words,
which are subject-specific and only infrequently arise in decontextualised
ways, for example words such as enzyme, catalyse, rhomboid, and isthmus.
Readers are referred to the work of Isabel
Beck, Margaret McKeown and Linda Kucan for a more detailed consideration of
tiers of vocabulary and how to teach across them.
Corson’s reflection provides an important “yes,
but” to the cut and dried idea of oral language being biologically primary.
This maxim holds to the extent that under typical circumstances, children will
acquire a generous store of Tier 1 words, with which they can navigate the
business of everyday life, in the here and now with those around them. Without
exposure to impactful classroom instruction, however, most children are not
going to experience enough of the literate language that authors use, to get
across Corson’s lexical bar, as users and consumers of more sophisticated language.
This exposure needs to occur both through classroom-based vocabulary teaching and
through children’s own reading. The latter of course forms a compelling
argument for impactful early reading instruction, so this is not left to chance
and a never-ending game of catch-up for all concerned.
Interestingly, there are also some “yes but”
scenarios in play on the biologically secondary side of the ledger, with
respect to children learning to read. These are borne out in Nancy Young’s
Ladder of Reading and Writing infographic (see below), which represents the
fact that a small percentage of students (5-10% in the darker green shaded area)
are successful with seemingly little to no formal reading instruction. They appear
to skip across the metaphorical bridge from biologically primary (oral
language) to biologically secondary (reading) skills on the strength of a positive
alignment between genetic endowment and preschool language and literacy
experiences, followed by a compounding Matthew
Effect on school entry. A further 35-40% (those in the paler green zone) seem
to succeed at school, regardless of where the reading pedagogy they experience
sits on a continuum of explicitness (see
here for an open access paper contrasting balanced literacy and structured
literacy teaching).
Reproduced with permission from https://nancyyoung.ca/the-ladder-of-reading-writing/ The existence of these “early adopters” of
biologically secondary skills should not overly surprise us, given that reading
skills, like intelligence and language skills are spread
across a distribution. Reading is probably most accurately conceptualised
as a bio-psycho-social skill – one that draws on genetic influences,
individual temperament/motivation factors, and the nature of the child’s
environment (including the instruction to which they have been exposed). Some children will be very high performers, some will be very low,
and most will clump around the mid-point. This pattern is strongest where a
so-called normal
distribution occurs, but of course a core aim of education is to disrupt
the normal distribution by pushing the entire curve to the right, in a more
peaked (less spread out) pattern. They key thing when considering this
bio-psycho-social framework, though, is the fact that schools cannot
influence children’s genetic endowment. They can, however, influence the
psycho-social domains by teaching reading sub-skills and promoting a strong
sense of self-efficacy as a reader.
What is perhaps not discussed enough, is the
potential value-add for these early adopters, of explicit teaching of spelling
and the incorporation of morphological awareness and knowledge to (a)
promote vocabulary development (especially on the high side of Corson’s lexical
bar, as discussed above) and (b) provide explicit understandings of the ways in
which morphology and spelling interact with each other. Consider for example,
the convention that we double a final consonant in CVC words when we add the
suffix “-ing” (e.g., cup becomes cupping) and we drop word-final
“e” in the same situation (e.g., cable becomes cabling). We could
hope that all strong readers notice and intuit these conventions, which of
course some do, or we could explicitly teach them, as a way of fast-tracking
improved writing. In the same way, we can hope that strong readers intuitively
“notice” that the words construct, destruct, instruct, structure, and obstruct
all have the same (Latin) base “struct”, and make the conceptual leap that it
means “build”. Alternatively, we could invest classroom (instructional)
time into teaching the meanings of the Latin and Greek bases that make up so
much of the literate language over which successful students achieve mastery. In
so doing, we can teach them the generalisable habit of being curious
about word meanings, origins, and connections. In a language with the large and
rich vocabulary we have to work with in English, this would seem like a solid
investment.
Moving down into the red-shaded area of Nancy Young’s
infographic, we see how the other half lives – the 50% of students for whom the
bridge from biologically primary to biologically secondary skills is
experienced as a flimsy rope assembly suspended over rapidly running waters a
long way below. These are the students who truly embody Geary and Berch’s
evolutionarily-informed theory with respect to reading skills. They are
also the 50% who remind us that we cannot build entire education systems around
the good fortunes of half of the population. Doing so is to wilfully sentence
half of the populace to under-achievement and its associated social and
economic baggage across the life-span. Nor, however, should we build entire
education systems exclusively around those for whom the journey is especially
challenging. We must build systems that effectively meet the needs of all,
ensuring that every student makes continuous progress and is extended in their learning,
wherever they are under the curve, and whatever their starting point.
While reading scientists are rightly at pains to
emphasise that, in the words (and indeed book tile) of Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker,
we have a language instinct, (but not a reading instinct),
there are certain adaptations that our brains seem to make once we begin to
learn to read, and these should be understood and capitalised on in early
reading instruction. Right across the proficiency spectrum, we want
children to be cashing in on what Professor David Share described back in the
1990s as the self-teaching
hypothesis. This is especially
important in an orthography such as the one we use in English, where there is
not a reliable two-way 1:1 correspondence between grapheme-phoneme
correspondences (GPCs), and some GPCs occur relatively infrequently. Those
low-frequency, less regular GPCs occur more and more in texts children are
reading beyond their mastery of basic GPCs and fluent reading of decodable
(phonically controlled) texts in the early stages of reading success. Share
cited evidence that the average fifth grader encounters around 10,000 new
words per year, a phenomenon he aptly described as an “orthographic avalanche”.
He argued that only efficient, transferable decoding skills afford children
opportunities for high rates of incidental success in decoding novel GPCs in
printed words. Such success of course contributes to reading
fluency, which is a strong driver of reading comprehension.
You can learn more about Share’s self-teaching
hypothesis at this Five
from Five page. A closely related construct, statistical learning,
is outlined by Joanne
Arciuli in this 2018 open-access paper. She notes (p. 634) that:
Children are given explicit instruction regarding some
of these regularities to assist them when they are beginning to “crack the
code.” Such instruction is vital in the early years of decoding. However, in a
language such as English, which has a deep orthography with many-to-many
mappings between orthography and phonology rather than one-to-one mappings and
complex mappings that depend upon positional and other contextual regularities,
it is not possible to convey explicitly all of the regularities that children
need to know in order to become skilled readers. Thus, it must be assumed that
some regularities are acquired implicitly.
Self-teaching and statistical learning, in turn, are
related to a third contemporary construct in reading science research and
practice: set for variability, otherwise known as mispronunciation
correction. I touched on this in my most
recent blog-post and provided a range of links there to readings and
podcasts for more information. Mispronunciation correction means that we are
guiding students to form hypotheses about possible pronunciations of unfamiliar
GPCs and then supporting them to use this information to test a spoken
(pronounced) approximation against their oral language lexicon and assess its
likely accuracy.
These lines of research and classroom/clinical
practice remind us that reading, while a biologically secondary skill, does not
have to flail around like an upturned tortoise every time an unfamiliar word is
encountered. Under optimal circumstances, it can be resourceful and like a bank
account, earn compounding-interest on its returns over time.
The bottom line then, is that oral language skills
are biologically primary, yet can be vulnerable, and reading skills are biologically
secondary, yet can be resourceful. The challenge (and opportunity) is to
titrate instruction to ensure that a biologically primary skill like oral
language is not taken for granted and is supported to develop beyond the
proximal horizon of Tier 1 words and simple sentence structures. On the flip
side, its biologically secondary cousin, reading skill, should be supported
through high-quality initial instruction to become autonomous and a secret
weapon for ongoing oral language development. This requires a nuanced understanding
on both sides of the biologically primary Vs secondary ledger by teachers and curriculum
leaders.
[*Theory of mind
(ToM) is sometimes mistakenly treated as being synonymous empathy, but that is
not correct. The two are related, but ToM is the understanding that another
person my hold a false belief, by virtue of their application of the
information they have available to them. You can watch a video
demonstrating its features here].
(C) Pamela Snow (2024)
