Early Reading and Writing

The Foundations of Literacy

Ramin Minovi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780815372776
• eBook ISBN: 9781351236522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Originally published in 1976. This book is about the teaching of reading and writing in infant schools around Britain for all parents and teachers. It outlines some schemes, approaches, methods and developments but focuses on the pragmatic application. The acquisition and growth of literacy must be seen in the context of the child's total language development, and this book devotes some space to the before-school experience and how parents can help their children.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Importance of Literacy

‘In asserting that the teaching of reading is essentially a political enterprise, the most obvious question I am asking is, “What is reading good for?” When I ask this question of reading teachers, I am supplied with a wide range of answers.’
NEIL POSTMAN, ‘The Politics of Reading’

Most of us cannot remember being unable to read – being literate is something we take for granted, like eating or walking upstairs. Unfortunately, there are people who have difficulty in walking upstairs, and some who cannot do it at all. Despite the influence of television, we still live in what has been called ‘a print culture’; for an adult in our society to be unable to read is, as we shall see, a crippling handicap. At worst, it has been known to lead to suicide. In London, teachers involved in the Cambridge House scheme give up their own time voluntarily to teach reading to adults in middle age Who are so ashamed of their deficiency that some have concealed it even from their husbands or wives. Recent surveys suggest that standards of literacy are declining for the first time since the setting up of State Education in this country in 1870, and national concern is reflected in the establishment of an investigation into the teaching of reading (see Appendix). Secondary school teachers complain frequently that the basic skills – what used to be known as the three Rs – are not being properly taught in the primary schools, so that 11- and 12-year-olds are arriving at their comprehensive schools or even grammar schools without the foundations for further learning. The NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research) survey of 1970-1 shows a marked drop in the number of very good readers, and an increase in the number of very weak ones. Of course, the question of what is a good or weak reader will crop up again: a good many sidelong glances have already been cast at some of the NFER’S tests.

Whether we accept statistics as the lowest form of lies or not, there is no doubt that serious concern exists for standards of literacy, at least among the general public, and it is not surprising that a scapegoat should be sought. Television is probably blamed most frequently. ‘TV’, runs the argument, ‘erodes reading time, substitutes visual communication for communication via the printed word, keeps kids out of bed too long, and damages eyesight’ Other villains are ‘the general lack of discipline’ in today’s schools; the move away from rote-learning and drills in many infant schools; ita (the initial teaching alphabet); too much time spent on ‘play’ and ‘discovery’ methods of teaching; the unnecessary expansion of the curriculum in primary schools to include history, geography, science, sex, and even French, at the expense of basic skills; the writing of free verse instead of ‘composition’ and spelling; inadequate school buildings and equipment; too much equipment; a shortage of teachers; too many poor teachers; no nursery schools; lack of parental guidance; and the permissive society. Some of these causes are more often blamed than others (the severest critics are parents, employers and other teachers), but the argument does assume that there has been in fact a decline in standards of literacy, and so far not many people have looked further than that.

At the same time there has been a growth in the number of fashionable educational diseases, like ‘dyslexia’ or ‘word-blindness’, and a strong demand, especially from teachers’ organisations, for more State provision in the field of nursery education to offset the pre-school ‘cultural deprivation’ supposed to be prevalent in some social groups. However, we still assume that reading and writing are very important skills which a member of our complex society should possess, although the odd dissident voice occasionally makes itself heard. The American teacher and sociologist Neil Postman, in an article called ‘The Politics of Reading’, suggests that the main reason we teach our future citizens to read and write is that a certain minimum standard of literacy is needed before they can be successfully manipulated: ‘If you cannot read, you cannot be an obedient citizen’ But the answer, surely, is to aim, not merely at the minimum standard needed to read propaganda and advertisements, but at really effective literacy.

The position has been further confused for the layman by the comparatively recent rediscovery by linguists that the primary form of language is not writing, but speech; and the announcement by the American prophet of the mass-media, Marshall McLuhan, that we are moving out of the print era into a new ‘oral culture’. These things have helped to bring about an increase in the amount of attention paid to oral work and development in our classrooms. The logical consequence, according to some ‘experts’, is that literacy will become less important and less emphasis will be placed on learning to read and write, a situation which advertisers, politicians and civil servants should view with extreme pleasure, as long as that dubious figure, the man in the street, can read well enough to be taken in by advertisement, bamboozled by party manifesto or confused by his tax return, but not so well as to read between the lines.

Newspaper editors and advertisers depend frequently on a lack of subtlety on the part of their readers, and often assume (rightly) that their vocabularies will be limited: the choice of ‘simulated’ rather than ‘imitation’ in advertisements selling nylon ‘fur’ coats clearly indicates such an attitude on the part of the advertiser towards his customer. The average citizen of today has to read and fill in more forms than ever before – and frequently has to turn to the civil servant or local government clerk to act as interpreter, a kind of witch-doctor who alone can reveal the secret of the magic symbols. What does ‘date of acquisition of vehicle’ mean on an application form for a road-fund licence? Most of us are familiar with the secret language used by doctors and chemists for prescriptions, and even the well-educated man finds himself in difficulties when faced with the complexities of, for instance, legal language. What, then, is the bewilderment of the man who cannot read and write at all?

It would be easy to make too much of the dangers of mere semi-literacy: reading has other advantages. The printed word in book, magazine and newspaper is still the main source of information for most people in this country, and the printed word is unique in its ability to ‘freeze’ knowledge for scrutiny. The reader, unlike the television viewer or a man listening to a tape-recording, can proceed at his own pace. What is more, if paperback sales are anything to go by, books remain an increasing source of pleasure for a growing reading public; criticism in this area usually concerns itself with the quality of the reading matter. The front page of, for example, the Daily Telegragh is said to require a Reading Age of only 13. Even children are remarkably adept at sensing the true meaning behind words in speech: we all know when politeness cloaks dislike, anger or spite, and we can usually recognise sarcasm or irony; but adults too are much less clever at discerning the meaning which may underlie printed words, and may wrongly take them at face value. What the teacher is ultimately aiming at is producing an effective reader, one with a good vocabulary, an appreciation of the subtleties of language, able to read between the lines and see the half-truth behind the apparent honesty, the deeper experience only hinted at in the form of words. She is also concerned with encouraging the enjoyment of reading, both for its own sake and also because most teachers have come to believe that the reading of literature is an aid to the development of the child’s personality and identity. Access to other people’s experience is still obtained largely through the printed word, and it is through language that he comes to terms with himself and his environment. In our society a good deal of that language continues to be written. We are trying to turn the 6-year-old on Book 3 of Janet and John into this effective reader, and we shall stand the best chance of doing so if we can somehow instil good reading habits in the young child.

Before we look at what happens in schools, it may be useful to try to gain a rough idea of what language is all about. Until quite recently it was thought that only man could ever learn ‘true language’ and most societies at some time in their history have regarded language as the gift of the gods, only a little less precious than fire and sex. Everyone knows that animals and birds can communicate but, on examination, it has been found that even the most elaborate animal ‘language’ is no more than a set of signs, visual or oral/ aural, which produce a desired response in the animal or animals being addressed. Experiments in teaching animals human language centred, mistakenly, on attempts to make them use their vocal cords to reproduce human sounds. The subjects of these experiments were usually dolphins or chimpanzees, but it was not until scientists finally realised that animals just do not have the right kinds of vocal organs that attention switched to human sign language. A chimpanzee was taught the American Sign Language as used by the deaf, and in about eighteen months had learned thirty-four signs which it could employ in appropriate situations. This in itself would be remarkable enough, but after learning the first ten signs, the animal began to combine signs to form short sentences to ask for food and drink from the fridge or to be carried down the garden. It did this without any instruction, and it would seem that this spontaneous combination of symbols is the basic secret of true language. Yet even this chimpanzee is unlikely to become the Shakespeare of the ape world, and the transition from speech to literacy may be almost as big a step as from the primitive sign codes of animals to true language. Even here, though, there is wide divergence of opinion. The American teacher and teacher-critic, John Holt, says that he sees no reason for teaching reading at all. Surrounded as he is by print of all kinds, the only child likely to fail would be one who had ‘been made to feel he was too stupid to learn to read’. The much-quoted statement ‘if we taught children to speak, the way we teach them to read, they’d never learn’ has been attributed to a number of people, but even the Department of Education and Science’s book, Inside the Primary School, takes much the same standpoint, adding only the cautiously qualifying ‘almost without further teaching.’ On the other hand, Dr Joyce Morris, leader of an NFER survey into reading standards and one of our leading experts, is quite sure that, left to their own devices, children will not begin to learn to read and will need ‘systematic instruction’. We do not yet know who is right, because the only children not taught to read and write are those who belong to societies without writing, like the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Nobody in England or the United States so far feels sure enough of his ground to leave a group of children in a library but without instruction, and the only thoroughly documented example will be found in Tarzan of the Apes where the infant Lord Greystoke, finding books in the hut built by his marooned parents, teaches himself to read and write by deciphering the little ‘black bugs’ on the printed pages. The books are in English, of course, but little Tarzan has already learned the language of the fictitious ‘Great Apes’, while the first human language he learns to speak is French. He is obviously a very promising student, and the strange mixture of insight and old wives’ tale that underlies Burroughs’s description of the imaginary process is worth looking at:

‘Among the other books were a primer, some child’s readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought.… His little face was tense in study, for he had partially grasped, in a hazy, nebulous way, the rudiments of a thought which was destined to prove the key and the solution to the puzzling problem of the strange little bugs. In his hands was a primer opened at a picture of a little ape similar to himself, but covered, except for hands and face, with strange coloured fur, for such he thought the jacket and trousers to be. Beneath the picture were three little bugs: B O Y.

‘And now he had discovered in the text upon the page that these three were repeated many times in the same sequence. Another fact he learned – that there were comparatively few individual bugs; but these were repeated many times, occasionally alone, but more often in company with others. Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text for a repetition of the combination B-O-Y. Presently he found it beneath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went upon four legs like the jackal.… Beneath this picture the bugs appeared as: A BOY AND A DOG. There they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied the little ape.

‘And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it – a task which might seem to you or me impossible – learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.

‘He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs … so that by the time he was 15 he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every printed figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books.

‘One day when he was about 12, he found a number of lead pencils, and he was delighted to discover the black line one of them left when it was scratched on the table top. Soon, after a mass of scrawly loops, he attempted to reproduce the bugs he saw in his books. It was a difficult task, but he had made a beginning at writing.…’¹

Deprived as he is of most of the prerequisites for learning (according to today’s notions), Tarzan’s feat certainly looks impossible. What are these prerequisites which a modern teacher would demand? The following are the more important ones, not necessarily in order of importance:

1  He has no spoken language other than grunts and screams; whereas we regard the child’s prior knowledge of language as an invaluable basis for beginning reading. We know, for instance, that the spoken language of children living in our culture is far more advanced than that of their first reading material.

2  He does not live in a ‘print culture’: he is not surrounded daily by printed words on posters, notices, advertisements, newspapers and books.

3  He has no adults to read or talk to him, to answer his questions.

4  He has no reason for learning to read. Why commit himself to such a laborious task when there is no apparent end which it will serve?

5  There are a number of minor and technical objections, such as ‘How does he learn that the writing runs from left to right, and from top to bottom of the page without someone to show him?’ There is no earthly reason why it should go one way rather than another.

It is probably fairly obvious by now that we could make a number of similar objections even though this is a comparatively light-hearted exercise, and it does throw some light not only on the way in which literacy may begin, but also on the way in which some people think it does, which is not the same thing. It should also lead us to realise that we know very little, in fact, about the precise process of learning to read and write (What did Tarzan write about?). If we had to sum up our findings in this remarkable case study, we should have to say that despite the student’s amazing ability, and the evidence of a distinct trend towards ‘discovery methods’, not many modern teachers would place much faith in the approach of the ‘Jungle School’ – although they might value one of Tarzan’s foster-parents as an assistant on playground duty.

¹ Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912).

Chapter 2

What Went Wrong? The Illiterate Adult in Our Society

Servant: I pray sir, can you read?
Romeo: Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.
SHAKESPEARE, ROMEO AND JULIET

Nobody knows exactly how many adults in Britain are illiterate or semi-literate. What we do know is that even after three generations of compulsory schooling the number of children who leave school at 16 still unable to read or write is so large as to give cause for serious concern. These people are not mental defectives, nor are they educationally sub-normal or suffering from any serious physical handicap such as deafness; indeed, some are of above-average intelligence and many are in responsible jobs – bus-drivers, for instance. It is remarkable how many people have passed their driving test without being able to read the Highway Code, and it is astonishing how many of them cope with everyday life in our print-dominated culture. It is also astonishing that they manage to keep the secret of their illiteracy so well, when we consider how frequent are the occasions on which it might be revealed. Perhaps it is only the illiterate who fully realise just how much reading and writing is present in our lives. Many of them are certainly driven to ingenious and even desperate measures: delivery-van drivers will ask passers-by to read the addresses on their delivery notes; waiters have developed amazing memories; a night-security man used to telephone his wife so that she could spell out the words for his r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Importance of Literacy
• 2 What Went Wrong? The lLLiterate Adult in Our Society
• 3 Basic Processes
• 4 Reading and Writing in a Small-Town School
• 5 Reading and Writing in a City School
• 6 How Parents can Help the Pre-School Child
• 7 Reading for What? Schemes and Children’s Readers
• 8 The Iron Teacher: Teaching Machines and Other Aids
• 9 Is Your Test Really Necessary?
• 10 Conclusion
• Appendix: The Bullock Report (February 1975)
• Books to Read
• Bibliography
• Index