Achieving Literacy (RLE Edu I)

Longitudinal Studies of Adolescents Learning to Read

Margaret Meek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136510809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How children learn to read well and what kind of teaching helps them is a scarcely penetrated mystery. This book is a fascinating and informative research report by a group of teachers who set out to teach children who have failed to acquire a useful degree of literacy; in it they discuss their experiences. The authors are presenting evidence about a central and constant problem in education, an essential kind of evidence which is often ignored, because it is so difficult to collect and present. The report presents enough case-notes and recordings of lessons and discussions to allow readers to make their own interpretations alongside those of the writers. Highly informative about many of the central topics of teaching literacy it discusses children's motivation, the influence of social and cultural background on learning, and different methods of teaching reading.

1

A view of the task

How children learn to read well is still almost a secret. What kind of teaching helps them is a scarcely penetrated mystery. We know some things about what children do in the early stages of learning and a great deal about what teachers do, and are told to do, in class teaching. Yet we cannot be sure that children learn to read as the direct result of being told what to do. Most expert adult readers have had no help from reading experts. Their best teachers may have been the authors of the books they enjoyed. There is abundant evidence that many children teach themselves and each other.¹ For all the money, time energy and ingenuity we have spent on reading research, we are still at the stage of saying that children learn to read when there is something they want to read and an adult who takes the time and trouble to help them.

The most important lesson children learn by becoming literate is that they can learn, in the way that school endorses learning. Then they join the school society of young learners who use their literacy as currency, as the medium of communication, as tools of thought and the means of deep symbolic play. The bond between the teacher and the taught is strengthened; exploration, discovery, ambition and achievement expand and flourish. The few children (and their number is not large, nor is it growing as many believe) who cannot read and write worry us because they are exiles from the society of child learners in school and are threatened, by parents, teachers and other adults, with exclusion from the wider social world outside school if they fail to become literate.

Consequently, the drive to teach children to read is intensified if they reach secondary school unable to do so. How, then, should they be taught? They have had reading lessons, or concern about their reading, for six years. What new diagnosis or remedy is possible? Even if we believe we fully understand the reasons for this delay, the learning is still to be accomplished. If the lengthening of the dole queue provides an incentive, what can a secondary school teacher do where a primary one, specially trained in the techniques of ‘basic literacy’ has failed? Is it inevitable that a twelve-year-old non-reader should spend his or her life in secondary school in the condition of a handicapped child? What actually happens when a teacher engages with the problems of a pupil whose reading is described as ‘slow’, ‘backward’ or ‘under-achieving’ so that she may help the child to reach the standard of competence consistent with what the outside world calls ‘literacy’?

This book is a narrative compiled from the work of six teachers who set themselves the task of answering these questions. We began to look closely at what we were doing in reading lessons and to examine what we saw the pupils doing because no research report seemed to admit as evidence those things which we had to grapple with every day.² So we decided to record, in as much detail as we could in the busy concourse that is a school, exactly what happened when we taught an individual pupil to read and write. We planned to continue this recording until the pupils knew they were fully and freely literate in ways they could recognize and we believed to be desirable. From these observations and records we hoped to understand better and to demonstrate more clearly exactly what is involved in teaching a secondary school non-reader to read. Then we would be able to encourage others to undertake this most rewarding of all teaching-and-learning operations with fewer frustrations and more encouragement.

In order to share and discuss our individual observations of a single pupil we met as a group. Here we consulted the research and analysed our perceptions of what we had set ourselves to do. We exchanged books and materials and relied on each other for support and help. Soon we began to realize that we were giving our work a double stance, first towards the pupil we were teaching and then towards our collaborative exploration of our common understandings. As our pupils changed, so did we. As we became confident on their behalf, we began to realize that we were being forced to challenge what had hitherto been presented to teachers as evidence about what matters in secondary school reading, about the nature of the reading environment and, above all, about the pupils’ and the teachers’ views of each other and of the task and the texts that lay between them. What seemed at first to be a fairly straightforward undertaking became, in the space of a few months, and then for nearly four years, a many-layered activity. The original report of our work was more than twice the length of this book.

Longitudinal case studies are notoriously difficult to record. In the inevitable time-lag between the beginning of the inquiry and the final summary nothing stands still. Pupils grow older and leave school. What seems newly observed is made plain in many places at once by researchers who scarcely know of each other’s existence.³ We realized as we went on that we should have included a much closer look at writing. We strayed sometimes in search of new insights; there were false dawns and cold scents. But these also have narrative value and are essentially part of the whole story we have to tell.

There was no ‘required to prove’ about our undertaking, only a decision to let others know that what we actually do when we teach a child to read is less than half of the total picture, which also indicates what we believe we are doing, what we choose not to do, and, even more important, what we take for granted. As we shall show at every turn, our pupils’ views of what learning to read means may have very little in common with our own. Learning to read and teaching reading are, in the end, ways of negotiating meanings, including what ‘being a reader’ means in our day and age.

Our concern is to show what we did and to explain what we came to understand. By a strictly utilitarian count of the test-teach-test kind, we have to say we failed to produce a blueprint of how inexperienced adolescents can be turned into readers beyond the risk of failure. To learn to read, the learner must gradually take over the act of reading from the teacher whose role is to mediate the responsibility for it to the learner until his experience and skill are sufficient for him to ‘go it alone’. All of our pupils had different reasons for being unable or unwilling to do this. In the end, we may have learned more about reading than they did. In some ways the effort was equally painful for us all, but we now know that too much is written about what teachers ought to do, and how children should behave in reading lessons. The evidence of what actually happens is very scarce. We offer what we have found to anyone whose interests lie in teaching, learning, language, literature, child development and the social effects of literacy in the ways described by Michael Stubbs.⁴

The outcome of our narrative is to ask some of the as yet unasked questions about literacy and to point to some important lessons that have not, in the classroom sense, been taught. This may seem a poor reward for four years of hard work, but we believe that, in that time, we learned many things that, as teachers, we had hitherto concealed from ourselves and each other. As our tale unfolds you will come to know us well. We are referred to by our first names, not as a specious gesture of familiarity, but so that you can recognize us as we meet and talk. In the course of our discussions we criticize many things, including our colleagues and the institutions where we work. You have only our word for it that we do this in the same way as we try to be honest about all that happened. If you think that we sometimes take our betters to task with unnecessary vehemence, you may also see that we have been no less sparing of ourselves.

In the chapters that follow we first put you into the picture of our activities, the total reading environment of each teacher and pupil, and of the group. We examine the view of literacy mediated by the school and the teacher as representing society at large, and the kinds of negotiation that are necessary for the selection of pupils and the establishment of ‘special’ lessons. Gradually we narrow the focus until you see the teacher and the pupil in the closest possible proximity, the interaction in the reading lesson itself. As we move further on to see what is happening, lesson by lesson, we count on your awareness of the whole context we established earlier, of the pupils and teachers in their schools and the teachers in their discussion group in the world of multicultural London at the end of the 1970s.

There are many gaps, but as far as possible we offer you our own words in our own voices. The most significant difference between this account of teaching reading and the more official projects is that we, the teachers, are the reporters. In this way we are being judged first by the children, then by each other, and now by you.

2

Features Of The Starting Point

As a reading teacher I was in a somewhat similar position to those primitive societies that perform ritual ceremonies to make the rains come. They know that pouring water on the ground won’t really open the heavens, but they have to do something.

Michael Simons

A language for life

Books to me are boring. I can never get into the story. In school I don’t mind reading. In school it’s different, it’s not so boring. You’ve got to sit down and shut up. I think I can get into it more in school because there’s nothing else to do like looking over the wall to the Park for mates or raiding the biscuit tin. When we read in school if the story ain’t so good I usually get in a bad mood or I get a headache.

There was one moment I remember most. This was the fourth year of my Junior School. It was the first day in my new class and the teacher wanted to hear us read. My stomach turned and I was getting hotter. There was about twenty people in front of me. One of them couldn’t read too well and Miss said, Well, Well, now we know the people who can’t read. I was next after Leigh and, I felt as though I was burning up. It was my turn nothing would come out every word I said came out with a quiver. Even very easy words wouldn’t come out and she stopped me. I was never so embarrassed in my life my face was turning bright red as the teacher was saying how bad I was. She didn’t seem to understand how I felt and that I was a good reader really. She seemed to be like a robot with no feelings¹

The eleven-year-old girl who wrote this prelude has said everything we need to say to excuse another study of reading and how it is taught. Competent readers who have no difficulties soon forget exactly how they began, and by the time they are nine they will say that you have to instruct younger children in ways that they themselves never experienced.² It is still not common to find the views of children offered as evidence because beginners are known to have confused conceptions of the reading process when they asked about it during their early years in school,³ and once they have learned to read fluently they do not expect to be questioned about their difficulties. But if a child does remember clearly something about first steps in reading, the chances are that it was connected with overcoming a specific problem.

Gradually, however, studies of classroom interactions are beginning to replace single-focus observations.⁴ There were very few of these in print when we began, and Extending Beginning Reading appeared when we had finished.⁵ In this recent Schools Council Report the voices of children are heard replying to questions about their reading and what they do when they are in difficulty. In many schools, however, discussions about literacy are still conducted in the adult language of crisis which has its counterpart in the response of our young writer. The reading teacher she describes in an archetypal figure. Right at the beginning of our time as a group we knew we were looking for something as far away as possible from teaching and learning in this mode. The teacher who elicited this autobiographical vignette had taken part in discussions following the publication in 1975 of The Bullock Report; A Language for Life. This was also the primary incentive for our operation. For the second time this century the emotional rise in public concern about literacy, notably in its relation to the job-worthiness of young adults, the state of public behaviour in adolescents and the qualifications for entry into higher education had resulted in an official enquiry. (The Newbolt Report in 1921 dealt with the complaints of the time about illiterate school leavers.) The Bullock Report addressed itself particularly to teachers, urging them to understand the nature of the relationship of language and learning and the place of reading in the overall development of children in school. It also revealed how anxiety about literacy reaches the general public as a single feature of a more diffuse concern about defining the nature of literacy at any given time in a society that takes the literacy of its members for granted.

The writers of the Bullock Report were aware that the entire population is now expected to be more literate (however literacy is defined) as more is ‘demanded’ by society in general. In the world-wide move towards universal literacy, two things are happening here at once: we are increasing the level of literacy for the entire population and also extending to everyone the possibilities of becoming literate in ways that have no precedent, in subject specialisms in science, for instance, in ways related to technology, in the storage and retrieval of information by computer, and in relation to television – a relation that is more subtle than is generally admitted by those who only bewail the decrease in children’s reading time. But the Bullock Report, for all its concern about the teaching of reading and the teaching of literature, could not define literacy. It also skirted the question of what a well-read person is like nowadays. Thus, for public purposes, literacy becomes what is tested by the most recent tests.⁶ For all its innovative concern about adult non-readers and its nascent awareness of the growing diversity of our multicultural society, there is no close examination in the Report of how a child engages with reading as a meaningful activity, or what a committed adult actually does in teaching a child to read, either at the normal time for learning in the primary school, or as a result of the child’s difficulty in conforming to the school’s expectations at a particular age and stage.

When the Report considers the plight of young people who may leave school unable to read with fluency and ease, the explanation offered for their failure is the fact that most of them ‘come from areas of social and economic depression’. The Report suggests that they need ‘additional teaching assistance’ related to the rest of their learning. The writers continue:

It would be unrealistic to expect that conditions for learning will ever be ideal, and there will always be children who for various reasons fall behind. But a very great deal can be done to prevent reading disability by raising the quality of teaching generally and by giving skilled individual help before a sense of failure has led the child to lose confidence.

(p. 275, 18.19)

Before the Report made this recommendation, we had all been giving ‘Individual help’ to inexperienced readers. We were already convinced that ‘it is not a question of “remedial methods” but of applying good teaching in such a way [our italics] that failure is replaced by a sense of achievement, with all that means for a child’s confidence and self-respect’.⁷ We wanted to know what did ‘in such a way’ really mean? We now needed to share experience of our teaching and the reality of our pupils’ actual needs, to teach a single pupil, to read and monitor the operation and to account for what happened in order to display what kind of skills are necessary to help inexperienced readers to learn. We wanted to think of it as a investigation rather than as a research project of the kind that has generated so much unease amongst reading teachers.⁸ We would attempt to reveal as much as possible of what happens from the learners’ point of view and from the teachers’ responses and actions to see if a way such as ours could contribute to the understanding of teaching and learning.

Reading experts or expert readers?

Teachers are the most significant variables in the process of a child’s learning to read because they begin by teaching themselves and all that they believe about reading. In some ways their position is intolerable. They are at the flashpoint of every conflict about aims and methods. They are expected to read, understand and implement the findings of research reports for which they make the evidence available, but are rarely consulted about the outcomes. They are the victims of travelling salesmen with new books, gimmicks, schemes and machines. They are expected to change ignorance into knowledge and to feel responsible if a child fails. Above all, they are constantly aware of the pupils’ difficulties and the multifaceted nature of any solution to their problems. It is always easier for them to envelope themselves in a profusion of specialist techniques, or to blame the pupils’ environment, poor parental attitudes, truancy, generally low motivation and lack of adequate facilities in school, than to take the reading problem in hand and try to deal with it. That so many do is a matter for rejoicing. At no time did we think our group was unique in either its caring or its endeavours.

In one way it was different, however. We were about to undertake teaching usually called ‘remedial’ but our skills derived from another specialism: we were teachers of English. Now, English teachers have, on the whole, come late to the idea that they need a theory of literacy and a theoretical understanding of the teaching of reading. Before the advent of mixed-ability classes, the traditional Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. A view of the task
• 2. Features Of The Starting Point
• 3. The compromise
• 4. Reading, without tests
• 5. Early encounters
• 6. Two sources of evidence
• 7. What progress looks like
• 8. Reflexions
• Notes