Children with Literacy Difficulties

Pat Pinsent, Pat Pinsent

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000527735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Gestione della classe

First Published in 1990, Children with Literacy Difficulties presents the work of a number of teachers with considerable experience of helping children with problems. The difficulties which some children experience in the area of reading have often been considered separately from the same children's possible problems in the areas of writing, spelling, and handwriting. This is no longer realistic. Nowadays most teachers appreciate the importance of linking all teaching in the language field. As a result, throughout the school, it should become impossible to erect barriers between oral dialogue, writing (both by hand and using the computer) and reading. All these aspects receive attention in the book. This book is an essential read for teachers and researchers of primary & secondary education, teaching and learning, school education and education in general.

CHAPTER 1

Assessing the Problem

Pat Pinsent

Is there a problem?

The National Curriculum imposes the requirement for teachers to monitor their pupils’ progress, both formally and informally, throughout their school careers. To a considerable extent, at least the informal aspect of this process is something which many teachers have been doing for many years, in their own record keeping.

Some children experience such acute difficulties in reading and writing that no teacher could have the slightest doubt that they require help. What is needed is to determine the form which that help should take, a process which will include the attempt to discover the cause of the child’s problems.

In many cases, however, the situation is not so clear cut, and the teacher needs to have a perspective from which to assess the children’s attainment in order to decide whether or not they have literacy problems as such, or are experiencing difficulties which result from one general factor such as health or environment. This chapter, therefore, represents an attempt to provide a broader context for children’s failure to achieve a desired level in reading and writing.

It is also necessary to look briefly at approaches to the determining of relative levels of literacy ability, in the shape of some kind of measure of attainment. While the teacher, with increasing experience, is likely to be the best judge of whether a child is making the expected degree of progress and if special help is required, she may sometimes find it useful to have some independent method of assessment, such as formal or informal testing, which may support her judgement, or provide more information about the specific problems of the child.

Some factors which may contribute to literacy problems

Physical factors

There is a good deal of evidence that relatively minor hearing defects may be of considerable significance in contributing to reading difficulties. Children with major hearing loss and an overall lack of aural acuity will normally be identified by medical tests, and will need special treatment, but the less obvious feature of inadequate auditory discrimination may be of considerable significance, as has been shown by Bryant and Bradley (1985). A child who cannot hear the difference between ‘p’ and ‘b’ or ‘th’ and ‘f’ will be unlikely to build up the kind of understanding of the relationship between sounds and how they are written which is necessary in order to go beyond the very early stages of learning to read. If a child cannot recognise that there are three sounds in the word ‘pet’, for instance, the possibility of spelling the word correctly without help is fairly remote. Experiences of failures of this kind are likely to create the impression in children that reading and writing are mysterious processes which require abilities that they do not have. A teacher needs to be able to recognise children who may, perhaps for fairly short periods, suffer from this problem so that she can avoid using approaches and materials which may give them a poor self image. Instead, she can concentrate on fun oral activities like nursery rhymes and jingles which build up their discriminatory abilities, while ensuring that the reading materials used hold children’s interest by having a meaning relevant to the child, and, where appropriate, telling an interesting story.

The role of visual perception in reading might seem fairly obvious; in the extreme, a blind child cannot learn to read in the usual way. Children who have poor sight should of course be receiving treatment for this, particularly since it may hamper their ability to see words as a whole, or to develop the kind of visual imagery they need in order to acquire sight-word vocabulary. If, however, they do not readily notice the differences between ‘b’ and ‘d’, or ‘p’ and ‘q’, this is more likely to be because they do not understand the significance of orientation than as a result of poor sight as such. The kind of formal training in visual perception which concentrated on symbols rather than words or letters and was practised in some schools, is now generally disfavoured; the best way of helping children perceive and discriminate between letters and between words is within a context of meaning and the need to use these symbols in order to read or to write.

Poor manual skills, even if these merely result from immaturity, can badly affect the ability to write. The close link between reading and writing which quite rightly exists in much initial literacy teaching today means that lack of progress in one is likely to be related to failure in the other. If a child has severe problems in this area, the teacher may need to devise other ways of recording the child’s ideas, for instance with a word processor.

Illness, resulting in poor attendance which impedes continuity of learning, or in impaired concentration, is likely to affect the child’s progress overall, not just the literacy area. The same is true both of an inadequate home background, where the child may be malnourished or badly clad, and of delayed maturation. The particular significance of any of these factors in relation to literacy is that they may result in a child having a poor self image. This demands particular care from the teacher about the choice of material which may help the child to build up confidence.

Neurological factors (for instance epilepsy or brain damage) are rarer than those mentioned above, but like them are in most cases likely to affect all areas of a child’s learning. They are also probably beyond a teacher’s competence to assess. It is however worth mentioning that some theorists suggest that minimal cerebral disfunction may be related to speech and language disorders, in particular dyslexia.

Emotional factors

While depressive or psychotic illness in children is rare, it is common for them to be affected by matters concerned with relationships. Family tensions or break-up, sibling rivalry, undue parental pressure, racism or bullying at school, are all matters which may affect achievement, and it is quite possible for this to be reflected in a single area of a child’s work: for instance, a parent may be over-anxious about reading because s/he also had problems at school, but less worried about number work, and may therefore by applying pressure in this area only. For some reason, even today, it is fairly acceptable to say ‘I never could do Maths!’ but regarded as socially demeaning to be poor at reading or writing, and this can compound a difficulty.

Teachers should not forget that they themselves and their relationship with the child may also be part of the problem!

Language factors

It is simplistic to describe a child’s language as ‘deprived’; the research of Tizard and Hughes (1984) and others has shown that the language associated with the ‘working’ class often provides a rich linguistic environment for a child. It is possible that a few children may have had insufficient language interaction, whether because they have been left alone in front of the television for long periods, because they have been left in the care of people who are not competent in English (foreign grandparents, au pairs, etc) or because they have particularly silent parents. Such aspects are not class related, but clearly any child whose language is immature for such reasons needs a good deal of interaction at school, with the teacher and with the pupils. It is quite possible that such children may not be ready to make a start on reading, but teachers should be reluctant to assume this unless they have evidence.

A related factor is the lack of experience of story. The research of Wells (1987) shows this to be of vital importance in children’s success in reading. Children may come from homes where they do not see or handle books, and have not been read to or had stories told to them. Since most early reading material is narrative-based, it is possible that they may be unready to enjoy stories in books. It is also likely that they will lack the experience of ‘book language’ and find both ‘story-time’ and reading material alienating. They may also lack any experience of seeing adults reading or writing.

Children may speak a non-standard variety of English, while the books which they are given to read will be written in standard English. Most children surmount this without undue difficulty, but in some cases the vocabulary may be unfamiliar. More significant perhaps is the fact that their accent may not make use of certain sounds (for instance using ‘f’ for ‘th’ in ‘thin’, or ‘d’ for ‘th’ in ‘the’), and this can make the relationship between the way a word is spelt and pronounced seem arbitrary to them.

In all these cases, an additional factor is that of the teacher’s expectation. Since most teachers are likely themselves to have experienced language-rich environments, and to have provided these to their own children if they have any, there is a considerable danger that they will think of the children who lack certain kinds of language experience as less able, less ready to learn.

The child whose first language is not English naturally has particular problems in the reading and writing areas, but it is likely that the teacher will be aware of this situation. Resources to help such children are often however limited, and a teacher who has not had any special training may often find herself confronted with children who need extra help with their English. The issue is too big to be dealt with here, and it is important that teachers should not assume that such children will automatically have reading and writing difficulties. It is however worth noting that language is best learnt in use, rather than through decontextualised exercises, and most young second language learners do best when provided with extra support within the ordinary classroom rather than in a special language unit. Progress in reading is generally greatest where children are either already literate in their own language and so know what the process is all about, or have made sufficient progress in oral English to undertand the material in the books. Children sometimes manage to conceal their lack of comprehension remarkably well, and teachers should not let apparently correct answers deceive them as to the extent to which a child understands the deeper meaning of what has been said or written. It is not uncommon for a second language learner to know the meaning of all the individual words without grasping the total message.

Dyslexia

This is not the appropriate place to enter into the many controversies about dyslexia, or specific reading and language retardation. If all or most of the above factors have been ruled out, and the child is not of below average ability in general terms, it may well be that the child is dyslexic. Whether or not this diagnosis is helpful to the child and their parents is a very individual matter. Approaches which may help the child are discussed in chapter five.

Failure in reading and writing is seldom, if ever, an isolated phenomenon. It may result from more than one factor, and is likely to get worse as the child gets further behind, with the consequent effects on understanding school-work generally, on teachers’ and possibly parents’ expectations of the child’s ability, and, probably most damaging, on the child’s own self-image.

Determining the nature and extent of the problem

The teacher’s own judgment is likely to be the most valid measure of whether or nor there is a literacy problem. This judgment may however need some guidance, particularly in the case of the inexperienced teacher who has not yet formed criteria as to what constitutes a good, an average or a weak reader or writer. Even the experienced teacher may sometimes need the support of what may appear to be a more ‘objective’ measure in order to convince colleagues of the reality of the problem. Within the framework of the National Curriculum, records of the literacy and oral language attainment of children will be kept, and in most cases these are likely to provide sufficient indication of progress or the lack of it. If further information is required, a teacher may want to use formal or informal testing techniques, which will enable her/him to acquire a sense of what can be expected at a particular level from a child, and thus to recognise those children who do not seem able to attain this standard.

Assessment of reading – informal approaches

In many circumstances, these will provide enough information and even the basis for comparison between children, without resort to any standardised tests. The Primary Language Record (1989) and its associated handbook, together with Patterns of Learning (1990), which related it explicitly to the National Curriculum, provides a straightforward means of regularly documenting observations of the child’s reading, writing and oral language, together with more detailed information on some of the approaches mentioned in this chapter. The headings alert teachers to features of the child’s reading, and there is also the opportunity to document the books read. This, together with the child’s response to these books and attitude to reading in general, is perhaps the single most important indicator of progress or lack of progress in the field of literacy. The opportunity for self-assessment by the child should not be neglected – not explicitly by describing themselves as good or poor readers, but by keeping their own lists and comments about books read. While teachers may want to have access to these for their own records, the child’s right to privacy about their responses should also be respected.

Informal assessment

The teacher creates a relaxed atmosphere, perhaps encouraging the child to choose the book which will be read. The child may preview the text with the teacher, and/or read through it silently first. A section can be practised before reading to the teacher; the text may be discussed with the teacher afterwards. During the actual reading, the teacher will be concentrating on the overall impression created, any specific strategies the child uses, and the child’s responses to the text. The result of this should be that the teacher is looking at the child’s reading more thoughtfully than if hearing the child read were merely a matter of noting mistakes and recording the page reached.

Running record

This is a slightly more formal process, where the teacher may note any departures that the child makes from the actual text, and also the comments which the child makes. Each error is scrutinised to see what caused the child to make it – for instance, a search for meaning or a visual cue. Self-corrections are particularly important.

Miscue

There are various methods of carrying out this process, described, for instance, in The Primary Language Record Handbook (1989), Southgate (1981), Arnold (1982), etc. Each teacher will probably need to devise their own preference, balancing the time spent on carrying it out against the need to gain insight into the child’s reading processes. Ideally a tape recorder is used so that the child is not distracted by the teacher making notes. The child is given a piece to read which is likely to be slightly above her/his usual reading level. The piece of about 150 to 200 words, should first be read silently by the child, and may then be retold. The actual reading aloud follows, and from it, or the recording of it, the teacher codes in a consistent way, all substitutions, self-corrections, repetitions, omissions, insertions, reversals, hesitations, long pauses and refusals. These are then divided into positive and negative miscues according to the extent to which ...