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May 11 - June 11, 2020
How current programs, fragmented and trivial in content, could effectively provide the general knowledge that children require in order to gain proficiency in reading is not explained by proponents of the status quo.
cognitive science has rejected a formalistic conception of language comprehension.
The contents of education in a democracy are always proper subjects for debate. But the debate will be more productive if its participants understand that certain subjects are essential by virtue of their inherent necessity for communication through speech and writing.
We don’t need to teach them the things that writers directly explain; we need to teach them what writers take for granted and do not explain.
Inference is filling in a blank in the text that we need to fill in to understand it. But filling in a blank is not a formal skill; it is not supplying a missing formal operation. It is supplying a missing substance.
This is at the heart of the matter.
is not mainly comprehension strategies that young children lack in comprehending texts but knowledge—knowledge of formal language conventions and knowledge of the world.
We don’t want them to be scorned for incorrect usage by language snobs, but there is more at stake: it is an equity issue that affects children’s economic future and capacity to gain respect. To tell children how to get these unnecessary forms right, we must use the grammatical names, and children must know what they mean.
No good school or teacher wants to send such a harmful message. The controversies have been useful to the extent that they cause teachers to be respectfully sensitive to language diversity and to make very clear that different language forms are used in different places. One has to learn when and where to use different language forms, just as one needs to learn what kind of clothes to wear on different occasions. It’s part of one’s education.
The British sociolinguist Basil Bernstein brought intellectual clarity to this subject by labeling one kind of home talk (found most often among less well educated people) with the term “restricted code” and more printlike talk (found most often among educated people) with the term “elaborated code.”9 The difference between restricted and elaborated codes is structural.
Since schooling takes up only a portion of children’s language experience, every effort should be made to make vocabulary-building in school as effective as possible.
That a person can learn up to fifteen new words a day from age two to age seventeen is one of the most remarkable feats of the human mind.
This is 80,000+ words.
Steven Pinker has argued on the basis of persuasive evidence that two separate language functions exist in the human mind, one for words and one for rules.
Word learning takes place most efficiently when the reader or listener already understands the context well. Researchers have found that we learn the words of a foreign language most effectively when the subject matter is familiar.
Failing to construct meaning, these children fail to learn new words. Such unrewarding experiences also tend to induce a dislike and avoidance of reading, so the child falls even further behind.
vocabulary in second grade is a reliable predictor of academic performance in eleventh grade.
Reading aloud to very young children is one of the main agents of their vocabulary progress.
average of two thousand to five thousand words per year that an advantaged child will have learned from age two to age seventeen.
most of our word learning occurs indirectly, through hearing, reading, and understanding a lot of text and talk.
The consensus of all researchers is that indirect, implicit learning is by far the main mode of ...
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Researchers have found that we need multiple exposures to a word in multiple contexts to start getting a secure sense of its overtones and range. That is why word learning is inherently a slow and gradual process.
explicit instruction plus guided practice is the most efficient way of teaching students how to map the forty-odd phonemes of English onto the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in some hundred-plus ways. The superiority of an explicit, analytical method in this case has been amply shown.25 And there are many other examples of the superior efficiency of explicit, focused instruction. How astonishing, then, if it should turn out that the most efficient way of learning thousands of word meanings is through an unconscious, automatic, and implicit process. Yet the weight of evidence indicates it
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is it best to make tiny gains on a dozen words or big gains on just one? In the long run, which method leads to most word learning? On the whole, the implicit method, they suggest, is best.
the curve of word learning is not a straight line. We don’t learn the same number of words every year.
Vocabulary growth is not entirely like the growth of money in an interest-bearing bank account.
vocabulary heard in school is potentially richer than the vocabulary heard outside school. Oral speech tends to use a smaller vocabulary than written speech.
That it should take so much time to explain a simple sentence containing not a single unfamiliar vocabulary word illustrates the impracticality of the idea that people can simply strategize what a sentence means or look up the knowledge they need for reading comprehension. Time considerations alone require that the background knowledge needed to fill in the blanks must be quickly and readily available to the reader’s mind.
Learning the craft of writing is bound up with learning how to gauge what can be assumed versus what must be explained.
Most current reading programs talk about activating the reader’s background knowledge so she can comprehend a text. But in practice, they are only paying lip service to the well-known scientific finding that background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. Little attempt is made to enlarge the child’s background knowledge.
“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”
children can learn words much faster if we stick to the same topic for several sessions, because word learning occurs much faster—up to four times faster— when the verbal context is familiar.
It’s possible, of course, that the reason for our relative decline with each successive grade lies in factors other than our unproductive use of school time—for instance, our distracting culture, our diversity, our racism, our unequal income distribution. But other developed nations have distracting cultures, ethnic diversity, racism, and unequal income distributions and nonetheless have higher-performing students.
THIS
It is unnecessary to seek remote causes for our low educational productivity when more immediate ones are available.
No teacher, however capable, can efficiently cope with the huge differences in academic preparation among the students in a typical American classroom—differences that grow with each successive grade.4 (In other nations, the differences between groups diminish over time, so that they are closer together by grade seven than they were in grade four. This effect has been most fully documented in European nations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and among these nations, the most detailed data come from France.5)
This is a compelling datapoint.
Even the most brilliant and knowledgeable American teacher faced with huge variations in student preparation cannot achieve as much as an ordinary teacher can within a more coherent curricular system like those found in the nations that outperform us.
It is true that many American teachers are ill-informed about the subjects they teach, and it is also true that this reduces their productivity in the classroom. But this is not because of their inherent laziness or native incompetence. It is because they are subjected to antifact, how-to ideas during their training.
the low productivity of our schools is chiefly caused by bad theory rather than by innate teacher incompetence.
Also this.
While it is true that disadvantaged students in those other developed nations never completely catch up in language skills, they do narrow the gap, as our students emphatically do not.
Most important was “intensity,” a persistent, goal-directed focus on academics that caused classroom time to be used productively.10 Schools with greater academic intensity produced not only greater learning but also greater equity.
Tests of academic progress are the only practical way to hold schools accountable for educating all children and are therefore essential to the twin aims of quality and fairness.
Many of the complaints against the No Child Left Behind law pertain to the supposedly harmful influence of intensive preparation for the standardized reading tests. Yes, the prepping (as conducted) is harmful!
tests are not testing comprehension strategies, as the states and test-makers suppose. They are testing comprehension, which is a different matter altogether.
The comprehension skills that students are supposed to learn by practicing “comprehension skills” cannot lead to high test performance, because they do not lead to actual comprehension.
Some have argued that these supposedly neutral tests are culturally biased, which is certainly true. While the test-makers attempt to be fair by making the tests knowledge-neutral, they do not succeed in this aim. Language comprehension can never be knowledge-neutral.
their unfairness resides in the pretense that formal reading skills are being tested when in fact relevant background knowledge is being tested.
In order to read a wide array of passages in different domains, a person must have a wide array of knowledge. This is a key point, and it is currently missed in conceptualizing these tests and the instruction to prepare for them.
Behind the current conception of reading, measurable, linear progress seems to be assumed. That is a reasonably correct model for the repeated, mechanical aspects of reading, such as decoding. (One of the best measures of decoding skill is the ability to sound out combinations of letters that don’t have any meaning at all.)
educational systems which require definite content standards and use curriculum-based content tests to determine whether the curriculum has been learned greatly improve achievement for all students, including those from less advantaged backgrounds.
breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status.
being “smart” is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background per se.10 This little-known and quite momentous fact means that imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the competence gap between demographic groups through schooling.
Important point for those trying to limit topics
A content-neutral, skills-oriented concept of education has the unintended effect of depressing reading scores and diminishing the shared content we need for communication and solidarity within the nation as a whole. The red-state/blue-state phenomenon is just one sign of this decline of commonality. Lack of communication between generations and a general lack of trust between groups are others. People who cannot communicate well with one another do not trust one another.
