Stop what you are doing and read this.

If you get a chance, listen to BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week this week.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019lvg7/Book_of_the_Week_Stop_What_Youre_Doing_and_Read_This_A_Bed._A_Book._A_Mountain/

I just heard Jeannette Winterson read the second episode and have ordered the book from Blackwells.

It is a book of essays on the process of reading and the impact it has had on the authors' lives.  It  has already had an airing in the book reviews, including articles and letters in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/30/humans-hardwired-read-books?INTCMP=SRCH

I was particularly struck by Winterson saying that "reading at a high level"  (not necessarily hard material) needs a process of acclimatisation.  When successful it is a way through to the world of "private thinking" and "a trained mind," with the freeedom to roam (she uses a lot a metaphors from a book she loved reading about climbing mountains).

Rather controversially she says that ADHD could be prevented by helping a person immerse themselves in the private thinking world of reading....  What do you think?

Thoughts from the Skills Conference

Many thanks to everyone who came to my workshops at the Skills Conference in Nottingham on 8/11/11.  See: http://wordpress.bksb.co.uk/SkillsConference/index.php/category/the-skills-conference-2011/
There were lots of very stimulating conversations and my ideas seemed to be well received.  This gives me inspiration to continue on the quest to write that book and get my recommendations more widely disseminated.

Here are some initial thoughts:

• It was good to hear from Ofsted that the revised common inspection framework (due to be introduced in September 2012) will embed a strengthened emphasis on the quality of teaching and learning.  You can still contribute to the consultation on the new CIF  for a couple of weeks: http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/common-inspection-framework-2012.  It certainly means any ideas to raise standards in the teaching of reading should be welcome.  I still see variable coverage of reading in my inspection of  literacy and functional skills.
• Yes, comprehension is the key goal of reading, but  I realised in responding to a query that comprehension comes at so many different levels that it is hard to pin it down, let alone measure it.  It could be a look in someone's eye as you see they "get the point" or even a different intonation as you hear them read a sentence with understanding.  So many of our traditional measures of comprehension  rely on memory, so that the "score" can often get corrupted.
• A practical thing to do might be to try to articulate some sample SMART targets for ILPs for practitioners to capture progress in developing reading skills.  Watch this space for input on that!

Let me know what you think.

Reading about reading

I have been doing a proof read of my thesis this week, for resubmission, and decided to use Texthelp Read &Write  www.texthelp.com -  to help with the process.  It has been a great aid, enabling me to spot the tiniest of typos that slipped through the net the first time.  It also, somehow, helped me read with greater awareness of meaning.  I actually had to pause it on occasion to stop and think, not because I was displeased with what I had written, but because I perceived the message with greater clarity.

The reader (I chose "Emily", a UK English reader, and speeded her up slightly, to get through the task in an efficient way) has a pleasant voice and nice intonation.  She helped me spot errors of punctuation (e.g. if the apostrophe was the wrong way round she told me it was a 'back quote.'  She read 'et al.' reassuringly as 'and others.'

Most amusing, however, was the way she chose to read 'reading.'  When it starts with a capital letter, as in "Reading is a complex process," she read it as a town in Berkshire,UK.  She also mixed up the present and past tenses of the verb 'to read,' (obviously spelled the same) but I wasn't able to tell precisely what rule of grammar she was going by!

Yes I know should train Emily with different pronunciations, but actually I quite like her idiosyncrasies.

Congratulations

Congratulations to the Gatehouse Books' title "Yes we can read" which this month won the People's Book Prize 2011 award for special achievement.  I reviewed  the book way back in March 2010 when it was first out (see the archive for March 2010).  It has great potential as an integrated approach to phonics and reading through meaning.

You can read more about this book on   http://yeswecanread.co.uk/  

I would love to hear from anyone who has used this resource with adults.

Reading tests - are they all non-sense?

There was a lot of fuss earlier this year about new tests of reading that are being piloted with 6 year olds this summer.  The press picked up on the fact that these tests would include a set of non-words in an attempt to screen children for difficulty with phonics.  The anti-testing lobby said they thought this might confuse children Wasn't reading about reading with enjoyment and interest in meaning? Non-words, by definition have no meaning.

However, I am on the side of the testers on this one.  If you are going to try to identify readers who find sounding out words hard, then a test including non-words is good.  The result is not biased by prior knowledge of whole word vocabulary.  Readers may still use visual cues as well as phonic ones when trying to work out the non-word item (looking for patterns similar to those found in real words) but not for the word as a whole.  Testers can observe whether the difficulty is in segmenting or blending sounds.

I use a test of non-words in my reading research and also in diagnosing adults with dyslexia. I favour Martin Turner's non-word test, which used to be freely available on the Dyslexia Action website.  You can still get hold of it if you do a Google search. I only use it in combination with other tests, however, as it is not powerful enough on its own. 

With adults, you can never be entirely sure whether a difficulty with non-words is evidence of a phonological processing difficulty or just that they were never taught phonics (depending which era they attended school).  Also some adults can't avoid making the items into real words in an effort to make some sense.  As always I would ask an adult about their experience and what they thought of the test to get more insight.

Coming back to the screening of children at the age of six.  Finding out that a child struggles with phonics at that early stage may well be useful.  However, there will always be some readers for whom phonics is a more difficult route to learning.  It is to be hoped that a poor result in the screening would not just lead to more and more intensive phonics, but to a closer look at why they child is not succeeding and perhaps trying a different method.

Kate Cain and David Saldana

On the final day of the BDA conference, Kate Cain (University of Lancaster) spoke very engagingly about her insights into reading comprehension.  She covered the fact that good comprehension is an integrative process that allows the reader to draw information and make inferences when linking different sentences within a text.  It is also a constructive process, as the reader brings in knowledge about the world from long term memory.  Her research is all about children (what a shame we can't persuade more people to apply these sort of insights to adults).  She has really added to our knowledge of what it means to be a poor comprehender.  I have bought her book, which I hope to review here.

Incidentally, she, like many theoreticians, says that poor comprehension is not the same as dyslexia, which  applies primarily to word recognition difficulties.  What do we think about that, adult dyslexia practitioners?

Day 2 of the BDA conference

I was particularly stimulated by Laura Shapiro (Aston University) talking about the factors that predict a child's level of competence with word recognition and reading comprehension at the very beginning of their school careers and then up to 4 years down the line.

Briefly, she found one of the best predictors of early success with both word recognition and comprehension is print knowledge (including letters, digits and high frequency words). Also important at the early stages are phonological awareness, verbal short term memory and rapid naming ability. A couple of years later, phonological awareness become less of a factor for word recognition, though is still has an effect for comprehension, along with other factors including the extent of a child's vocabulary.

I would love to know if there are similar factors governing the reading attainment of an adult struggling with reading. It would be really good if we could get some funding to do the large scale quantitative research that Laura does, but with adults... what a dream...

I also came across a young researcher from LSE (Sebastian Boo) who has been doing some work evaluating memory strategies to enhance adult dyslexic learners' range of vocabulary (concentrating on word meanings). It struck me that there are some parallels here with my work on vocabulary development.

I am looking forward to hearing Kate Cain talk about reading comprehension tomorrow.