Talking is just recording what you're thinking. It's not the thing itself. When I'm talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I'm about to say. But it's not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There's certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we're about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting.
–Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
OK, so let’s take some stock of where we’ve been thus far in our explorations of the development of language and literacy.
We’ve spent some time poking at the notion of whether learning to read is unnatural or not, and landed on the conviction that terming it unnatural–though useful as a rhetorical device–may be less precise than recognizing that learning to read and write is more formal, abstract, and distal from the immediate context of human interaction – and thus requires more effort, instruction, and practice to master.
We then turned to the development of language and discovered that even here–despite the ubiquity and swiftness with which native languages develop anew in every child across our species–language may not be as innate and inborn as it may appear.
Both language and literacy have bestowed humanity with sacred powers for the transmission and accumulation of cultural knowledge that seems to–as of yet–have no ceiling beyond that of our own destruction. Whether this is natural or innate or not may be beside the point. What does seem to be clear is that we have something inherited within us that is unfurled and reified by the networks that are riven across our brains through storytelling, interactive dialogue, and shared book reading that connects spoken to written language, and further strengthened with the hardwon fluency we manage to achieve on our own across modalities, texts, and languages.
In my last post, we landed on the idea of a nascent scaffold that we are born with in our brains, which is developed through our daily interactions with one another – and then further accelerated through the reinforcement and extension of written language use.
Before we venture into the wilds of the possible relations between language and thought, I wanted to build on this idea of how our inner scaffolds are most fully realized through speaking, listening, reading, and writing by geeking out about the beauty and wonder of multilingualism.
There is a fertile topsoil we are born with in our brains, imprinted by the interplay of sights and sounds and movement of those who interact with us. This immersive communicative theater, felt first in the womb, roots itself within the immediacy of each moment, even while gesturing at distant realms yet unknown. Climbing towards this mystery with our tongues and thoughts and technology bends the world toward our needs, and allows us to project our inner selves into the past and future. We ride rivers and build highways across our brains. This is our cultural inheritance, our storied legacy of language and literacy.
Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that develops in children with remarkable ease and fluency. Yet questions remain about how we acquire language. Is it innately wired in our brain, or do we learn all facets rapidly from birth?
Two books – Rethinking Innateness and The Language Game – provide us with some fascinating perspectives on language learning that bears implications for how we think about learning to read and write, and furthermore, for how we talk about the power and limitations of AI.
In my last post (yeah, it’s been a long time. I don’t get paid for these, you know), I made the case for the importance of phonics instruction, while acknowledging it should be just about 30 minutes a day in the early grades. But I also pointed out that the quality of that 30 minutes can be highly variable.
Even when you have a program that sequences phonics instruction systematically and explicitly, it needs to be acknowledged that this is only a small part of what is on most teachers’ plates each day. Kindergarten – 2nd grade teachers usually teach most core subjects, and may be drawing upon a panoply of programs they are supposed to be experts in, while managing a bunch of young homo sapiens who have not yet fully developed a prefrontal cortex and the ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. It’s exhausting, to say the least.
Why do I keep harping on the importance of explicit, systematic phonics instruction? I know it bugs some people.
Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?
There is a concept termed diglossia worth exploring in relation to dialects of African American English used in the United States.
What is diglossia?
Diglossia can be defined as “the coexistence of two varieties of the same language throughout a speech community. Often, one form is the literary or prestige dialect, and the other is a common dialect spoken by most of the population.”
I am a nerd, and I skim through a fair number of research papers, both to keep current for my professional role, and because I just like learning about literacy and language.
While I use Zotero to organize some of what I come across, I tend to read through papers on my phone on buses/trains to and from work, or to print out something to read later, so I am not systematic or well-organized about what I pick up from what I read, unfortunately. I do post quotes from articles as I read them on social media, so I can search through my own past feed to find links to research I read. So while I might build my own schema about things as I read more and more stuff, I don’t retain the specific sources.
One of the things I have had in my head regarding literacy interventions is that multicomponent approaches in English tend to be more effective than single component approaches for students who are learning English at school (ELL), and for many other populations as well.
Gaining a clear picture of a student’s language and literacy abilities in both English and their home language is critically important in two scenarios:
the student has just entered your school and speaks another language at home (whether because he is entering the school system in kindergarten or is newly arrived from another country and entering in a later grade)
the student is in a bilingual program
Gaining information in both languages for bilingual students in these situations can portray a completely different spectrum of profiles than when assessing in English only.
My son just entered kindergarten. We received a folder from his teacher with two sets of materials: an overview of the Fundations phonics program (good!), and a list of sight words that he would be expected to memorize each week (um).
This is how the sight word overview began:
Dear Families,
Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?
Sight word are words that do not follow the rules of spelling and therefore must be recognized by sight. The more sight words a student can recognize, the more fluent of a reader they will become.
Language is a uniquely human phenomenon that develops in children with remarkable ease and fluency. Yet questions remain about how we acquire language. Is it innately wired in our brain, or do we learn all facets rapidly from birth?
