Language & Literacy

After the recent mass murders by disturbed teenagers with all-too readily available assault weapons, it’s hard to see a way forward given the dysfunction of our political system. Short of federal gun regulation, there are other areas we can influence that could help to prevent troubled teenagers from making plans to hurt themselves and others.

There’s a debate that has flared up around mass shootings that over-simplifies the issues into gun control vs. mental health. Yet these both need to be part of the conversation. We need to decrease access to assault weapons, while increasing access to sustained mental health services.

One of the keynotes at the NYC Learning and the Brain conference I’d just posted about was by Jonathan Gottschall on “The Story Paradox,” and which was based on his book of the same name.

His talk was compelling enough that I promptly read his book as well. Like Gottschall, I’ve done some pondering about Plato’s long ago warnings against the power of the written word back when I did a nerdy deep dive into the roots of close reading (“Close Reading: The Context of an Exigesis“), so this idea that storytelling can be a double edged sword resonated with me. And his warnings about the dangers of storytelling, particularly through social media, seemed an important part of the puzzle of the rise of Trump, the far right, and QAnon, amongst other phenomenon such as anti-vaxxers during this turbulent age dominated by Facebook and Twitter.

I wrote a little while ago about Andrew Watson’s excellent book, “The Goldilocks Map.” I had an opportunity to attend a Learning and the Brain conference, which was what sparked Andrew’s own journey into brain research and learning to balance openness to new practice with a healthy dose of skepticism. In fact, Andrew was one of the keynote presenters at this conference – and I think his trenchant advice provided an important grounding for consideration of many of the other presentations.

I think there’s something in the nature of presenting to a general audience of educators that compels researchers to attempt to derive generalized implications of their research that can all too easily overstep the confines of their very specialized and specific domains.

There was a relatively recent Hechinger Report article by Jill Barshay, “PROOF POINTS: Researchers blast data analysis for teachers to help students” that seemed to indict any and all assessments and data use in schools as a royal waste of time. It bothered me because the only source cited explicitly in the article was a 2020 opinion piece by a professor who similarly vaguely discusses “interim assessment” and doesn’t provide explicit citations of her sources.

I tweeted out my annoyance to this effect.

To Ms. Barshay’s great credit, she responded with equanimity and generosity to my tweet with multiple citations.

Since she took that time for me, I wanted to reciprocate by taking the time to review her sources with an open mind, as well as reflect on where I might land after doing so.

A recent paper caught my eye, Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation, and despite the immediate mind glazing effect of the word “ontogenesis,” I found the model well worth digging into and sharing here—and it may bear relevance to conversations on orthographic mapping.

• Bordag, D., Gor, K., & Opitz, A. (2021). Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000250

How we learn words and all their phonological, morphological, orthographic, and semantic characteristics is a fascinating topic of research—most especially in the areas of written word recognition and in the learning of a new language.

*Back in 2013, I wrote a series of posts for the Core Knowledge Foundation blog that were titled, “Promethean Plan: A Teacher on Fulfilling the Intent of the Common Core.” Unfortunately, they don’t appear to be available there anymore, so I thought it could be fun to re-post them collected here as one post, both to archive it and also to see whether the mistakes I outlined were indeed part of the squandering of the opportunity presented by the CCSS.

My 2013 classroom self, as you will see, was a bit more grandiose, but methinks I made a few good points. I’ll leave the rest to your consideration.*

We recently examined Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger’s 1980 paper, Learning to Read: An Unnatural Act, in which they made a neat analogy of learning to decode an alphabetic writing system to cryptanalysis. As a part of this cryptanalysis, children aren’t simply learning to decode, but more precisely, learning to decipher the written code. This distinction highlights that learning to read in English is not driven by paired-associative learning, but rather by internalizing an algorithm, a statistical, systematic, quasi-regular mapping.

This point is a sharp one because what they were saying is that we can’t teach such a cipher directly. We can’t just hand a kid the codebook.

So when I saw a reference recently to another Gough paper called Reading, spelling, and the orthographic cipher, co-written in 1992 with Connie Juel and Priscilla Griffith, I knew I needed to read this one, too.

I’ll never forget the moment when I realized that the students in a school I was supporting had not read anything more than a few pages of text for close to two months.

There were a myriad of potential excuses for it. They were ramping up for test prep season, there was a spring break and a snow day, they had cycles of interim assessments that broke into their instructional time, they rotated between reading and writing units during core ELA time, and had been in the middle of a writing cycle, etc.

It took me a while to see it clearly, as I came only once a week, at most, and couldn’t always see the full picture. But then it hit me like a ton of bricks once I did. How could students improve their literacy when they weren’t expected to read for sustained and structured periods of time daily?

The first thing that happened to reading is writing. For most of our history, humans have been able to speak but not read. Writing is a human creation, the first information technology, as much an invention as the telephone or computer.

—Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight

What is (un)natural about learning to read and write? We began our quest with this question, prompted by two references in a line in a David Share paper.

Like learning to read (English) which Gough famously dubbed “unnatural” [43], see also [3], becoming aware of the constituent phonemes in spoken words does not come “naturally”.

—Share, D. L. (2021). Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia. Brain Sciences, 11(11), 1510.

This led us to unpack three foundational papers from 1976 to 1992 that have provided us with some surprising twists and turns and even moments, dare I say, of clarity.