Musings about language and literacy and learning
OK, we’re here, at our third paper in our series examining the naturalness, or not, of gaining literacy.
In our last post in a series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1980 by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger, Learning to Read: An Unnatural Act, that provided a counter to Ken and Yetta Goodman’s argument that learning to read is natural, and provided us with a useful analogy: learning to read an alphabetic writing system is a form of cryptanalysis. Using this analogy, Gough and Hillinger drew out a fine-grained distinction between a code and a cipher that allowed them to make some precise observations about the difficulty of breaking the alphabetic cipher that have held up quite well over the years.
In our last post in this series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1976 by Ken and Yetta Goodman that argued that written language is a form of oral language and thus, learned naturally in a literate society through exposure and use in the environment.
In this post, we’ll explore a direct counter to that argument made by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger in 1980.
This is the first post in a series examining the question of what is natural and unnatural in learning to read. In this first post, we’ll unpack a controversial paper from Ken and Yetta Goodman.
In this presentation/paper, the Goodmans make the argument that in a literate society, learning written language is as natural as oral language because it is part of their functional environment.
“Language learning whether oral or written is motivated by the need to communicate, to understand and be understood.”
The most fundamental questions and debates in a field of study can often be the most illuminating to the topic. Debates about the value of literature and the arts today, for example, can still be traced back to Plato and Aristotle.
A fundamental debate related to this blog’s focus has revolved around whether learning to read and write is natural or unnatural. This may at first glance seem a trivial question, but it turns out that the “reading wars” have circled around it. And it seems to surface continuing unresolved tensions between the studies of language and literacy development today.
In my last post, we reviewed a round up of some research on phonology, with clarifications around what we know and what we do not yet know regarding the relation of advanced phonemic awareness training and phonemic proficiency to outcomes for struggling readers.
One piece I briefly mentioned in that post and which I’d like to dig further into is from David Share, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?“
This is an important question to ask, because while research into how children who speak English learn to read in English has become quite substantive (even if still mostly unknown in too many classrooms), there is still quite a bit we don’t know about learning to read in English if you don’t speak English as your first language, and there’s even more we don’t yet know about learning to read in languages other than English.
Here is my Yule time gift to my fellow reading nerds:
I am honored that a version of my blog post about my shift in thinking on phonemic awareness has been published in the latest Nomanis. Do check out this newer version for the research goods. And a big thank you to Tiffany Peltier for pushing my thinking on the matter and sharing much of the research that I cite in that piece. Check out her blog for sound guidance on phonemic awareness instruction.
Along with this criticism against phonological awareness practice without letters, two recent pieces have addressed critiques against David Kilpatrick’s “phonemic proficiency hypothesis” and against advanced phonemic awareness in general as well:
To continue on the phonological tip, David Share, most well known for his “self-teaching” hypothesis of reading, also has a recent piece, “Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia” that provides some further food for thought on the relation of phonology to print and to dyslexia. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in this paper — one of the takeaways I had was the insight that dylexia only becomes “‘visible’ in literate societies.” In a pre-literate world, we didn’t need to recall “addresses, telephone numbers, the days of the week or months of the year, foreign names and places,” for example, so spoken-language phonological weaknesses may have existed, but don’t surface until the sub-lexical work needed for print. In other words, the “phonemic awareness” problem children with dyslexia have isn’t just about phonemic awareness, it is related to a phonological issue that only becomes most evident in the demands of phonemic awareness required for reading with an alphabetic system.
He also has a great passage on learning the “infrastructure of the orthography”:
“In addition to learning the specific symbol-sound mappings of the orthography being learned, the learner must “get inside words”, go below the level of meaning and penetrate their sound structure. This phonological analysis or “meta-linguistic” awareness is an inescapable pre-requisite for literacy learning enabling the learner to exploit the combinatoriality of writing, decipher novel letter strings, match up spellings and pronunciations, and begin the process of building the orthographic lexicon by unitizing or chunking sub-lexical symbols into higher-order meaning units—the key to rapid automatic word recognition. It follows that any difficulties that a novice reader may have in processing speech sounds (e.g., hearing loss) or difficulties (in the absence of hearing impairment)) in processing the nuances of phonology (speech sound disorder, dyslexia) will almost invariably impair learning to read. Here, the evidence is incontrovertible and goes well beyond phonological awareness to early pre-literate spoken language competencies in processing (receptive and expressive) the sounds of speech as discussed earlier. Phonology, therefore, is necessarily a major source of variability in reading ability and hence a core deficit (or at least one core deficit) among struggling readers whether dyslexic or non-dyslexic.” [bold added]
There’s much more to say on phonemic awareness — David Share has another recent piece in ILA, “Is the Science of Reading Just the Science of Reading English?” well worth unpacking, but I’ll leave that for a separate post.
Also worth spending your time investigating — I highly recommend watching all three of Mark Seidenberg and Molly Farry-Thorn’s Miniseries on Phonemes and Phoneme Awareness. I found the first two especially enlightening and clarifying.
Enjoy geeking out in between some grog, coquitos, and COVID minimal family time, and wishing you a most restful and restorative break.
#phonology #phonemicawareness #research #dyslexia #Kilpatrick
Sharing a fun paper to geek out on with my fellow language nerds, “How children learn to communicate discriminatively” by Michael Ramscar. In this paper, the author makes an argument that the contrasting forces of “discriminability” and “regularity” both serve to make language something we pick up pretty much naturally, even if we don’t know all the words in the language.
“…the existence of regular and irregular forms represents a trade-off that balances the opposing communicative pressures of discriminability and learnability in the evolution of communicative codes. From this perspective, the existence of frequent, well-discriminated irregular forms serves to make important communicative contrasts more discriminable and thus also more learnable. By contrast, because regularity entails less discriminability, learners’ representations of lexico-morphological neighbourhoods will tend to be more generic, which causes the forms of large numbers of less frequent items to be learned implicitly, compensating for the incompleteness of individual experience.”
The language of this paper is, as you can see, a bit opaque, so much of this went just a bit over my head, but I found the arguments fascinating given the debates that happen about how to teach the “irregular” spelling of so many words in the English language. Here, the author seems to suggest (I may be over-extrapolating as I often tend to do, but this is what got me geeking out on it) that in fact there is some level of constructive tension between language forms that show up again and again, and the language forms that are more infrequent, but thus inherently gain more of our attention. This relates to the theory of “statistical learning” with which we not only learn language, but also when we map a language to its written form.
The author later provides what I thought was a very concrete thought experiment that demonstrates this principle when he moved from morphology to names:
Imagine that 33% of males are called John, and only 1% Cornelius. In this scenario, learning someone is named Cornelius is more informative than learning their name is John (Corneliuses are better discriminated by their names than Johns). On the other hand, Johns will be easier to remember (guessing ‘John’ will be correct 1/3 of the time). Further, although the memory advantage of John relies on its frequency, the memorability of Cornelius also benefits from this: Cornelius is easier to remember if the system contains fewer names (also, as discussed earlier, if John is easier to say than Cornelius, this will reduce the average effort of name articulation).
What is also interesting about the author’s argument in this paper connecting information theory to language learning is that these assertions are empirically testable:
“Whether these mathematical points about sampling and learning actually apply to human learners are empirical questions. This account makes clear predictions in regard to them: if learners are exposed to sets of geometrically distributed forms, they should acquire models of their probabilities that better approximate one another than when learning from other distributions. Conversely, if learning from geometric distributions does not produce convergence, it would suggest the probabilistic account of communication described here (indeed, any probabilistic account of communication) is false.”
There’s a lot more in the paper to nerd out on–I found the section on verbs especially interesting, for example, given that it connects to some other tidbits on the power and challenge of verbs I’ve come across before:
I’ll leave the rest to you!
#verbs #regularity #irregularity #learning #language #statisticallearning #probability #discriminability #informationtheory #form
As I was preparing for a session I was facilitating, I went down a rabbit hole on language use and cognition. I know saying “went down the rabbit hole” typically bears a negative connotation, but I gotta say, I love me some getting lost in meandering exploratory nerdy byalleyways. While rabbit holes may oft lead nowhere but to wasteful skimming of social news feeds, I believe that they can also lead to fortuitous and deeper connections that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise.
Case in point: whilst engaged in aforementioned spelunking, I discovered an absolutely wonderful paper synthesizing various theories of language, and I say wonderful because it manages to thread together varying theoretical perspectives from a stance of learning and curiosity, rather than pitting them against one another, as is so often the case. The paper is Essentials of a Theory of Language Cognition by Nick Ellis, and while it may be heady and academic, there’s something playful, even poetic, in the author’s use of language (so meta!).
By example, here’s a couple of gems:
“Language and usage are like the shoreline and the sea. Usage affects learning and it affects languages too. So, our understanding of language learning requires the detailed investigation of usage, its content, its participants, and its contexts—the micro level of human social action, interaction, and conversation; the meso level of sociocultural and educational institutions and communities; and the macro level of ideological structures.”
“Language is the quintessence of distributed cognition. Language is ever situated, either in the moment and the concrete context or by various means of mental extension to reflect prior or imaginary moments.”
Dear reader, you may or may not be aware that I have another (not updated any more) blog entitled, Schools & Ecosystems, wherein I geeked out about complex adaptive systems and how ecological concepts relate to the physical and social environment of schools. So you can imagine my nerdy delight when I discovered a connection in this paper between complex adaptive systems thinking and LANGUAGE! Oh my. It was like two previously schizophrenically disparate selves suddenly merged into one.
Here’s a couple of quotes regarding language as a complex adaptive system:
Language as a CAS [complex adaptive system] involves the following key features: The system consists of multiple agents (the speakers in the speech community) interacting with one another. The system is adaptive; that is, speakers’ behavior is based on their past interactions, and current and past interactions together feed forward into future behavior.
De Bot, Lowie, and Verspoor (DBL&V) present a persuasive case for language as a complex dynamic system where cognitive, social, and environmental factors continuously interact, where creative communicative behaviors emerge from socially co-regulated interactions, where there is little by way of linguistic universals as a starting point in the mind of ab initio language learners or discernable end state, where flux and individual variation abound, where cause-effect relationships are nonlinear, multivariate and interactive, and where language is not a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes.
In a previous post, we looked at some interesting findings from neuroscience that suggested language in the brain is mostly associated with parts for communication, rather than thinking. So this idea of language as a complex adaptive system that emerges based on social use within a particular community makes quite a bit of sense.
One of the other things that jumped out at me as a theme emerging from these various theories of language was the idea of language as an ecology: something dynamic and situated within a particular time, place, and community of relationships. It’s a beautiful — and more accurate — way to think of language that allows us to acknowledge the unique language ecologies we can each have as individuals and as members of communities — most especially for multilinguals who bring a rich repertoire of linguistic experiences and cultural knowledge.
This paper is also a wonderful companion to Annie Murphy Paul’s book, The Extended Mind, which isn’t focused on language per se, but connects to many of the theories in this paper and also has some Easter eggs for language focused nerds, such as an exploration of the use of gestures as a precursor and accelerator of language.
Somehow I had not stumbled across “usage-based” linguistic research or theory previously, so I’m excited to dig more into this realm. Seems like it has a lot to offer, especially as the reading research crowd begins to unpack more the language connection to reading (importance of phonology, morphology, incidental learning, statistical learning, etc).
#linguistics #language #ecology #complexadaptivesystem #interaction
I have somewhat eclectic book reading habits, and I take pleasure in reading haphazardly (i.e. whatever I happen to come across). After growing bored with Moby Dick recently, I happened across a copy of Siddhartha Mukerjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
The book is compellingly written, narrating an expansive overview of the history of the treatment of cancer, while at the same time painting portraits of individual researchers, clinicians, and patients that draws the reader in. It makes oncology research and clinical practice sound exciting, which is no small feat.