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whole language, "French across the curriculum," constructivism -- it's all here
I will type it up, Ed's will translate, I will post.
Starting with the sudden epidemic of dyslexia amongst French children after schools abandoned phonics in favor of whole language, aka balanced literacy.
Le scandale de l'illettrisme (nouvel obs: the scandal of illiteracy)
dyslexie, vraiment? ) (nouvel obs: true dyslexia?)
Comment en est-on arrivé là? (nouvel obs: How did we get here?)
Lucy Calkins on teaching children to write
instructional casualties in America
curriculum casualties: figures
forcing hearing children to learn as deaf children must
Rory: I frickin' hate whole language!
thank you, whole language
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4 comments:
For some time now, my dad keeps reminding me that the U.S. does not have a monopoly on the "education crisis". He has friends all over the globe and they tend to comment on the same issues. I can't help feeling, however, that we have an advantage. We just may have begun the downward spiral earlier than others. But, who knows.
There's a dissertation on the subject of how and why our lousy education techniques are exported to other countries. I think it was done by an Australian grad student.
I've always wanted to read it.
iirc (and I'm not sure I do iirc), one of the issues was how and why our bad theory & practice becomes worse in the tranlsation.
The Israeli version of the first New Math seems to have been far worse than our own version of it, for instance.
Ron Aharoni talks about this in his American Educator article on arithmetic teaching in Israel.
I don't like phonics either, simply because the rules of English spelling are just plain inconsistent. It's more helpful to identify trends. I suppose grade school is a bit too young to start tossing historical linguistics in their faces (distinguishing Latin versus Germanic words) where you can sort out some of the inconsistencies.
I always sort had the instinct even when young that words like "eat", "learn" or "stoat" were of a different stock than say, "berate" or "ceiling". Of course, I didn't know the whole history of the reason why (like the double vowels in "heat" and "float" were the result of diphthonigisation of certain stressed vowels in Middle English that remerged in Modern English). So I wonder, what happens if you try to teach spelling from a linguistics point of view? Is it too much?
I never really learnt anything from phonics. It sort of already conveyed rules you already tended to know. What I dislike is that for example, children would be told "silent e" at the end always makes the a somewhere near it long, as though there were no exceptions.
Also, the whole idea of "long A, short A" is really based on a conception of English vowels that has not been updated. The teaching of "5 vowels, of 2 lengths" really threw me off when I first started going into linguistics because I still had that lesson I retained from first grade (not to mention that "two lengths of A" really doesn't fit the three or four-fold distinction of hat, are, ate or boar). It took me a while to realise that English actually has around more than a dozen different vowels. English used to have a short-long vowel distinction (like "ate" was pronounced "aahhhhtei", with a literally long a, but "hat" as "haht" with a literally short a).
Then of course, it's interesting to throw away everything they taught you in elementary school when you realise that "e" didn't use to be silent (I remember asking my first grade teacher who invented the silent e, and she was all confused, haha), didn't have stress vowel reduction save for certain ending vowels, such that "melodies" would have been pronounced "may-lo-dee-uhs" in 1500 and not "mel-oh-dee".
English is sort of a unique language in that way. You have to study linguistics to really understand what you were taught in elementary (or primary) school.
But I must say "whole language" looks absurd too. Unless you are ready to teach them the entire phonological-orthographical history of the English language (so they can understand the historical reasons why silent-e has a certain effect on certain vowels), techniques should be viewed as an arsenal towards deciphering the inconsistent code that is English writing, and not as a paradigm.
Phonics can't explain the spelling of many different words. Obviously whole language is even more incapable.
My biggest grudge with the "new syllabuses" is that they often try to extend overarching generalised processes that are so generalised that it doesn't really help the students who take the syllabus. What's this deal with, "organising, reflecting, extending, analysing synthesising" I see in textbooks.
It's as though kids are doing some big abstract process (sort of like those CRITICAL THINKING questions which are not really critical thinking at all).
I evaded the whole "new Math" thing, since I jumped directly to Algebra II after I came back to th US. But my poor sister didn't, and is paying the price.
I love to analyse and conceptualise what happens in math. But I don't want to answer a question like (perhaps listed under a header like "Synthesise", or "synthesize", as you Americans would spell it) "Reflect on why X is blah blah blah, and Extend your answer" or something.
Like really. They could simply ask, WHY, generalise it to all cases of N, make a proof, or something.
Because when I make the proof, that is the biggest sign of "synthesising, reflecting, extending".
But proofs don't have any pragmatic direct application. Whoops.
I always sort had the instinct even when young that words like "eat", "learn" or "stoat" were of a different stock than say, "berate" or "ceiling".
Moats argues that in fact English spelling is far more regular than people realize.
She says that once you understand that English has several root languages, English spelling makes much more sense -- and should be taught with reference to these roots.
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