Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Googlemaster strikes again

In the Comments section of an earlier post (Wrong again) I was banging on about nominalizations being essential to academic writing because a nominalization lets you combine a noun and a verb and then use another verb to write about the new noun-verb combination...and Google Master made the point a lot more succinctly:

Heh. The word "nominalization" is a nominalization.

I wish I'd thought of that.

bad writing, bad thinking

From the Atlantic article (Grace's post  here):

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects.

"Writing is thinking."

You hear that, and, if you're me, you believe it.

But what does it mean, exactly?

I'm thinking Douglas Biber's work on corpus linguistics has light to shed. Will try to translate my thoughts re: Biber into a set of coherent sentences in the not too distant future.

Magister Green on how the Greeks and Romans taught

Magister Green on the question of whether you can "pick up" the grammar of writing through reading:

Going back to ancient times, the Greeks and Romans taught their children not rules of traditional grammar but rather the works of the great poets and thinkers who had come before. In particular, emphasis was placed on memorizing and modeling one's own schoolwork on the works of past masters. If we accept that students can learn grammatical rules through exposure as opposed to explicit instruction (which I do accept), the fact that schools in general (public and private) refuse to teach, much less acknowledge, the works of "masters" would go a long way towards explaining why students today know so little of the rules of traditional grammar.

I've been only vaguely aware of the 'copy work' practices of the ancients (and of the Well-Trained Mind people), but I've come to be a fan.

I think Magister Green is right.

One reason students don't write (or punctuate) grammatically today is that they aren't spending enough time reading, studying, and 'mastering' important works under the direct guidance of their teachers.

I think there's probably something missing in terms of fluency training in the early grades, too: possibly just basic fluency practice in writing and punctuating simple Subject+Verb+Object and Subject+Verb+Complement sentences. But I don't know.

I speculate that 'basic fluency training' is missing because C. was reading important works under the direct guidance of teachers in high school (though not before then), yet his writing still had lots of comma splices. I asked him how he finally got rid of them, and he said he thinks his dad just corrected so many of them that he finally started to see them himself.

Which reminds me: I need to get a post up on Morningside and "discrimination training."

Morningside does not seem to teach "grammar" at all, really. They teach writing via sentence combining, and they don't teach sentence parsing or sentence diagramming. Kent Johnson told me he teaches grammar terminology after students have learned to write, and he teaches the terminology at that point because students have to know it for state tests.

I don't know how I feel about that. I gainsay nothing Morningside does; I've seen the results with my own eyes (and in a writing class, too). But the idea of 'withholding' or avoiding the vocabulary of grammar bothers me nevertheless. I wish somebody had taught me how to diagram a sentence back in the day!

On the other hand, I may be looking at it the wrong way. The Morningside program doesn't avoid teaching the vocabulary of grammar so much as it delays formal instruction in grammar.

Maybe that's the right sequence. Reading and writing first, grammar second.

I'm going to come back to this later.