Standards of Literacy

[ono no komachi]

I heard recently, via a friend who has a child in the relevant council's education system, that one local council's nominal literacy standard is for a 14-year old child to be able to read The Sun.

Made me wonder what current opinion is regarding literacy levels amongst 'the youth of today'. Any takers?

[the exile]

I think, given modern teaching methods, children reach the level they wish to attain. :cry:

[John Self]

What are "modern teaching methods"? (Often referred to as "trendy teaching methods".) Have they changed since I was schooled in reading in the late 70s and early 80s?

I am pretty sure standards of literacy are better than they were a hundred and fifty years ago. Then, someone of my background would have been shinning up chimneys for a slice of bread and a pat on the head a week.

[Colyngbourne]

How much detail do you want on teaching methods? At the moment reading seems to be taught via the phonics route, teaching all the phonemes in the reception year (and before if the nursery is doing its job). Some schools follow a strict reading scheme, others combine the best of various reading schemes (the amusing Oxford Reading Tree, the plain ol' disgusting Ginn 360), and a variety of unconnected texts. The old 'look and say' method appears to have been discarded, though visual recognition still plays a part in learning to read, and contextualisation too.
The school I am currently connected with uses Jolly Phonics to teach the phonemes, others use the old Letterland scheme (which I used to teach my own four to read).

[pandop]

Phonics has made a comback in recent years, as education busybodies (otherwise known as the ministry against education) have finally realised it works.

The trendy teaching methods so often disparaged in the press are the 'whole word' approach where in many cases the children are allowed to get away with a close guess :roll: this system does not work so well on its own, but is ok when used with phonics

I could read before I went to school, and I guess my mum (being an old fashioned type of teacher) used phonics to teach me

Standards of literacy are better now, than before there was compulsory education, but are not so good as they were in the 50s/60s (teaching underwent some radical changes in the 70s)

I agree that some reading schemes were/are dire (those that I can remember anyway, I ran out of reading scheme books by age 8), but equally some were quite good - we had 'Wide Range Readers' that contained a mixture of fiction, history, science/nature etc - and they were well written (sufficiently so that I remember the story of the Bell Rock lighthouse well enough to be excited about next weeks Seven Wonders of the Industrial World (Beeb 2, 9pm thurs - very good series, I want the book for Christmas)

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

I see the problem as being not so much teaching the child to read, as having enough time to listen to readers, change books over (with security measures about allowing children to wander in school to where the books are kept). My oldest had to head off into the junior school when he was in the infants to find the correct level of book for him. Even with classroom assistants there is very little time to hear/assess children and keep the reading moving (since few read at home). In some schools I have seen children only receive one reading book per week (this is a large print 16-32 page book) and are not allowed to change it more frequently. Reading is of course encouraged in schools but in a very limited way.

[Lucoid]

As I am not a parent or closely related to any child of primary school age, I have no idea what things are like now, but as a child of the 80s (born 1979) I was encouraged greatly in reading by both my teachers and my parents (I still have affectionate memories of the smell of the old sweet tin I kept my little cards of words in - odd, isn't it), and I'm sure I remember taking home a different book each time I finished one - I'm sure there were no limits on how often we could change them.

As a 9 year old I was trusted by the teacher who had taught me the year before to take home her volumes of Lord of the Rings to read. Would this happen now, does anyone know?

[pandop]

Luciod,

Snap - we are the same age! I am also pleased to say that I enjoyed reading at school very much - and was similarly encouraged, but I am sad to say things have deteriorated since then (although the new literacy hour may have addressed this. I am not sure) as there is so much emphasis on so much percent of time on this or that (or whatever is causing the current panic) and there is seldom any time left over for the children just to read - or to be read to

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

My four are aged 5 (today! :D) up to 11 1/2 and I spent a fair amount of time in school one way or another. I have the impression that the literacy hour is on the whole a good thing but little time is made available for reading in the class, and even less for that wonderful fifteen minutes I remember the teacher finishing the school day with, when we used to sit and listen to a chapter of a book (sometimes drifting with our heads on the desks). There is even less time for creative writing, which puts pressure on in Year 6 when the terrible, awful SATs ruin that last year of primary school. Many schools run creative writing classes outside class time to catch up with this skill, ready for the test.

LOTR? Well, my nine year old was given Little Women and Sense and Sensibility last year, and managed the former with a little help and encouragement from me, but it's a rare thing and schools don't seem to have the banks of books and libraries that I recall. (My old senior school had 20,000 books in its library.)

[Lucoid]

That's an impressive school library.

(By the way, though I was leant LOTR and diligently read the whole damn thing, I don't think I actually understood what the hell was going on.)

[Lucoid]

My primary school teacher friend has goven me the following information about literacy in her class.The children in my class get to
change
their school reading scheme book 3 times a week aslong as they have
finished
the book. We do not have the time in the week to change them anymore
frequently than this. However I encourage parents to make sure that
this
book is not the only thing the child reads and that they have access to
books and comics at home. I do not have the time to listen to them
read
individually but I have classroom assistants and a few parents who come
and
hear them read for me. They are also allowed to take home a book from
the
reading corner in my classroom as these books are more interesting to
the
children then the scheme books. Every day I have a guided reading
group
this is a group of 5/6 children of similar ability, we read a book
together
and discuss strategies of how to work out unfamilar words and to use
expression and lots of things like that. My children also have story
time
at the end of each day apart from Thursday when they have show and
tell. In
the first 15 minutes of the day they have quiet reading and parents are
invited to come and read a book with their child, unfortunately not
many
parents do this. I think the problem with the Literacy hour is that
people
are too scared to use it in a way that will help the children most. It
doesn't have to be as prescribed as what people were led to believe at
the
beginning and this is not always a useful way to teach. We have found
the
problem with the literacy hour is that there is a lot of work towards
phonics and reading but writing standards sometimes slip, because
children
are just not given enough time to write independently. That's why
we've
taken guided reading out of the hour and within the hour each day I sit
with
a group and we do a guided writing activity, to help them develop their
writing skills. I also tend to not teach a proper 'literacy hour' on
the
days when I want the children to write a poem/story so they have enough
time
to do this.

[Colyngbourne]

That sounds a thorough and well-thought out approach to the subject and to the division of 'the literacy hour'. I really like the silent reading idea in school - this is something we do at home on evenings sometimes, all 5 or 6 of us sitting and just reading (harrumphing at annoying bits, snorting at funny bits).

[pandop]

and it sounds remarkably like the system the teacher I had in my second year at junior school used, before any of this was the current media worry!

We had an hour a day set aside for one of four activities - poetry (reading and writing), reading, story writing and fact writing (often summarising from other books) and then we could choose what to do on the other day - as we were in groups there was no pressure on any one type of book, and we had plenty of practice of reading and writing on our own and with help

Also, this teacher was the last to read us stories at the end of the day, and he read us some wonderful things (Stig of the Dump, The Iron Man are just 2 that I remember)

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

That also sounds so enlightened :D My own favourite end-of-school-day reads were Beverley Nichols' The Tree That Sat Down and Mollie Hunter's The Haunted Mountain, which have been favourites (at home) with my kids too.

[Lucoid]

Mine were Famous Five and The Hobbit.

[skanky]

This article is relevant to this thread:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1052646,00.html

[Colyngbourne]

This article is spot-on. Children re-drafting endlessly is invidious. I'd heard the Pullman quote about the 15 mins prep and 45 min 'test' before and how his ideal response would be to write the story first and write the 'plan' (story structure, beginning, middle, end) afterwards. Unfortunately in real life it is almost impossible to do. A child of mine took SATs last spring and is quite disastrous at punctuation, especially speechmarks. He usually writes reasonably innovative stories with a few jumps in action and unexplained appearances of handy props that are common in children's writing but he was instructed before the test by his teachers that he must not on any account write any direct speech in his creative writing piece, because if he did, he would certainly mis-punctuate it and lose marks. Can you imagine how impossible this is?

Needless to say, he ignored the teacher's instruction and did include some direct speech (I think the starter for the story was 'You are in a queue for a toyshop when...') and gained the 'correct' level mark for his age.

[Lucoid]

I knew things were stupidly rigid but I hadn't realised just how ridiculous the whole SATS/curriculum thing had become. Where's the creativity and fun in teaching and learning now? How's anyone meant to be inspired?

This thread has been a real eye-opener to me. I just hope things have improved by the time I have kids.

[skanky]

Depends on when you plan to have tham. After all, new government = new education/health complete revamp.

[Lucoid]

Not for a long long time according to The Partner, so I suppose things could be all hunkydory in education by the time they're school age.

[amner]

That's very optimistc of you, Lucoid.
.

[Colyngbourne]

And in the 13 years between a theoretical child starting and finishing school, all hellish manner of educational reform could have been and gone and been again (just to cheer you up) :wink:

[Lucoid]

Too true.

[pandop]

yup - my year at school was a guinea pig for many things, and I think every year since has been too

Hazel

[NottyImp]

How's anyone meant to be inspired?

Good citizens don't need to be inspired, Lucoid, they need to be able to follow directions, fill in forms and co-operate with assessment on a regular basis. Oh, and work for peanuts as well, especially in the public services.

"Inspiration" and "creativity" would be excised from education completely if governments of any stripe had their way.

[skanky]

Indeed. I could - without too much effort - dig up quotes from US politicians saying as much (note: one of them is Woodrow Wilson, so we're not talking about non-entities here).

[bakunin_the_cat]

Sadly, I'd have to agree. Creativity is largely seen as an inconvenience, to be squashed out of kids in the first five years of school. After that (and even along side) they can learn how to give the answers the teachers want, conform to society and become good citizens.

People who try and break out, are branded dropouts and losers, until one of those losers manages, against the odds, to create the next big thing. This is when society begs to be able to lick the toes of the ones that they previously dismissed and despised. If these 'losers' didn't need money to pay the rent and avoid working for McDonalds, they'd probably tell society to go to hell, and who could blame them? Generally this doesn't happen though, people do need money, want some kind of recognition after the years spent out in the cold, want some kind of reward for the work they've done, the joy they've brought people. Unfortunately this is where the rot starts. The first few years you can still say you're trying to change the system from within, but sooner or later you get subsumed into the great machine, and become part of the establishment that others will fight to get out of. And the wheel spins on.

Sorry, went into a bit of a rant-o-rama there. I started off, just responding to the thread but somehow, the red mist descends.

[Lucoid]

Well, it's important to be passionate about this stuff.

[joy]

If they are just being trained to fill out forms - why can't the university applicants I deal with manage to do it properly! Grumble.

The bit I hated in school was reading round the class. Not because I couldn't do it, but listening to everyone else (and I'm sure the rest felt the same about me) was horribly painfull. It took all the joy out of any book and certainly put me off them.

[pandop]

I agree - it probably isn't pc of me to admit it, but there were some people I wanted to drag the words out of (that was when I didn't give up listening, and just read ahead at my own speed)

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

Me too. We did Robert Westall's The Machinegunners (which I still love) and reading-round-the-class killed it stone dead.

[Lucoid]

Shakespeare was always the worst. It's stuff that's MEANT to be read out loud yet most people could put no feeling into it whatsoever.

[pandop]

thats cos they are 'embarassed' - mainly that they might be good at it! as we know being good at anything other than sport (and sometimes art) is a death sentence in most 'bog standard' comprehensives :evil:

Hazel

[Lucoid]

But I didn't go to a 'bog standard comprehensive' - it was a grammar school where entry was by the 11-plus, so everyone was quite capable. But I think you're right about people being embarassed - teen angst and all that.

[pandop]

Which play was it - the boys in my class (top set English, we were streamed at our comp) got terribly embarrased by Romeo and Juliet - as the version we had 'helpfully' explained all the innuendo .....

Hazel

[Lucoid]

Romeo and Juliet was our first, but fun and relatively accessible so not so problematic as Macbeth which we studied later as, other than the opening witches scene, many of the class seemed to struggle with the language and drama of the rest of it - though we were older and there wasn't so much embarassment, there was still plenty of dull, unemotional reading.

[pandop]

If you don't mind me asking, how old are you? It seems we have done remarkably similar books at school - I too did Romeo and Juliet followed by Macbeth

Hazel

[Lucoid]

24.

[pandop]

Snap

Hazel

[skanky]

Count yourselves lucky. We did "Henry IVth Part One" - guraranteed to put anybody off old Will for life. It's the literary equivalent of studying, in music, only the bridge of any song.

[pandop]

I didn't do that one until university, and then we werent studying it as literature per se, more for how Shakespeare's history plays have influenced later views of those kings

interesting module, taught by the wonderful Raplh Griffiths

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

we looked at Midsummer Night's Dream as our first intro to Shakespeare aged 11/12 - which was useless with all the boys sniggering at the fairy bits, Bottom, etc. Then at O and A Level we had the joy of three of the four main tragedies - Macbeth, Lear and Othello. What a downer!

[pandop]

Did they want you to slit your wrists or something?

Hazel

[Colyngbourne]

Quite possibly :? Now I seriously think about it, others of our set texts were similarly cheery reads - Wuthering Heights, Death of a Salesman - we have to be thankful for the slightly upbeat TKAMockingbird and FFTMaddingCrowd. French set texts weren't a lot better for their mood-enhancing qualities.