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CHAPTER 5
Language in The Early Years
5.1 There has been a great deal of valuable work both here and on the other side of the Atlantic into the processes by which a child acquires language and the influences operating upon them. The chief of these is his home environment, and we shall recommend various ways in which parents may be helped to a better understanding of their own vitally important role. We shall also make suggestions about the kind of specific attention to language to be given within the nursery and infant school. Before this, however, it will be useful to review what is known about the way in which a child acquires language and the forces governing how it develops.
5.2 The point at which a child begins to connect two or three words is usually between the ages of 18 and 24 months. To reach this stage he has developed the capacity to imitate his parents, but he does not imitate unselectively. The words he reproduces are the content words, those which carry the essential information in what he has heard and what he is now saying for himself. These words are generally nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and they are the ones which tend to receive the stress in normal speech. It is natural that he should hear these more clearly and that they should be the ones that fix in his memory. He is less likely to hear the structural words, such as 'on', 'and', 'but', 'the', which are not essential at the level of meaning at which he is receiving. When the child produces his short sentences he puts them in an order which is syntactically correct, e.g. 'Daddy come'. He thus acquires early the basic rules of syntax, placing subject and predicate in their natural relationship, associating the noun with its modifier, and so on. At a surprisingly early age he responds to the intonation patterns of his parents' speech and adopts some of them. Thus a raising of the pitch on the second of the two words 'Daddy come' enables him to utter them in question form. Indeed, it has often been noted that children will imitate intonation patterns in the non-speech sounds they make before they begin to speak.
5.3 The adult may well take up these contracted sentences and expand them in a manner which gradually opens up the child's area of verbal operation. Thus, the mother would be likely to expand the two words quoted above into 'Yes, Daddy will be coming home soon'. In one American experiment mothers were found to be expanding their children's simple utterances nearly a third of the time. The process is a two-way interaction. The child imitates the adult, and in turn the adult imitates the child, preserving the order of his words but adding inflections and attaching other words to them. The child reduces; the mother expands. This, however, is not the whole story. Anyone who has listened to a young child talking knows the inventiveness with which he tries out groups of words he is clearly not directly imitating. What he is doing is searching for the regularities of the language, and he naturally makes mistakes. The very fact that he does so shows how productive is this 'search'.
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It is most obvious in the morphological mistakes he makes, i.e. in adding plural endings and forming tenses. When he says 'I digged a hole', it is not because he has ever heard an adult say it; it is because he has learned that to add the sound /d/ or /t/ or /id/ to the verb converts it into the past. He has then overgeneralised, applying the rule in cases where it does not actually operate. His mastery of morphological rules comes later than his command of syntax, but together they amount to the discovery of latent structure, on which the child will work variations for the rest of his life. It has been suggested that by the age of four he will be in possession of the essential structures of the English language. Of course, this does not mean that he has complete command of the language. Recent research has shown that syntax is still being developed during the early years at school. A child's arrival at adult speech is the result of his working through a series of approximations to it.
5.4 This is a necessarily brief account of a highly complex process, but it is perhaps enough to show how important is the nature of the language exchange through which this process develops. The Plowden Report (1) said: 'The educational disadvantage of being born the child of an unskilled worker is both financial and psychological'. It could be added that it is also linguistic, but such a simple equation would be much less than the whole truth. There is an undeniable relationship between social class and language development, but we must qualify all that follows by pointing out that social class is a rather crude indicator. What is really at issue is the language environment in which the child grows up, and particularly the role played by language in his relationship with his mother. There is no shortage of terms to describe the kinds of environment in which language development prospers or is inhibited. We know the objections to the phrase 'cultural disadvantage' and to its suggestion of a deficit to be made up. Nevertheless it is a term which serves our purpose if it is understood that we do not assume a relentless correspondence between language development and social class. There are differences in language environment between socio-economic groups, but there are also differences within groups.
5.5 With these essential qualifications made we go on to consider what are the effects of different kinds of language environment. It has been suggested that the differences begin to be marked from about 24-30 months; and at this early stage they show up in what we have described above as the morphological rules. There are indications that the child in a favourable environment makes swifter progress in learning how to make plurals and use the right endings to make past tenses. Later he is found to show greater proficiency in complexity of sentence structure and indeed in the length of his sentences and the variety of vocabulary contained within them. Evidence from American experiments (2) suggests that the gap widens each year, so that the differences become more marked as children grow older.
5.6 Much the most influential work in this field of language and social environment has been carried out by Bernstein, and his terms 'restricted code' and 'elaborated code' have become widely known, though they are often misinterpreted. Bernstein (3) has emphasised that linguistic 'codes' are not related to social class as such but to the family organisation and the interaction between the individuals within it. In what we have called the
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culturally disadvantaged home a child's language will be limited by certain norms of relationship; there will be less opportunity for him to discuss the reasons for and the likely results of certain decisions. Intentions, possibilities, alternatives, consequences: he will lack occasions to explore these verbally. His more favoured counterpart, on the other hand, will have just this kind of experience. Within his family the part an individual plays in the interchange leading to decisions and judgements will depend less on his status than on his own personal qualities. He will be encouraged to talk things through; he will be given explanations and justification, to which he can offer alternatives. As a result, there is a premium on the need to develop more varied and more sophisticated uses of language.
5.7 An American study (4) set out to identify the patterns of mother-child instruction and relate these to the child's linguistic and cognitive development. This provided interesting illustrations of the contrasting techniques mothers used to teach their children simple tasks. The mother from the 'advantaged' home showed a greater tendency to anticipate an error and warn the child that he was about to reach a decision point. She would encourage him to reflect and to anticipate the consequences of his action in such a way as to avoid error; and she would do this in language that tended to be abstract and elaborated. Thus, he was helped to acquire the ability essential to any problem-solving situation: the capacity to reflect, to weigh decisions, and to choose among alternatives. All this took place in an experimental setting, and it cannot be taken for granted that replication in a British experiment would produce the same results. Nevertheless, it supports what is known from other sources, including the study of mother-child instruction in the natural environment of the home. Between the social groups there were marked differences in the range of purposes for which the mothers used language. The children from the advantaged homes experienced more sustained conversation, within which language was used for a greater variety of functions.
5.8 A study in this country by Tough (5) has suggested that all children between the ages of three and five seem to use language to protect their own rights and interests, open up and maintain relationships with others, report on present experiences, and direct their own and others' actions. But there is a range of uses which children from 'educating' homes seem to have developed more extensively than children without these home advantages. Among those Tough lists are the following:
to collaborate towards agreed ends
to project into the future, to anticipate and predict
to project and compare possible alternatives
to see causal and dependent relationships
to give explanations of how and why things happen
to deal with problems in the imagination and see possible solutions
to create experiences through the use of the imagination, often making a representation through the symbolic use of materials
to reflect upon their own and other people's feelings.
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There is confirmation here of what is implied by the studies we have already described and many other British and American experiments; namely, that the child from the advantaged background is more likely to be led to use language of a higher order of complexity and greater abstraction. A child is at a disadvantage in lacking the means to explain, describe, inquire, hypothesise, analyse, compare, and deduce if language is seldom or never used for these purposes in his home. This is the kind of language that is of particular importance to the forming of higher order concepts; in short, to learning in the school situation.
5.9 But this difference should not be accepted with a kind of despairing determinism. The fact that some children from disadvantaged backgrounds make little use of an elaborated code does not of itself mean that they have no access to one. The context in which they use language and the nature of exchange does not call for the higher degree of complexity. If a child does not encounter situations in which he has to explore, recall, predict, plan, explain, and analyse, he cannot be expected to bring to school a ready made facility for such uses. But that is not the same thing as saying the ability is beyond him. What is needed is to create the contexts and conditions in which the ability can develop. What follows is a discussion of ways in which this can be done, both in and out of school, but first one further point needs to be made. The argument has been advanced, notably by Labov (6) in the USA but also by some people in this country, that to imply a superiority on the part of elaborated language is to think in terms of middle class values. Commenting on some of the American studies to which we have referred, Labov suggests that 'lower class' language need be no less effective, that it has its own equal validity, and that one should not look upon the child in terms of a deficiency to be remedied. This is a sincerely held view to which we may do less than justice in presenting it so baldly. It is a necessary corrective to the opinions of those teachers and educationists who believe the disadvantaged child brings nothing of his own to school. But it must not blind one to the reality of the situation as it exists. There is an indisputable gap between the language experiences that some families provide and the linguistic demands of school education. In our view it is not a condemnation of a language form to point out that there are some functions it will not adequately serve. But the fact that it will not serve them is at the heart of the matter. The important thing is that the child should not suffer limited opportunities because he does not have the range of language that society demands.
5.10 All children should be helped to acquire as wide a range as possible of the uses of language, and there are clearly two ways in which this can be achieved. The first consists in helping parents to understand the process of language development in their children and to take their part in it. The second resides in the skill and knowledge of the nursery and infant teacher, her measured attention to the child's precise language needs, and her inventiveness in creating situations which bring about their fulfilment. We will begin with the role of the parents.
5.11 Several of the witnesses urged on us that young people should be made aware of children's language development long before they become parents; that they should, in fact, encounter it while still at school. Some witnesses
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placed the emphasis on actual preparation for parenthood; others preferred to think in less personal terms. In both cases it was suggested that pupils from secondary schools should visit nursery and infant schools, where they would learn how to talk with young children in the context of constructive play, perhaps using toys they had themselves made. Alternatively or additionally the young children might come to them at the secondary school. We are very much in sympathy with the principle of introducing secondary school pupils to language growth in young children. With careful preparation many schools have developed excellent courses in parenthood, involving both boys and girls. Some have been evolved by the Home Economics department; others have become part of the curriculum for early leavers. A number have been shaped into CSE courses, open to all fourth and fifth year pupils. Such courses often include general child development in the early years, taking account of health, dietetics, physical growth, and emotional needs. They usually have a vigorous practical element and involve the pupils in visits to playgroups and nursery classes. From our point of view the most interesting are those which are broadly-based and which direct the emphasis away from mothercraft to child growth as an aspect of human development. It has to be recognised that many adolescent pupils are simply not ready to cast themselves in the role of future parents, and for them a study of language in parenthood could well take the hypothetical even further. This is not to suggest that pupils still at school are not interested in young children. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that they are. We are convinced that this interest can be extended to children's language without laying an overt emphasis on personal preparation for parenthood. Young people are deeply interested in human beings in all their variety: in their jobs, their environmental pressures, their lifestyles, the things they do and the things they say. We feel that the language development of young children should be set in the wider context of the language human beings use. Within this context films, demonstrations, discussions, and practical experience would lead to an awareness of the adult's role in the young child's linguistic and cognitive development. This would include a study of the linguistic aspects of relationships, of the questions children ask, and of the value of discussion and explanation in controlling a child's behaviour as against simple prohibition.
5.12 To be successful any such study must be firmly based in practical experience. A theoretical study of language would not provide the kind of foundation which is necessary for the long-term objective. This means contact with young children within the schools, and this in its turn implies close co-operation between the teachers. In suggesting this we see clearly the problems of organisation which it sets. So far, only a relatively small number of secondary schools have developed contacts with nursery and infant schools. The widespread adoption of such a practice could produce obvious difficulties, and the teachers of young children could be forgiven for viewing the prospect with alarm. It must be made clear that we do not see this in terms of large numbers of secondary pupils invading the nursery and infant schools. The dominant consideration must be the interests of the young children themselves. But granted this, it should be possible for a pattern of visiting to be devised which would give a large number of pupils valuable experience. Provided it is carried out over a period of time, the receiving school need not feel any sense of intrusion. In any scheme of this kind a
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great deal will depend upon the interest and commitment of the individual pupil and the individual teacher, and some disappointments are inevitable. However, with proper planning the presence of these pupils will confer as much advantage as they themselves derive.
5.13 There is already sufficient experience to show that these are not impractical ideas. In one example, young children were taken along to a secondary school where they were given a mixture of objects likely to arouse their interest. In assembling these the older pupils had exercised considerable ingenuity and they used them to talk to the children on a one to one basis. Pupils have also been encouraged to write stories for five to seven year olds*, going to great lengths to match the language to the needs of the children, and in the process learning a good deal about them. We are suggesting, in fact, that although visits to young children in their learning situation are an important feature, the courses should go much further than that. When pupils plan their conversation sessions or prepare the material for their stories there will be a great deal of study and discussion, the more valuable because it is designed for a practical outcome. Whatever the nature of the personal contacts, they should be placed in a wider context, and this can relate first-hand experience to more general discussion. The following is a transcript** of a tape produced in a Manchester infant school by Staffordshire members of NATE. It was in fact produced for study by teachers some years ago, but it will illustrate the kind of material that can be used with older secondary school pupils. It is an example of 'participant'*** use of language, in which two young children talk their way into discovering the purpose of a land measuring tape they have been given. They have never seen one before, and the dialogue reveals how language is essential to their search; through it they work their way towards an understanding:
Boy It's got the date on it ... it's blue, it's round, it's got a thing on what you hold.
Girl It's a kind of handle.
B What you lock it up. What you lock it up.
G A kind of handlebar.
B Oh, that comes out. Oh, that comes out.
G It's a tape measure, isn't it?
B It's a tape measure. It looks like one.
G Yes. It's a tape measure.
B Hey, it only goes up to 9 and starts at one again. Hey, when you pull that out ...
G How do you put it back in?
B Ah, I know. Oh, look, when you pull it out, the thing ... the thing goes round and round. It's a handle. It's a handle.
G Ah, that goes up. When you want it to go in you turn it back.
*There is a more detailed account of the possibilities of this kind of activity in Chapter 14, where we discuss ways of bringing about continuity between schools.
**We are grateful to Mr Harold Stephenson for permission to use this extract.
***See paragraph 11.6 for a discussion of this concept.
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B Oh, yes, you turn it back. When you want it to go back in. Then if you want it to come back out ...
G Yes. You pull it out.
B Hey, when you turn that round that goes round.
G That goes round.
B And when you turn it that way, that goes round, (laugh) When you press that, press that.
G What number does it go up to? Starts at one.
B Starts at one. It comes ... what ... it comes ... first there's a red one and then there's a black one.
G Well, now, that's one foot and then it starts on another foot.
B Oh, yes.
G And when it's a red one, it's two feet.
B Two feet. How many feet does it go up to? Whoops! Seven feet now.
G Lots of feet ... 11, 12, 13, 14 ...
B 16, 17, 18 ...
G I got to get it out. Is that one long or something ... well it's all ... (laughs).
B 31 there.
G Yes, cor, more than a yard here.
B Oh, yes, more than a yard.
G I'll pull it all out and you hold it tight ... Who will ever understand this, will they?
B You've only got to wind it all back up again.
G Well, Mark, it's a pieces in ... 60.
B Think it goes up to a hundred.
G So do I. Oh, Mark, it's gone up to 66 feet.
66 feet it goes up to.
G I can't turn it back again ...
There is space to give only one such illustration, but obviously scope exists for many such enterprises. Tapes with transcripts, tape-slide sequences, video-recordings: these and similar extensions of personal experience can be put to good use in a study of children's language. It follows that such courses must be properly planned and equipped, and one cannot repeat too often that they imply a high degree of goodwill and co-operation between the schools. It also follows that the teachers who are organising them must have an up to date knowledge of language development, and appropriate in-service training will be necessary where it is intended to introduce such work.
5.14 After this the most productive point at which to introduce the subject of the language development of the young child is when young married couples are shortly to become parents. We believe it may well be in antenatal clinics, which are attended by a high percentage of expectant mothers, that the
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case for children's language needs can be made with the greatest effect. Language is thus placed in the general context of child care, in which it can be shown to have an important place. It is accepted at once that this is not a simple matter. Antenatal clinics already have a demanding task, with a range of preoccupations which must have priority. Nevertheless, we feel that the situation presents too valuable an opportunity to be missed, exemplified in the advice one health visitor gives to every expectant parent: 'When you give your child a bath, bathe him in language'. At the simplest level the clinics could be provided with pamphlets, posters, and other visual material. Videotapes and cassette playback machines with headsets offer interesting possibilities. Speech therapists and visiting nursery teachers could stimulate interest through discussion. In one inner city area a health visitor had started a Toddlers' Club for children from a few months old to nursery age. This was held weekly at the medical welfare clinic, and expectant mothers were invited to join in with the children's own mothers. There was close liaison between the health visitor and the head of the nearby infant school, who went along to take part with one or two of her nursery nurses. This was an interesting co-operative venture which, among other things, provided the expectant mothers with a valuable practical introduction to the subject of children's language needs. In ways such as these the antenatal situation might become a point at which some very profitable foundations are laid. There is room for experiment into the means by which such possibilities might be realised. The problems are immediately obvious. Space, facilities, time, finance, the shortage of speech therapists: all these and more have to be taken account of when such arrangements are being considered. Nevertheless, the value of the outcome could be out of all proportion to the effort and expenditure involved. We see this early point of intervention as a key stage in the continuous help that should be offered to parents. In the following sections we go on to discuss the even more difficult question of how they might be helped within the home in the early years of the child's language growth. The creation of interest and awareness at the antenatal stage would make this more natural and acceptable. Above all it would establish from the beginning that the child's language development takes its place alongside his physical and emotional growth as a matter of vital concern to parents. This is certainly an area of possibility which health and education authorities might co-operate to explore. Local situations will vary widely, and the greatest need will obviously be in the EPAs [Education Priority Areas], where pressures are already at their greatest. The resources of antenatal clinics in these areas are often stretched, and the difficulties are not to be underestimated. Nevertheless, it is our central contention, and there is ample evidence from research to support it, that attention to language problems comes too late. The education process must be started earlier if the language deficiencies we have described are to be reduced. The difficulties of implementing such a policy at the antenatal stage must not be allowed to obscure the need for one.
5.15 We come now to the possibilities for help within the home, and it must be acknowledged at once that home visiting is an activity which has to be conceived and carried out with the greatest delicacy and care. Almost all parents are keen that their children should have the best possible opportunity, but many set low expectations and assume that their child's performance will
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be governed by his innate ability. They regard the child's mental growth as controlled by maturation and capacity: something that simply happens up to a determined level by an automatic process. If he has it in him to do well he will, but this is something that his schooldays will discover. They do not recognise their own potential in furthering his educational development, and not uncommonly they are apprehensive that any attempt to 'teach' him or introduce him to books will conflict with the school's methods and thus confuse him. Moreover, there may be the natural suspicion on the part of the mother that a home visitor is bringing with her a critical attitude to the child's upbringing or the conditions of the home. In some cases anyone in an official position may be seen as representing authority. The father, whose co-operation is vital, may let his judgement of the situation be coloured by his experiences with 'officialdom' in other contexts. All this makes it an exercise requiring great tact and particular qualities on the part of the visitor. In recommending, as we shall, more initiatives in this field, we are also conscious of the implications for staffing and training. At this point we are discussing the pre-school situation, but we shall later examine home-school contacts. These can be given a strong foundation if the early relationship with a pre-school home visitor has proved rewarding. The qualities needed to achieve such a relationship speak for themselves. The visitor will have to be tolerant and understanding, imposing no judgement and hinting no censure. She will be setting up learning situations which are designed to advance the child's linguistic and cognitive development, and she will therefore need a good understanding of the processes at work.
5.16 There have been several home visiting programmes in the USA, all of them concerned with children from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds. Some relied on purely voluntary participation; some went so far as to pay the mothers to take part. In certain cases the object was to equip the mother with the ability to work through a structured programme with her child. In others the mother was not actively involved at all, and the child received his 'tutoring' from the visitor. Many of these programmes appear to have been successful in what they set out to do, but they do not appeal to us as appropriate models for the kind of relationship we are suggesting. There have been a limited number of experiments in this country, mostly tentative and on a small scale. One particularly encouraging initiative came from a group of Norwich teachers who planned it as members of NATE. With the agreement of the City of Norwich education authority the teachers, in association with the English department of the college of education, volunteered to make monthly visits to families with a number of children one of whom was between 18 months and 2 years. The teachers worked with the parents and aimed to help them increase the range of linguistic opportunity for their children. The teachers themselves met monthly between visits to discuss their experiences, and they also provided transport to take the parents to the college to see films of interest to young mothers. The success of the first stage of the experiment led to an expansion of the number of teacher volunteers and an extension of the work to young married couples bringing up their first child.
5.17 The most fully documented experiment to date has been part of the West Riding EPA (7) Project, and in this case the visitor worked with the
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children in the parents' presence. The organisers decided that they would not single out specific children as 'disadvantaged', but would take all the children in the district within a specific age-group. The children had in common the fact that they all lived within an EPA and that their fathers were manual workers of varying degrees of skill. Nevertheless, there were considerable differences between the families, and it would have been possible to identify some children as in greater need than others. To have done so could have caused suspicion, not to say resentment, and the invitation to participate therefore went to all the families in one school catchment area. 20 children were involved, aged 19 months to 28 months, and they were visited every week for one to two hours over a period of a year. The visitor brought toys, books, tape recordings, etc, and in co-operation with the mother used these to develop a number of skills in the child. The initial attention of the Project was to examine and improve the child's educability, and though the sample was a small one there were clear indications that it succeeded in what it set out to do. Our particular interest here, however, is in its benefits in bringing about a growth of understanding in the parents. Their role in the child's linguistic and educational development was successfully demonstrated, and they acquired confidence and interest as they came to see what they could in fact achieve. One of the most valuable results of such enterprises is that they encourage a sense of partnership. It has been remarked above that many parents regard learning as the province of the school. Not only do they feel ill-equipped to anticipate it, but they do not see themselves as sharers in the process when their child starts school. This is sometimes born of indifference, but more often of apprehension. In a later section there will be a consideration of the ways in which parents can be brought into school. But it is worth emphasising again here that home visiting programmes should establish at an early stage the notion of partnership. The right kind of relationship with a home visitor can make the prospect of home-school contact a natural one in the mind of a parent.
5.18 It goes without saying that the parents should not be made to feel any sense of interference. The examples under discussion were experimental situations. They were of limited duration, had a declared objective, and were in the hands of highly skilled persons. In one sense the fact that they were experiments made their task more difficult. For many people the very notion of an experiment carries an unwelcome suggestion of being scrutinised. In the West Riding Project, for example, there was unease on the part of some parents at the idea of their child being tested by a psychologist. However, although an experiment presents problems it also has the advantage of providing a defined framework within which co-operation can be sought. The parent is helping the experimenter and can be made to feel she is taking part in an enterprise in which she and her child are not merely on the receiving end. If home visiting schemes were introduced on a large scale they would not have this advantage. It has to be acknowledged frankly that many of the families where this help would have most value would view it as one more addition to the social agencies with which they have so much contact. So much, then, depends upon the way in which the idea is broached and on the parents' earliest experiences of it in operation. Parents can become engrossed in their child's learning activities. When this happens any sense of receiving social aid will have been eclipsed. It is the feeling of being essential to the
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partnership that is the key. We feel that home visiting of this kind could be an important innovation, and one which might help to reduce the effect of cultural deprivation in the pre-school years. As local conditions vary so greatly there is little point in offering a blueprint of how such a scheme might operate. Authorities would have to assess the need in particular areas and then consider how they might find the resources for a programme and what should be its nature and duration. We recommend, however, that serious consideration should be given to such measures where cultural disadvantage is evident.
5.19 In recent years there has been a growth in the number of educational television programmes directed to young children. They have often been criticised for being 'middle class' in tone and content. Television is discussed elsewhere in the Report, but we are concerned with the possibilities of the medium for increasing the kind of parental awareness we have been discussing. One of the most valuable features of programmes for young children is that they offer to them and their parents a common experience to talk about. The most effective will be the programme that makes this a certain outcome, and it is not likely to happen if the mother's experience cannot so engage with what she is seeing as to draw her to elaborate upon it. This in itself is an argument for a tone and content with which she can find a good measure of identification. Of particular interest is the possibility of using television to bring home to parents the language needs of their children and their own part in fulfilling them. There is no escaping the fact that educational programmes of this kind, directed at parents at an adult level of instruction, would be unlikely to be watched by the parents we are most concerned to help. It may be that the children's programmes themselves could be structured in such a way as to focus the parents' attention on these language needs in the process of fulfilling them. There is certainly room for research into the possibilities of television for the language interaction of parent and child. We would add that in our view the communication should be sustained and not simply occasional, and that it would be most effective if it complemented other measures of the kind we have been discussing.
5.20 This is an appropriate point at which to comment on the more general question of the influence on young children's language of television entertainment programmes. Although it seems to us regrettable that children of all ages should spend such long hours watching television (see paras. 2.5-2.9), we do not share the opinion that no good at all comes out of it. Certainly this view does not do justice to the undeniably good effects of television on some aspects of children's language. While it is certainly true that television popularises empty catchwords and current slang, it can also be shown to make the vocabulary of the moment eminently available to children. The vocabulary of politics, popular music, space travel and industry is acquired by children not through the adult programmes of news and comment, but through cartoons, children's serials and teatime entertainment programmes. It is a remarkable fact that infants have the vocabulary, if not the concepts, of the technological, polluted, divided world that television presents to them. Certain reading schemes in current use do not reflect the seventies; television does. It exposes children to a range of accents, idioms, and registers which they would not otherwise hear. Infants engaged in a space travel game show
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a knowledge not only of the words (e.g. rocket, countdown, capsule, splashdown), but of the way in which they are used. They reproduce as a matter of course the terse reporting style of the men in a moon landing. At other times they use the more leisurely and often hyperbolic register of the mid-western cattleman. Observers are constantly struck by young children's response to puns and to rhyme which may feature very little in the speech of adults around them. It is a reasonable hypothesis that television, especially children's entertainment programmes, adult light entertainment, and to a mixed extent the commercial advertisements, has done much to sharpen children's response to this feature of language and to wordplay in general. It is, of course, well known that children respond more than most adults to verbal play; what is not generally realised is that the language skills used in verbal play - repeating jingles, puns, riddles, matching rhymes etc - may be very important in early reading. It is clear therefore that there are some important things to be considered about the impact of television on children's language. Parents and teachers need to be aware of this, and so do those responsible for planning and devising programmes. The programmes children watch between the end of afternoon school and teatime seem to us to be particularly influential in this respect, and we recommend research into the whole of this very important field.
5.21 We shall return to the parents when we consider how schools can work in co-operation with them, but at this point we pass to the playgroup, nursery class, and infant school, and to the vitally important part played by the teacher in the child's language development. The teacher in these early stages is concerned to help the child move into an expanded set of relationships - with his peers, with adults other than his parents, and with the world reflected in a new range of experiences. Three or four year olds coming into school for the first time will often stand and stare, then flit from one activity to another, either silently or with excited chatter. There is just not enough time to take in everything, and the idea that all will still be there tomorrow is not easily accepted. As they become accustomed to the ordered provision children will begin to use materials more selectively and build on the remembered experience of the past. In this they are guided by experiment and by constant talk with their teacher, who helps them make sense of their experiences and prepares the way for new ones. Every encounter with clay, water, sand, 'junk', paint, book and picture is used as an opportunity for talk. Excursions out of the classroom are made part of the process, and are constructed and reconstructed through anecdote and an exchange of question and answer. The teacher encourages the child to relive his experience and embroiders it for him, helping him to draw out of it half-remembered detail. Meeting the same group of children day after day she is able to receive and deepen their interests, record their thoughts, and help them to share their discoveries with others. Thus in a very real sense the classroom and its extensions can constitute a language environment, with experience extending language,, and language in turn interpreting experience.
5.22 Most nursery and infant teachers recognise that when young children are involved in some activity the talk that accompanies it becomes an important instrument for learning. Talk is a means by which they learn to work and live with one another. It enables them to gather information and build into their own experience the experience of others. Between themselves and with the
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teacher they 'process' or interpret the information, creating their own links between what is new and what is familiar. The continual reinterpretation of all that a child knows in the light of what he comes to learn is a characteristic of the talk that occurs in make-believe situations of his own creation. This takes many forms, from domestic scenes in the home corner to improvisations on storybook and television themes of heroes, adventurers, giants, and witches. It is fed by nursery rhymes and singing games, by the stories that teachers and children tell and the poems they read. Talk of this kind is a consolidating activity, a way of reordering experience to make it acceptable. Into this context of purposeful, sociable and consolidating talk, the infant teacher introduces the written language. What it brings is fresh material to be talked about, for the spoken word must mediate the written. In many infant schools concern for writing begins, one might say, with the making of 'books'. The teacher writes beneath a child's drawing or painting the caption he dictates to her. The child may be asked to trace over the writing, and later to copy it underneath. By degrees, beginning with the words he already knows, the child will take over the writing until the whole caption is his own work. The 'books' are collections of such pages. The child reads the sentence back to his teacher, and in this way this personal collection of captions and sentences becomes his first reading book. Sometimes they are the response of every member of the class to a particular stimulus, sometimes the work of a group sharing a common interest and anxious therefore to read other children's contributions as well as their own. Sometimes they are a collection of the work of a single child, his own book on his own topic. More often than not they are in the children's own handwriting and with their own illustrations, but we have seen excellent use of a Polaroid camera and a typewriter with a large 'Jumbo' type face which reproduces the kind of print used in most infant schools. Captions or labels of use and interest to the children are often to be found in the classroom. At first, the labels are accompanied by pictures that carry the same message, but as reading proficiency increases, there will no longer always be the same need for pictures. In some classrooms the walls become a kind of glossary of useful words in useful groupings, and the material changes as the interests of the class change and develop. Captions written by the children on maps or diagrams or models add to the verbal display. Where the whole effect is colourful and attractive, the right climate is produced for the development of pleasure in writing and reading and pride in the appearance of the handwriting*. The seeds are here for later developments. The nature of the books will change; what began as a full-page picture with caption will become by degrees a written page with illustrations, and then, where appropriate, a page of text unadorned.
5.23 There is, even in the earliest stages, no lack of things to write about. Young children will write about their homes and families, their pets and other animals, and the highlights of their day-to-day experience. They will write about a football match, a street accident, a snowfall or a thunderstorm, a visit to hospital, a television programme they have watched, or the things they bring into school, and they will write stories on fantasy themes involving witches or bandits, ghosts or gunmen. They describe objects or processes that have interested them, and in this way much of their writing arises from the practical activities in school. At the same time, they develop
*See Annex B to Chapter 11 for a discussion of handwriting.
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a language adapted to the expression of feeling, a language of implicit rather than explicit statement; in short, a form of 'poetic' writing that is the counterpart of the consolidating talk we referred to above. Thus, writing serves them to give expression to their own versions of what is, and to create fascinating alternatives in terms of what might be. Across this range of purposes, however, their writing in these early stages is likely to remain expressive; it is likely, that is to say, to retain a close affinity with their speech. To begin to write is to put to a new use those linguistic resources that have so far been developed entirely by speaking and listening.
5.24 We have been describing the kind of language stimulus enjoyed by a child in a good school in his early years, and it is the foundation on which all else rests. But many witnesses have questioned whether this is enough for each and every child. The argument has been advanced that the kind of language for which we have urged the need will not necessarily be developed by the normal experiences offered in the nursery and infant school. It has been suggested that there is a need for a more precise definition of linguistic objectives and for the provision for some children of a more carefully planned language experience than is evident in most nursery and infant work at the present time. This is an important question and one which requires discussion. The best way to begin is by examining briefly one or two of the programmes that have been developed with this very object of directing attention to specific features of language. Several such experiments have been carried out in the USA, and one of the most recent has been the tutorial language programme developed by M Blank and F Solomon (8). This is based upon a regular one to one tutorial designed to develop 'abstract thinking' in the pre-school child by encouraging him to discuss situations not present before him. They involve him in explaining and predicting, two features of language which we have already noted as being less likely to be at the command of a disadvantaged child. They also require him to give and repeat instructions, to use language to compare and make choices, and to use relational words, such as 'between', 'under', 'before', 'after'. An interesting feature of the programme is the transcript of dialogues between teacher and child, with commentary by the authors on how language is actually being used. The one shows a teacher using the Blank and Solomon technique; the other reveals missed opportunities arising from a lack of conscious awareness of the language procedures on the part of the teacher. The authors claim that their method of tutoring with specific language goals produces marked behaviour changes and the use of more coordinated language patterns. They press a point which has in fact been made to us in a number of the submissions of evidence: that simply to expose a disadvantaged child to materials and put him into a one to one relationship with an interested adult will not necessarily bring about the language growth we are seeking.
5.25 The Bereiter and Engelmann programme (9) has received more publicity in this country and was criticised by many teachers on the ground that its methods seemed so alien to the generally accepted view of nursery education. The programme assumes very little language on the part of the children and it prescribes for them short periods of instruction each day. The main aims are to enable them to make affirmative and negative statements, to use
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prepositions, handle opposites, name basic colours, and make simple deductions. The authors emphasise that they are not bidding to replace the free and creative environment of the child's first school, merely to reinforce it. However, the range of language goals is undoubtedly narrow and the use of drill involving unison responses is an unattractive feature for most British teachers.
5.26 There is less intensity in the Peabody Language Development Kit, which was used in a radically modified form in the NFER Pre-school Project. There are, in fact, four kits, and they aim to provide a language development programme from three to ten years of mental age. Each kit offers a complete programme which consists of 180 lessons of 20-30 minutes, and it is designed for use with groups of children rather than for a one to one situation. Within a general framework of language development it includes vocabulary building, sentence patterns, problem solving and concept formation. The teacher is supplied with a manual, picture cards, posters, tapes or records, and puppets. At the lowest age level there are also toys and teaching aids for developing various skills, e.g. sorting and labelling. It is clear from the experiments carried out with these kits in Britain that the teachers involved were very divided in their reaction to them. This is not the place to detail the exchange of argument, but we are bound to record our own belief that at any rate in the British context programmes such as the Bereiter and Engelmann and Peabody do not provide a ready made answer. Moreover, their use may result in a narrowing of aims and a corresponding loss in the imagination and flexibility which are so vital to nursery education. There is an important place for guides of one kind or another to help the teacher to develop the child's language in the ways we have already indicated. There is also a place for programmes of a kind appropriate for English schools; they have a value in alerting the teacher to particular language needs, and they help her ensure every child's active involvement in small group work. But the guide should be a support for the teacher's initiative, not a substitute for it; and the programme should be an integral part of the rich environment she creates as a source of constant stimulus to language.
5.27 So far, the attempts described have been American, but in recent years there have been similar enterprises in Britain. These are different from one another in kind and often in philosophy, but they have one property in common; they are designed to extend children's language by deliberate procedures. In East London, Gahagan and Gahagan conducted (10) an experiment based on Bernstein's concept of 'restricted code'. It employed a language training programme that set tasks for which the former would not be adequate. The activities were designed to improve attention and auditory discrimination, to improve speech (extended narrative, explanation, detailed description, expression of uncertainty and the hypothetical, description of feeling and relationships), and to improve structure and vocabulary. The work involved the use of various games, and the teachers were asked to set aside 20 minutes a day for it. The same principle of a reserved daily allocation of time operated in part of the language development programme associated with the Swansea project (11). This enterprise directed attention to the following language skills: listening, naming, describing, categorising, denoting position, sequencing, and reasoning. To
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give an example, the last three of these skills involve the use of 'relational' words such as
| under, between | (relation of position) |
| before, after | (relation of time/events) |
| if, but | (relation of cause, effect and conditions). |
These words are of the greatest importance to language development, and their use presents particular difficulty to young children. The programme therefore suggests activities which will lead the child to use them. Many of these are grounded in the normal experiences of the infant classroom, but some take the form of language games. The handbook provides a check list intended to help the teacher assemble a picture of the child's language through listening to his conversation in the normal classroom setting.
5.28 The notion of a checklist or an inventory of language skills is one that attracts some controversy. On the one hand it is argued that a device of this kind offers the teacher a means of monitoring the child's progress; that it allows her to concentrate attention upon the deficiencies she detects. On the other it is contended that a checklist puts the emphasis on surface structures rather than on the context of children's talk; that it induces the teacher to impose forms from without. This is the view of Tough (12), whose project has produced a teacher's guide to the appraisal of a child's use of language. This does not set out an inventory of language skills but shows teachers how they can keep their own record of observations. It directs attention to certain features of language, and in listing these the author emphasises that they are simply a framework to help the teacher identify uses of language she is already fostering in the normal course of her everyday work. The project does not suggest any games or special activities and goes no further in this direction than to provide two picture story books and suggestions on how to use them to open up and guide the children's talk.
5.29 In making recommendations about the development of young children's language we have in mind an essential first principle. Granting what we have said about the need for more conscious procedures, how far can these be made to fit into the best nursery and infant practice of today? Our first point is that the more complex language uses can and should be developed within and as part of the normal classroom activity. However, the language programmes themselves point out that they are designed to complement this, not erode or replace it. They vary in the extent to which they 'stand outside' the normal daily routine m the sense of requiring a separate time allocation and a number of activities which have not emerged naturally from classroom experience. In our view the less the separation the more likely is the programme to match the normal way of working in schools, but with this caveat we are sure that teachers will find in some language programmes a very helpful support. Some teachers may prefer the assurance of guidelines, specified activities, and a daily time allocation. Others may regard the programmes as a source of useful suggestions which they will employ in their own fashion. Others again may find that 'language games' can make an interesting addition to the range of individual activities provided for children to choose from. Our own view is that the kind of language development under discussion will be more likely to take effect the more it
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uses as its medium the daily experiences of the classroom and the home. We emphasise again, however, that this cannot be left to chance, and we shall go on to argue for its place in teacher training and for the support of additional adults to enable the teacher to give attention to it.
5.30 We advocate, in short, planned intervention in the child's language development. At the level at present being discussed this will mean that the teacher recognises the need for the child to include in his experience the following uses of language, and that she will then keep an effective record of his progress in them:
Reporting on present and recalled experiences.
Collaborating towards agreed ends.
Projecting into the future; anticipating and predicting.
Projecting and comparing possible alternatives.
Perceiving causal and dependent relationships.
Giving explanations of how and why things happen.
Expressing and recognising tentativeness.
Dealing with problems in the imagination and seeing possible solutions.
Creating experiences through the use of imagination.
Justifying behaviour.
Reflecting on feelings, their own and other people's.
The experience of individual children will vary, and this means that the teacher's appraisal of each child's needs and achievement is the key to success. Children from advantaged backgrounds are likely to have plenty of opportunity at home to acquire such forms. It is the disadvantaged child who needs help with them, and through her appraisal the teacher can create the situation in which they are likely to be acquired.
5.31 We have discussed the kind of approach which we believe will produce the language development we regard as essential. This involves creating situations in which, to satisfy his own purposes, a child encounters the need to use more elaborate forms and is thus motivated to extend the complexity of language available to him. It also involves the teacher in charting the process by careful observation of the developing language skills. Before going on to say anything about the need for additional adults in the school we emphasise that success depends on the professional guidance of the teacher. The teacher is the organiser of the learning situation, working in close association with the helpers but planning the strategies which they are involved with her in realising.
5.32 We believe there should be more adults involved in the school to afford a one-one or one-two relationship with the children as often as possible. A proposal of this kind requires some elaboration, and we begin by distinguishing between two levels of language experience which such additional help would provide. In the first place it has to be recognised that increasing the opportunities for talk with a sympathetic adult will not necessarily develop more complex language forms in children who are
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unaccustomed to using them. As we have already suggested, situations have to be created from which such uses are bound to emerge. The person who plans these situations must have a knowledge of how language works, and the ability to appraise children's language and operate upon it accordingly. All this has implications for training and represents an increase in the professional responsibility of the teacher. It does this in two ways. The teacher of young children has always seen it as an important part of her task to add to their experience of language, and if these more sophisticated goals are to be achieved this new dimension is added to her work. Moreover, if other adults are to help it will be under her guidance and towards ends which she has shaped. To appraise each child's speech and keep a record of its features is asking a great deal of a teacher. In the first place she is operating in a situation where there is noise and movement and constant demands upon her time and attention. In the second place she has so much to do in the way of preparation that it is no easy matter for her to note and record speech on this scale. Nevertheless, appraisal and the keeping of some form of record is so important for the whole notion of developing the child's language that serious thought needs to be given to how it can be achieved. It is clearly not a skill lightly acquired nor a task that can be easily delegated.* It depends on more than a superficial understanding of language development, and should therefore rest with the teacher. But she needs support to accomplish it, especially in areas where there are many disadvantaged children. We suggest that the teacher should have the assistance of trained persons, the nature of whose participation she will herself decide according to the demands of the situation. In the nursery school the nursery nurse should have an important part to play in this process, since her training recognises the importance of language in children's early development. We suggest that this element in her training should be extended to take account of the factors we have been discussing. Language study at this level goes beyond that normally encountered by the student nursery nurse, and indeed by the nursery teacher herself.
5.33 We believe that in the infant and first school the teacher also needs the support of aides who have been properly trained. It is accepted at once that this is an issue which will require discussion and consultation. The Plowden Report (13) made a number of suggestions in its recommendation for the employment of aides, and it is not our intention here to re-examine these. What we want to stress is that aides working with young children should have as part of their training a course in language development in the early years. As a result of it the aide should be able to understand the teacher's policies and put them into practice, operating within situations the teacher has devised. The course would by its very nature call for a good deal of practical experience with young children, and theoretical aspects should be closely related to the work in the classroom. There is also scope for the use of film, tape/transcript, and video recording, which would enable the student to study language in action and see it being successfully modified.
*One experienced infant headmistress gave us an example of how easy it is to overestimate the young child's understanding of certain speech forms. When she was wrapping Christmas presents one six year old asked her if she wanted any more paper. She replied 'Oh, I might do; I'll have to wait till I see if there's any more in my room'. The boy repeated his question, and as she talked to him she realised that though her sentence was apparently just a simple sequence of monosyllables the expression of tentativeness meant nothing to him.
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Ideally, such a course might be developed as a second stage course under the administration of the NNEB, and be taken as an additional course after a period of experience in school.
5.34 Some Authorities have already taken steps to provide general training for aides working in their schools, and this training sometimes includes reference to the development of children's language. In many cases the schools themselves have been a source of valuable practical training, and the aides have learned a great deal about children's language needs through the guidance and example of the head and the teachers. These have been valuable starting points, but we are suggesting that there should now be a movement more deliberate and specific to enable aides to play their part in the ways we have indicated.
5.35 We have so far been discussing particular uses of language, those which are less likely to be at the command of the disadvantaged child. There is, however, great value in simply expanding the number of opportunities for talk with adults quite apart from the fulfilment of such specific aims. This is the second of the two levels of language experience, and one at which the nursery nurse or aide can operate widely and very profitably. What many children lack above all is the experience of having someone to listen to them. In the home their chatter may be disregarded, not out of any unkindness, but disregarded nevertheless. Their questions may receive casual answers and their remarks the briefest of acknowledgement. This may be particularly true in large families, and it is significant that several research studies have indicated a relationship between verbal ability and family size. Much of the mother's utterance is directed at regulating behaviour and establishing role, and a question or an observation from the child is quite likely to receive as a response an unexplained prohibition. Every child gets some measure of this, however little, but in some homes it is likely to be the dominant feature, especially where there are other children claiming attention. It is a likely outcome that the child will become accustomed not to expect answers, and in due course not to ask questions. This is not necessarily due to any lack of warmth or care on the part of the mother. Indeed her solicitude for appropriate behaviour is itself a token of her care. It may be, however, that sustained dialogue with her child, with herself in a teaching role, is not within her range of experience. Thus, unlike his more favoured counterpart, the child comes to school unused to the kind of conversation with an adult in which meanings are exchanged, past experiences reshaped, and questions posed and answered on both sides.
5.36 All these are features of language which the nursery and infant school should see as central to their verbal activity; and indeed the environment they create, the experiences they provide, have among their objects a stimulus to language growth. Paragraphs 5.21-5.23 described the way in which this is done. But when we come back to this matter of adult-child dialogue we are bound to ask whether the school is able to afford enough opportunities for it. To begin with it might be asked whether the teacher has sufficient opportunity simply to listen to the child talk. In her enthusiasm for what they are doing, her concern to give attention as widely as possible, she has much less time to listen than she would like. Some of the responses her questions attract go little further than the short utterance, perhaps a simple monosyllable.
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The questions are often invitations to confirm or deny. A child's observation or anecdote will be warmly received, but its purport will sometimes be anticipated and a prompt will foreclose it. This is almost an inevitable consequence of having a large number of children to deal with. The teacher herself has insufficient time to recognise the possibilities of the exchange, to discern the direction in which she could edge the child to explore a particular idea. The nursery nurse and the aide should be able to make an important contribution here. Their training ought to have equipped them with the ability to 'read' a dialogue and to see where it might be encouraged to lead. It should have revealed how little profit there is for the child when the adult unconsciously manoeuvres him into making a closed-ended response. Perhaps above all else the teacher lacks time simply to listen, to let a child establish for himself a notion of the adult as someone who will reward a sustained verbal effort with her attention. It is here that there is great scope for voluntary participation, for the involvement of parents, students, and older secondary school pupils.
5.37 The participation of parents has been gradually increasing in recent years, particularly since the Plowden Report did much to encourage it. Many primary schools have worked hard to encourage parents to exercise a role in the life of the school, and a number have gone further than seeing this in terms of performing some kind of service. Parents act as escorts on journeys and in environmental studies outside school; they help in the school library, in the games period, in home studies areas. In all these situations they are involved in the learning process. We believe there is room for many more such initiatives, and our purpose in this chapter is to consider what parents can contribute in the nursery and infant school. It is no use pretending that the parent can slip easily into the learning situation. There are adjustments to be made and sensitivities on both sides to be respected. For example, it is all too easy for parents to misinterpret the situation and demand to know why their neighbour is 'teaching' their children. In EPA areas in particular parents may well be diffident and feel ill at ease, though once these natural apprehensions are overcome the gains for them as well as for the children are striking. Conversely, unease on the part of the teacher is a natural possibility. It requires some adjustment to move from the accustomed circumstances of working alone or with a nursery nurse to sharing one's classroom with other adults. But evidence we have received suggests that once this unease has passed the teacher finds new opportunities are open to her. There is no question of her room suddenly becoming crowded. At any one time the numbers of parents involved will be small, and should certainly be no larger than the teacher herself thinks right for the situation. The grouping of related spaces - the alternative to the classroom concept of school planning - could contribute to the success of a pattern of shared working. Small withdrawal spaces would provide a degree of seclusion to the benefit of both children and adults, and at the same time enable the teacher to keep in touch with all that was taking place. Perhaps the first point to be made about parental involvement is that it may be courting disappointment to 'mount' it as a scheme. Where participation of other kinds is already well developed its extension into this field can probably be made very naturally. But in other circumstances it is better for the classroom involvement to develop from informal contacts.
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5.38 Ideally, pre-school activity will have made these more easy to establish. If parents have been accustomed to home visiting or to pre-school playgroups they will find such contacts more natural. One school in a northern town took the initiative by going out to meet the mothers of two-three year olds in the community centre. The headmistress visited the centre once a week and after she had got to know them on personal terms she developed a kind of workshop situation. The following is her account of what happened when the relationship was well established:
'1st Session
This was a story-telling session. I gave what I considered the best way to tell a story to very young children and illustrated by telling 'The Three Pigs' - 'huffing and puffing and blowing the house down'. Then parents volunteered to tell the group one of their own stories; there was no embarrassment, rather fun and a lot of laughter. The children (two and three year olds) were kept with the group for story telling, then were occupied in an adjacent room.
I considered this first meeting very important. It started or restarted bedtime stories at home. Parents had to borrow and read books from the Mobile Library to refresh their memories of stories heard long ago and to read up new ones.
2nd Session
1. Children allowed to paint while parents watched and talked about colours and pictures.
2. Parents took over for picture painting then (a) used large brushes to make Marian Richardson patterns - introductory writing, (b) used smaller brushes for letters, and (c) finally large graphite pencils for letters and words. Parents bought books to take home.
3rd-10th Session
At this period I had a very talented welfare assistant in the Reception Class. I asked if she could help these young mothers, knowing that she had much to give them. She could make almost anything, grow anything, and had a wealth of knowledge acquired through travel; most of all she loved children. These afternoons were a joy for all. Parents made dolls, clothes, and jewellery, painted pictures, and mended books. They prepared apparatus, mostly from scraps, bits and pieces from home, and odds and ends from city shops. This kind of work overflowed to the homes, involving fathers and older children. Fathers made geo-boards, clinometers and boxes for school mathematics.'
Thus, although the children were not yet at school, the parents not only learned to appreciate the school's help and interest but made things for it for the benefit of other children. The sense of partnership which grew from this enterprise was ideal ground for the later participation we are discussing.
5.39 Another example comes from an East London infant school in an area of particular social difficulty. The head began by starting what she called the 'Wednesday Club', an opportunity for mothers to relax over a cup of tea and enjoy various activities ranging from cookery and hairdressing demonstrations to films and exhibitions of books. The mothers could bring their young children, who were looked after in a specially equipped playroom.
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From this beginning she extended the activities to morning sessions, when she and members of her staff discussed with the parents various aspects of the education of young children. This led up to the making of a video tape of each class at work, with the mothers introducing each activity. The interest aroused encouraged the head to provide books, art materials, etc for the parents to buy for use at home. The parents themselves raised the idea of opening a playgroup for their younger children, and the school is helping them to start this on a sound footing. This has given the head another opportunity to discuss with them the relationship between play and talk, and she is taking them to visit a number of good playgroups. The more we saw of this relationship the more we were impressed by the warmth and mutual trust it had generated. It had extended to visits by parents, children and teachers to the theatre and to the ballet, and there was no doubt at all of the benefit to the children's language development of all these shared experiences.
5.40 In another inner city area we found excellent co-operation between an infant and a nursery school to the same end. They founded a joint 'Mothers' Club', again with the initial emphasis on providing these young mothers with friendly social contact away from the four walls of their high rise flats. They developed a programme of talks, demonstrations, and practical activities, for some of which pupils of the nearby secondary school produced materials. The club provided a collection of books for the parents themselves to read. They talked about these with one another and with the heads, who then led the discussion to children's books and the value of story telling. The mothers worked out a rota for looking after their young children in the adjoining playroom and in this they were helped by a nursery nurse. From here it was a short step to drawing them into the nursery and infant schools themselves, and they were welcomed by the teachers into their classrooms and into the staffroom. We were again impressed by the quality of the relationship and cannot speak too highly of the determination of the teachers to make it work. It was not easy for them at first, and they do not disguise the fact. It meant a lot of hard work, patience, and adjustment, but they think the value out of all proportion to the initial cost, and they are in no doubt that it has made their own work more rewarding. The ways in which the services of parents are used must be for the school to decide, since circumstances will differ so widely as to make models unhelpful. The school will know what ratio of additional adults to children is most appropriate in its case, what patterns of encounter will be most rewarding, and what degree of 'tuition' the parents need. We recommend the practice as one that carries considerable benefit for all concerned, particularly for the children, and we should like to see its extension.
5.41 It should be recognised that individual and small group adult-child dialogue needs the right kind of accommodation, to which we have already made a passing reference. Nursery and infant schools are busy places, alive with noise and activity. Much of the additional language experience we are suggesting will, of course, take place in the context of normal classroom activity, with which we have suggested it should be closely associated. For example, the supporting adults will be engaged in talk with children at the sand or water tray, at the modelling table, or in the cookery corner. However, it would be an inadequate building that did not have spaces to which an adult could withdraw with an individual child or a small group to engage in
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uninterrupted talk, in language games, etc. This is not always a facility readily to be found, and we believe that school design should take account of the need for several such spaces to be distributed throughout the school.
5.42 It is likely that schools in educational priority areas would be helped in making and maintaining their contacts by having the services of an educational visitor or home liaison teacher, and indeed some such appointments have already been made. We believe that this kind of service is a valuable addition to a school's resources. It is never easy to separate educational and social concerns in the circumstances in which the teacher may be working, but we feel that the first should be emphasised. It should be his or her responsibility to help the parents into a co-operative relationship with the school and to encourage them to play a part in their own child's education. In this the visitor would be acting as one of the staff, not as an additional social worker, and should therefore have a teaching commitment. Heads with whom we discussed the possibilities of such appointments were all emphatic that they would not want a roving ambassador who simply used the school as a base. Indeed, their view was that each teacher should know the parents of all her children on these terms, doing the home visiting herself. They agreed that as a universal practice this would not be possible. Some teachers would find it difficult, and it would be unrealistic, not to say unfair, to ask it of probationers. A liaison teacher's role should be a flexible one, and it would involve her not only in visiting but in working with a class in school while their teacher was herself visiting. We believe that the liaison teacher should essentially be part of the school, and that the best results are to be obtained on this principle, not on the basis of a large 'caseload' across two or more schools.
5.43 Before passing on to the child's experience of reading we would conclude by emphasising once more the very great importance of a conscious policy for language development. We have argued that the language growth of very young children is a more complex matter than is often realised. We know that one of the principal concerns of teachers at this level is to help the children to use words freely in response to a variety of stimulating experiences. But we suggest it is now necessary to look more deeply into the process. More active steps should be taken to help parents in the early stages and then to show them how they can co-operate with the school to develop what has already been started. Teachers themselves need to know more about the way language works, and they should have support in planning and carrying out strategies to meet the children's language needs. There are obviously implications for a large-scale expansion in in-service courses and development work if these demands are to be met. Equally obviously there are implications for the staffing of nursery and infant schools. As so many of our recommendations for participation by additional adults depend on the involvement of an appropriately qualified teacher, the staffing ratio of infant and nursery schools should be improved to allow the additional responsibilities to be undertaken with full advantage.
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REFERENCES
1. Children and their Primary Schools HMSO: 1967.
2. M Deutsch et al The Disadvantaged Child Basic Books: 1967.
3. B Bernstein Class, Codes, and Control Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1971.
4. R Hess and V Shipman Early Experiences and the Socialisation of the Cognitive Modes in Children Child Development, Vol. 36, No. 4: 1965.
5. YJ Tough Focus on Meaning: Talking to some Purpose with Young Children Allen and Unwin: 1973.
6. W Labov The Logic of Non-Standard English in F Williams (ed.) Language and Poverty Markham, Chicago: 1970.
7. AH Halsey Educational Priority Vol. 1, HMSO: 1972 and West Riding Educational Priority Area Project: No. 5 The Home Visiting Project.
8. M Blank and F Solomon A Tutorial Language Programme to develop abstract thinking in socially-disadvantaged pre-school children 1968-69 et seq.
9. C Bereiter and S Engelmann Teaching Disadvantaged Children in Pre-school Prentice Hall: 1966.
10. DM and GA Gahagan Talk Reform Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1970.
11. Language Development and the Disadvantaged Child: Research and Development Project in Compensatory Education Schools Council (not yet published).
12. YJ Tough Listening to Children Talking to be published under the auspices of the Schools Council.
13. See 1. above.
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Part Three
Reading
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CHAPTER 6
The Reading Process
'I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter.'
Charles Dickens: 'Great Expectations'.
'We are all of us learning to read all the time.' - IA Richards
6.1 Controversy about the teaching of reading has a long history, and throughout it there has been the assumption, or at least the hope, that a panacea can be found that will make everything right. This was reflected in much of the correspondence we received. There was an expectation that we would identify the one method in whose adoption lay the complete solution. Let us, therefore, express our conclusion at the outset in plain terms: there is no one method, medium, approach, device, or philosophy that holds the key to the process of learning to read. We believe that the knowledge does exist to improve the teaching of reading, but that it does not lie in the triumphant discovery, or rediscovery, of a particular formula. Simple endorsements of one or another nostrum are no service to the teaching of reading. A glance at the past reveals the truth of this. The main arguments about how reading should be taught have been repeated over and over again as the decades pass, but the problems remain.
6.2 A study of the way these arguments have been advanced, contested, revamped, discredited and rediscovered is a useful corrective to the idea that any one of them has a monopoly of truth (1). In the last four centuries there has been a succession of them, making claims for word methods, sentence methods, experience methods, phonic methods, and so on. It is interesting to note that they were usually introduced with the description 'new' or 'natural' or 'logical'. Today's discovery was often yesterday's discard, unrecognised as such, or rehabilitated by some new presentation. This does not mean that there has been no advance, that nothing really new has emerged across the years. There have, of course, been many innovations of one kind or another, notably in materials. But the major arguments are substantially the same as they have always been, and to endorse one at the expense of the others is no more helpful today than it has proved in the past.
6.3 Among authorities on reading there is, in fact, considerable agreement, and in recent years they have done much to reduce the polarisation of opinion. There is no doubt, however, that this does still exist, and it characterised much of the evidence we received. One issue that has received more than its share of this kind of attention is that of approaches to the teaching of reading in the early stages. It is argued on the one hand that the essence of the process is 'breaking the code', converting print into sounds and then into words; it is argued on the other that this must take second place to securing and expanding the child's interest, keeping his curiosity alive, and giving reading a meaning. Immediately, a false conflict is created which leads to a number of unnecessary tensions. Some would put so much emphasis on the 'mechanics' of reading that certain children would be handicapped rather than helped. Others advocate so keenly the virtues of mature reading from the beginning that they are in danger of leaving it too much to trust that the skills will be
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acquired on the way. The children would thus be left ignorant of vital information about the nature of the written code. This emphasis fails to acknowledge that the majority of children also require precise, well-organised instruction if they are to become successful readers. In our view a large part of the controversy arises from the expression of unnecessarily extreme opinions, often more extreme than the real beliefs or practices of those who advance them. In addition, the contentious statements are often based on inadequate information. For example, we received many letters whose writers seemed convinced that the majority of infant teachers had abandoned the teaching of phonics; they argued that a return to the practice would raise standards dramatically. But the results of our survey showed that their supposition was far from correct. The teachers of six year olds in our sample were asked which approaches they were currently using. The results were as follows:
| 1. Look and Say (word recognition) | 97% |
| 2. Phonic 1 (letter sounds, digraphs, diphthongs) | 97% |
| 3. Phonic 2 (based on syllables) | 70% |
| 4. Sentence Method | 51% |
We believe that an improvement in the teaching of reading will not come from the acceptance of simplistic statements about phonics or any other single aspect of reading, but from a comprehensive study of all the factors at work and the influence that can be exerted upon them. In the course of this sequence of chapters, therefore, we shall outline what we believe to be necessary for the effective teaching of reading - from the earliest stages to the advanced skills required of the educated reader. We believe, however, that a fundamentally important question has to be answered before there can be any discussion of how the teaching of reading can be improved. What is Reading? Much of the misunderstanding surrounding the debate about reading results from the lack of a proper examination of what the process involves. Before considering the ways in which children can best learn the skill one must be clear about what is expected of them, in both the short and the long term. This knowledge should then inform decisions about the organisation of the teaching within the school, the kinds of initial and in-service training needed, and the resources required at each level. Thus a detailed understanding of the reading process is of critical importance in terms of its practical implications. It is for this reason that the account which follows includes a good deal of technical detail. We regard this as essential to our task, for we do not believe that a Report making recommendations about reading can examine the issues fairly without defining what is involved for a child when he is learning to read. We must also emphasise here that our discussion of reading is not confined to this section of the Report. Parts Six and Seven have a particular relevance to this one, but since references to reading occur throughout the Report we hope that all the chapters will be read in close association with one another.
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6.4 It may be useful to begin by looking at some of the ways in which reading can be defined:
'One can read in so far as he can respond to the language skills represented by graphic shapes as fully as he has learned to respond to the same language signals of his code represented by patterns of auditory shapes.'
This statement by Fries (2) could be interpreted in a number of ways, but it reflects his view that the teaching of reading is largely a matter of developing the child's ability to respond to letters and spelling patterns. If these could be converted from print into spoken form then this could be regarded as reading. Goodman (3), on the other hand, emphasises the importance of teaching children to respond to meaning:
'The purpose of reading is the reconstruction of meaning. Meaning is not in print, but it is meaning that the author begins with when he writes. Somehow the reader strives to reconstruct this meaning as he reads.'
Reading is here taken to include all those processes necessary to arrive at some reconstruction of the author's meaning. Gray (4) elaborates on this theme in the following way:
'A good reader understands not only the meaning of a passage, but its related meaning as well, which includes all the reader knows that enriches or illumines the literal meaning. Such knowledge may have been acquired through direct experience, through wide reading or through listening to others.'
This means that reading is more than a reconstruction of the author's meanings. It is the perception of those meanings within the total context of the relevant experiences of the reader - a much more active and demanding process. Here the reader is required to engage in critical and creative thinking in order to relate what he reads to what he already knows; to evaluate the new knowledge in terms of the old and the old in terms of the new. By this definition reading includes all the intellectual and affective processes that take place in response to a printed text.
6.5 These three definitions may be represented as follows:
