Last week I had the huge pleasure of meeting the Research Assistants who are administering and monitoring the implementation of Breakthrough to Learning at Matthew Moss High School.
They have set up a blog and made a number of video clips (including two of me made on their visit!). They can be accessed on:
www.btlmmhs.blogspot.co.uk
These are some of the comments by Year Seven learners on their first experience of Book 1: Continue reading
My brother has discovered that, if you call up Google Scholar, and type in “nominalization and abstract language”, two of our old articles come up very near the top:
The Deficit Hypothesis Revisited (1986) and
“Illuminating English”: how explicit language teaching improved public examination results in a comprehensive school (1992)
I was unaware of this and asked for help in understanding how Google Scholar works.
Tom Davis explained: Continue reading
Learners in years 7 and 8 at Matthew Moss High School have already started working through Book 1 of Breakthrough to Learning. The research assistants appointed to monitor and administer the courses have broken into my computer programme and produced a vastly improved version. Continue reading
I’ve just had an email from Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale, which has introduced Breakthrough to Learning into every class in the school. This is how some pupils responded to the first lesson:
We observed some year 10s in BTL today and it was marvellous. They are doing the fast track course. The promo video had really inspired them and they worked brilliantly, making some lovely observations along the way, such as “It really makes you think Miss!” and “I’d never thought about language in layers like this before Miss.” It was so exciting and rewarding! It was Mark Moorhouse’s, the deputy head’s, class and he was amazed at how they got stuck in! One boy, a reticent learner called Luke, was excitedly babbling about complex sentences and connectives etc – it was great! He said “This is miles better than normal English Miss!”
I’ve been looking at introductory books on Linguistics for people wanting to learn about it from scratch and have been, once again, startled to see how the academic understanding of the subject is growing.
Here are some of the branches, which each have their own fields of development:
semiotics, phonetics, phonology, intonation, morphology, semantics, grammar / syntax, discourse analysis
language variety, world Englishes, multilingualism, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, conversational analysis, pragmatics, language extinction, forensic linguistics, stylistics, language in education, Teaching English as a Foreign / Second Language
historical linguistics (philology), language families
Each of these branches of Linguistics (and all the others I haven’t spotted) has University Departments specializing in them. Not only is our theoretical understanding of language burgeoning, but the applications of the new insights is also proliferating.
Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy ed. Frances Christie and J.R. Martin, 2007
The title was irresistible! I got it from Amazon in pursuance of work which Urszula Clark had told me about in answer to my comment: “Surely other people have done my analysis of academic texts and come up with abstract language.”
Indeed they have! In this collection is an article by J.R. Martin: Construing knowledge: a functional linguistic perspective. The abstract words which are produced by nominalisation and metaphor are described by Martin as the product of “grammatical metaphor” and “literal metaphor”.
This gives strong academic backing to my own work, though it is done from a totally different perspective. I can feel the necessity of another article coming on!
I’ve been having a long-running argument with a friend about whether modern Linguistics can be called a science.
I maintain what I have written in my published papers that Systemic Functional Linguistics offers a complete description of the English language, which entitles it to be called scientific. There is no utterance in spoken or written English that cannot be exhaustively described in terms of this system. My friend argues that language is too complex and dynamic to be described in truly scientific terms. No linguistic school, she says, offers a universally agreed description of language such as the periodic table has established for the material world. Continue reading
One of the intriguing references in the www.learningfutures.org site is a link to Spaced Learning.
This seems to be a scheme used by some schools in the Engaging Schools programme to use the insights of neuroscience to enable the memory to work to best advantage.
I look forward to pursuing this promising line of research.
I’ve been catching up on the books and websites recommended to me by Lindsey Sladen, the teacher in charge of implementing Breakthrough to Learning throughout the school. This week I’ve been reading Mindset by Carol S. Dweck.
The sub-title: HOW YOU CAN FULFILL YOUR POTENTIAL places the books in the self-improvement tradition so strong in America. This is not immediately attractive to a sceptical European, but the message of the book turns out to have important implications for the contemporary approach to learning as practised in Lindsey’s school.
The message is a simple one: Dweck argues that there are two types of learner: Continue reading
This is the title of a book by Howard Sharron and Martha Coulter which I’ve recently been re-reading. It describes the inspiring work of Reuven Feuerstein, the Israeli teacher and psychologist.
It is a lesson to everyone engaged in education to treat with caution the claims of “science” in pre-scientific subjects like psychology. Feuerstein was one of the survivors of the Holocaust who made his home in Israel after the Second World War. As a psychologist, he was confronted with helping children who had survived the camps to lead a useful life in their new country. However, he was shocked to discover that the conventional psychologists of the time diagnosed a wholly disproportionate number of them as educationally sub-normal. Luckily, Feuerstein was more of a teacher than a psychologist and he refused to accept that these remnants of European Jewry, however horrific their experiences, were ineducable. Continue reading