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
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
In my blog on 6th June I trumpeted the news that a school in the North of England had contacted me to discuss using Breakthrough to Learning in their school.
Three teachers from the school came down to Birmingham on 21st May, and what was my amazement to be told that they had already timetabled in Breakthrough to Learning in every year of the school from next September. This was something different! How was it that a school could respond to the needs of the pupils instead of fitting the pupils into the iron framework of the subject-based school timetable?
Since then I have been in constant touch with the school and have been pursuing the articles and websites they have sent me. I am still working on this, but have to share with my readers immediately a very exciting website:
There are two ways of making abstract words from concrete words: one is nominalisation and the other is metaphor.
When I was working on the structure of abstract language, I found it hard to flush into consciousness the metaphors embedded in everyday language. For example, we have no way of conceptualising time except by using a metaphor from space. (For instance, the chemist’s is between the grocery and the optician. The meeting is between 2.00 and 4.00.) For me as an adult, the processing of these metaphors had become automatic.
I’ve been reading a recent book on metaphor: I is an Other by James Geary. He desribes research which indicates that children develop an understanding of different kinds of metaphor at different ages. Continue reading
This week’s blog continues Bob Farmer’s contribution. He applies his ideas on interactive peer group learning to teaching The Language of Ideas:
Low academic language skills have been shown to be associated with low academic performance in a variety of educational settings. Mary Mason’s computer package The Language of Ideas is a based on the principle that one of the differences between successful and unsuccessful students is that students who succeed have learned the abstract language of ideas. In order to get qualifications in any subject, therefore, students need more than good exam technique, they also need to learn about and raise their level of academic language skills. Continue reading