Here’s a follow up to ‘A Rose but …’ Debbie Hepplewhite of the Reading Reform Foundation summed up the Report pretty well I thought: “I’ve now read through Rose’s Dyslexia Report – some parts too quickly so I need to re-read – however there is a lack of clarity and lack of mention of different… Continue reading O Rose, thou art sick!
News again from National Public Radio or npr in the USA. They’ve recently noticed the jettisoning by the UK government of the ‘i before e, except after c’ rule.Npr reports that Ben Schott has fixed the rule in his sights and declared it to be ‘an annoying edict about an annoying rule’. On his blog… Continue reading Schott takes aim at ‘i before e, except after c’.
Another government report: ‘Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties’! They’re churning them out faster than David Crystal can write books on language these days. Probably so that we don’t have time to read them thoroughly!With this latest offering, we’re treated to the usual platitudes – ‘every child to succeed’,… Continue reading A Rose is but …
You might, if you were watching, have seen last week’s ‘English at the crossroads’ Report from Ofsted declaring what we all know already: that English standards are ‘not good enough’.As I’ve written in a number of posting before (see the postings on the Policy Exchange Report), although the government have spent huge amounts of money… Continue reading Standards stall – more evidence.
John was in Northern Ireland last week training teachers at a primary school in Lurgan. This is the second time I’ve run a training at the school and, after training the teachers in P1/P2 last year, this year we trained the P3/P4 teachers. And an enthusiastic lot they were too! (P1 in Northern Ireland corresponds… Continue reading How many children are read to by their parents?
In September last year, the children’s author, Alan Gibbons (Shadow of the Minotaur is a terrific read!), launched a campaign to protect libraries in schools and to try and prevent library closures in the community. He’s now organised an e-petition, which reads: We, the undersigned, call on Her Majesty’s Government to accept in principle that… Continue reading Campaign for the Book
In case you missed it, the one millionth word passed into the English language sometime around last week, according to Telegraph writer Simon Winchester. If you’ve never heard of autopeotomy, nor still linked the word with Dr James Murray, two elderly lexicographers at Oxford station, or Simon Winchester himself, you may shudder a little and… Continue reading The Joys of Our Truly Global Language
More news from npr in the USA. One of the latest pieces the station has run is with the new Secretary for Education, Arne Duncan. You’ve heard of ‘Education, Education, Education’ but Arne has $100 billion to spend across the education spectrum! It’s the ‘civil rights issue of our generation’, he says, and the Obama… Continue reading 100 Billion dollars to spend on education!
I have previously written that true literacy tuition is about teaching reading and spelling together because they are inextricably linked. What most children can do when they start their schooling is talk. They are already very accurate at using the grammatical structures of English and have vocabularies running into many thousands of words. David Crystal… Continue reading Support for Spelling (Part 2)
This latest DCSF publication pulls together much traditional thinking about how spelling has been taught in British schools for over a hundred years without providing any evidence that anyone learns to spell as a result of it. From the very beginnings of the development of our compulsory schooling system, spelling was identified as a major… Continue reading DCSF publication: Support for Spelling (released from captivity May 2009)