THE RELEVANCE OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC INSIGHTS

INTO THE READING PROCESS FOR

CURRICULUM PLANNING AND

TEACHING PRACTICE

by

Harvey Mendham B.A. (U.N.E.)

A report submitted in partial

fulfilment of requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Education

School of Education

University of New South Wales

1978 ii.

This report, entitled "The Relevance of Psycholinguistic Insights into the Reading Process for Curriculum Planning and Teaching Practice", has not been submitted for an award to any other institution.

Signed\'IJ~ iii.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Professor L.M. Brown for his assistance and encouragement; Or. Peter Rousch and Dr. Brian Cambourne for their advice and for supplying me with sources from the United States which I was unable to procure here; Dr James Fitzgerald for his advice and help with European sources; librarians of the Riverine College of Advanced Education; and Vivienne Mendham for her unfailing encouragement - and for her typing the manuscript. iv.

ABSTRACT

The research of psychologists, linguists and psycholinguists is examined to find implications for curriculum planners and teaching practitioners in the area of reading. It is argued that Noam Chomsky was instrumental in establishing a new

"paradigm" so that research into reading has followed a new direction. Thus many older findings can be seen to have a new significance while more recent research (which is sometimes quite "mentalistic") emphasises the very complex nature of the reading process. Previous ideas that readers simply took up graphic information from the page and recoded it to sound are discounted. Beginning and mature readers, alike, are viewed as active participants in a constructive act of information­ processing. Successful readers bring much more than print­ decipherment skills to the page; their experiential background and linguistic ability are of as much importance to their proper recreation of authors' meanings. Curriculum planners and classroom teachers might pay attention to these factors and their recognition will be evident in learning-context analyses, goal and objective formation, choice of learning situations and manners of assessment. The implications for practitioners are quite as serious and modification of instructional styles, lesson emphases, arrangements of time and

space, and manners of diagnosis and remediation might be

seen to be necessary. v.

CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION 1

PART 1

Chapter

1 CHOMSKY'S STIMULUS TO RESEARCH INTO THE READING PROCESS 21

2 PSYCHOLOGISTS' FINDINGS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE READING ACT 45

3 LINGUISTS' STUDIES OF THE MANNER OF CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 68

4 PSYCHOLINGUISTS' VIEWS OF READING AS AN ACTIVE PROCESS 98

PART 2

5 IMPLICATIONS FOR CURRICULUM PLANNING 123

6 IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM PRACTICE 144

CONCLUSION 161

BIBLIOGRAPHY 166

APPENDICES 1 When is a Word Not a Word 174 2 My Poltergeist 175 The Little Lost Bear vi.

FIGURES

1 • The "outside-in" model of reading 4

2. The "inside-out" model of reading 5

3. Reading viewed as a simple translation of graphic symbols to sound 6

4. Reading viewed as a process of bringing meaning to and extracting meaning from print 6

5. A diagrammatic representation of Chomsky's theory of transformational-generative grammar 36

6. Chomsky's conception of dual structure when applied to reading - from the author's point of view 38

7. Chomsky 1 s conception of dual structure when applied to reading - from the reader's point of view 38

8. The place of meaning in the reading process 38

9. A detailed immediate constituent analysis to reveal hierarchical structures in a child's utterance 77

10. A simplified constituent analysis to reveal hierarchical structures in a child's utterance 77

11. A representation to illustrate how cues, strategies and analytical techniques fit into a cyclical arrangement with comprehension as the continuous focus 111 Introduction

This report is written in the hope that it will assist curriculum planners and classroom teachers as they develop reading programmes that take account of recent research findings in the area. As

Aims of Primary Education in New South Wales states:

Changes in administrative patterns are placing more responsibility for the school program in the hands of the principal and staff. Approaches to curriculum development have changed. Rather than being detailed prescriptions, syllabuses have become guides providing a broad framework within which schools operate.1

A later passage admits the consequent challenge facing each school:

The greatest difficulty is to move from generally accepted aims and priorities of a school. Many decisions can be made only at the local level by forming judgements in practical situations about a complex of factors. Given that a statement of broad guidelines is provided from a central source, the responsibility of the school is to interpret those guidelines and to make decisions in terms of the school's professional initiatives, needs, priorities and resources.2

School administrators, then, have new and demanding responsibilities.

Apart from their leadership, supervisory and "human relations" role, they have to be expert in curriculum development and its corollary, in-service education:

Instructional excellence is dependent upon administrative leadership and expertise in curriculum and teaching. In smaller administrative units, the administrator should, ideally, be expert in all curriculum areas. This expectation may be impossible for most administrators and it may be necessary to select certain crucial areas for emphasis. For several reasons, knowledge in the area of reading instruction would seem to merit a high priority. 3 2.

One of these reasons might well be the evident concern amongst professionals and lay people about the quality of reading instruction and reading standards, especially as they apply to the young. It is obvious that this concern is, to an extent, a function of the large amount of space and time allocated to discussion of "the first R." in research papers, 4 serious journals,5 the popular press6 and on the electronic media. 7 Some would argue that the controversy is sometimes motivated by more than purely educational concerns; views about "the right way" of teaching reading can be seen to reflect more of their exponents' larger systems of belief than their knowledge of reading or educational theory. But more authentically-based concern certainly exists and educationalists are duty-bound to provide some realistic answers to the questions raised.

Professor Crisp of the Australian National University suggested that

"the present situation in universities is very desperate - and getting worse at an increasing rate •••• Some university students are only semi-literate when they graduate .... "8 The late Dr F. Just argued similarly when speaking on behalf of the Australian Council for Educational Standards; he said, "We believe that standards have declined in reading, writing and arithmetic". 9 At the other end of the educational spectrum, the Victorian Federation of State School

Mothers' Clubs claimed that, on the basis of a survey involving

77,000 children attending Victorian schools, one in six pupils needed special assistance to improve reading skills. 10 A secondary teacher in New South Wales, genuinely concerned and rather more bold in his assertions insists that 30% to 40% of high school children are functionally illiterate. 11 3.

A survey that was specifically designed to assess fourteen-year­

olds' ability to handle necessary day-to-day reading tasks revealed a very different picture12 but that teacher went on to level several

specific charges worth considering: teacher education in the area of reading instruction is inadequate; children from homes with no

(or few) books are disadvantaged; reading failure tends to be self-reinforcing, leading to further and more general failure; many older children seem to lack those reading skills they need if they're to handle the most usual tasks demanded of them by modern society; reading failure often leads to personality disturbance and sometimes to a childvs relegation to a group whose needs are different from his.. 13

If aware of some or all of these "symptoms", many teachers are less sure about causes and quite unable to suggest remedies •

••• most teachers feel insecure to a substantial degree about the teaching of reading. They want guidance, encouragement, in-service training, time for planning, and relief from some of the 14 obstacles which inhibit effective reading instruction.

Doubts and confusion among practising teachers become easier to understand when one puts oneself in their place and seeks "the truth" in the mass of research15 conducted in the area. Perceptual 16 psychologists such as Jerome Brosner are at theoretical odds with cognitive psychologists like Kenneth Goodman 17 and both are in disagreement with their behaviourist-inclined colleagues e.g.

Dr Carl Bereiter.18 All the same, it is in the research that answers

can be found and teachers should be urged - as they were by

James Britton at the U.N.E.S.C.D. Seminar on the Teaching of English, 19 in Sydney, 1972 - to seek authoritative answers themselves. 4.

Teachers' professional organisations have a prominent role to play here, encouraging members to examine their practice and its underlying theory in the light of research findings. The Primary

English Teachers' Association has done just this; in its recent newsletter (P.E.N.5 "Towards a School Reading Policy" by Norman 20 McCulla ) tan precepts, comments and "discussion starters" were presented to challenge teachers' assumptions and to guide them as they worked towards the creation of their individual schools' reading programmes. Although the document was directive in tone, teachers were asked to read further through the reprinting of an abridged address by Professor Walter McGinitie. 21

Precept 5 is central in the document, describing the nature of the 22 reading act itself. Obviously derived from the thinking of Huey,

Chomsky, 23 Smith, 24 and Goodman, 25 it encourages reading teachers to reorient their thinking to align with late, psycholinguistic findings.

It is the purpose of this report to examine critically the theoretical underpinnings of this line of thought and than to seek implications therein for curriculum planning and teaching practice.

"Towards a School Reading Policy", Primary English Notes 5, defines reading this way:

PRECEPT 5 - READING IS A PROCESS OF BRINGING MEANING TO AND EXTRACTING MEANING FROM PRINT.

Comment - ONCE: it was thought that reading was 'an outside-in' process:

EVERY RUN WORDS PRINT - ITEM SOUNDS PRODUCED DISCRIMINATED TOGETHER

(Figure 1) 5.

As such it was seen to be predominantly visual. Many materials were produced with rigidly controlled vocabulary and phonetically regular words. It did not account for how young children while struggling with 'Pat, pat fat cat Tat' were also reading words like 'television', vcoca-Cola', 1 dinosaurv with little difficulty.

- NOW: reading is increasingly seen as an 'inside-out' process or, as some would have it, 'thinking with print':

PAST EXPERIENCES, SAMPLE PRINT, EXPECTATIONS, USING MEANING 'FEEL' FOR LANGUAGE MINIMAL CUES

(Figure 2)

Children bring a rich linguistic background, past experiences and certain expectations to what they read. When children have access to materials that (a) reflect familiar experiences and new experiences structured by the teacher, (b) reflect those patterns of language usage they are accustomed to, they are not forced to rely entirely upon the printed page to derive meaning. A familiarity with content and a feel for the language enable them to anticipate and make predictions about what is to come, correcting themselves when the flow of language is destroyed or hindered.26

The "outside-in" and "inside-out" terminology used above was 27 introduced by Wanner. He implied that, although there are numerous approaches to the teaching of reading ("look-and-say", "phonic",

"augmented or altered orthography", "language experience", "eclectic" etc.), they can all be placed in either of two categories.

Those approaches that are framed on the assumption that reading consists of processing an inward flow of graphic information from the page are labelled "outside-in". Perceptions of print are supposed to proceed in an uninterrupted, uncomplicated flow to the brain where they are analysed piece by piece until some meaningful interpretation occurs.

The graphic information is processed in a series of hierarchical decisions: first, letters or clusters of letters are discriminated; 6.

then, these letters are synthesised into syllables and words through the matching of letters with their phonologically appropriate sounds.

Elaborating upon Figure 1, we arrive at this "model": 28

PHONEMES AND EVERY LETTER PRINT - DISCRIMINATED GRAPHEMES - BLENDING - PRONOUNCED - MEANING MATCHED

Figure 3

In contrast, "inside-out" theorists argue that reading is only incidentally visual and assert that recoding to sound is peripheral to understanding the meaning of words. Even the beginning-reader perceives only a small proportion of the graphic display. On the basis of this sampling, he anticipates what meanings and associated language forms could come next. Thus he proceeds to reconstruct authors' meanings i.e. to read. If his expectations are not fulfilled, he goes back to check what is on the page, possibly correcting his responses to the print. Not every letter or letter-cluster is processed; neither is there a hierarchy of analytical skills; nor is recoding to sound absolutely necessary.

Again, · ex t en d.ing F.igure 2 , we arrive· a t th·is represen t a t·ion: 29

PAST EXPERIENCE, SELECTIVE SOUND AND LANGUAGE INTUITIONS, ASPECTS OF MEANING PRONUNCIATION EXPECTATIONS PRINT IF NECESSARY

Figure 4

Acceptance of this reading "model" necessitates a major reorientation of thinking, approach and practice for teachers as has been mentioned already. They have been very accustomed to approaches, materials and arrangements that reflect "outside-in" beliefs. Even their close ?.

professional advisers, the school counsellors, use instruments of assessment based on their view of the reading process. 30 In the vast majority of cases, these teachers will have been taught at college that readers process all the graphic information on the page; that they "blend" letters and letter clusters into syllables and words; that they match these shapes with sound, running them together to attempt pronunciation aloud or sub-vocally; that "hearing" the sound, they comprehend.

It is little wonder, then, that a lot of pupils' reading time is given over to practice in fine, visual discrimination, in watching words presented on flash cards, in matching graphemes with phonemes, and in practising blends, digraphs and other letter clusters. Similarly, it is to be expected that "outside-in" oriented teachers spend more time in getting their pupils to "sound out" automatically and with complete accuracy, leaving assistance with comprehension "for later".

"Comprehension of content is supposed to come about automatically if and when the child masters decoding skills, and in any case it is the child's responsibility. 1131 It is also to be expected that these teachers provide more practice in visual discrimination and phonic analysis when pupils fail; their "model" doesn't offer any alternative approach.

Now they are being asked to abandon any preoccupation with absolutely accurate reproduction and to encourage pupils to anticipate,

to make "educated guesses" based on their senses of semantic and

syntactic propriety. Developing this regard for meaning ~'Does that

make sense?") and feel for the flow of language ("Does that sound B.

right?") becomes very important:

Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game - and by "guess" I mean the informed response that you make when you're not quite sure. That guess is based on many factors: your personal experience, your knowledge of the language, the context in which a word or sentence appears, the graphic cues provided by the text. You can dress "guess" up in fancy terms and call it "tentative information processing". But it really is guessing in the sense that you have an idea of what's coming before it actually comes.32

Extending the child's experiential and linguistic background is considered as much a part of reading instruction as is training in the deciphering of print. Linguists, psychologists and psycholinguists have provided evidence that the fluent and the beginning reader make use of all three cueing systems. Though not a "linguistic adult", 33 the five to eight year old manages most34 of the usual grammatical constructions and has stores of experience that enable him to predict the meaning of unknollll words. It is when these anticipations are unfulfilled so that (acceptable) sound and

sense are lost that the young reader resorts to a close examination of the print.

Clearly, a critical difference between proponents of the "outside-in"

argument and those more influenced by psycholinguists' findings is

their view of written language. The former hold that print is more

abstract and quite different from speech. "Inside-out" theoreticians

argue that writing is not essentially different from oral language.

In both forms of communication, messages are transferred using a

system of symbols, one audio and one graphic. They think print

and speech are alternative language forms: 9.

Several basic premises underlie the psycholinguistic view of reading. Reading is seen as language, in fact, it is one of the four language processes. In a literate society written language becomes a parallel to oral language. Just as speaking is productive oral language and listening is receptive aural language, so writing is the productive counterpart of speaking, while reading is the receptive process that corresponds to listening.35

While acknowledging that print has more set conventions, they still maintain that reading has its foundations in the effective control of oral language.

Such a basic divergence of view leads those teachers favouring an

"inside-out" explanation to adopt quite different teaching approaches and practices. Accepting that understanding speech and understanding print demand similar thinking of the individual, and noting that the vast majority of children are remarkably successful in mastering talk, they try as far as possible to align their in-school teaching with the manner of children's pre-school language-learning experiences.

They argue that young children learn to speak so quickly because they are immersed in the medium of oral language and feel a genuine need to understand and be understood. They want to know what is being said in the home, in their larger family, amongst their peers and in the community. Just as importantly, they want to make their needs and attitudes known. Apart from physical satisfactions and ordinary information, they look for emotional reinforcement and support.

"Inside-out" oriented teachers argue that children could learn to read as quickly if they were similarly immersed in the medium of written language - and if they were to experience a desire to communicate with authors via the graphic symbols on the page. If pupils can be convinced that the messages contained in the print also offer enjoyment, 1 o.

improved understanding, support, reinforcement etc., they will, given the correct guidance and materials, become effective readers.

The mark of the effective reader, according to these teachers, is his gaining most meaning from a minimal use of cues. (They can point to many pupils, trained according to phonics-oriented programmes, who can sound out passages of prose with accuracy but with little comprehension.) Teachers influenced by linguists' studies of children's speech development expect less than completely accurate decipherment of print by young readers. The semantically appropriate but graphically incorrect response is preferred to the graphically very similar but nonsensical "miscue". 36

Bob: The boys went through the dark woods. John: The boys ran though the dark frest. Text: The boys ran through the dark forest • ••• In a qualitative analysis ••• Bob's miscues would be rated "better" miscues - in other words, miscues of high quality - than those of John.37

Remembering that pre-schoolers have moved from "whole to part" in their language development, from "babbling" to generally acceptable speech forms in a process of gradual approximation, these teachers give first priority in their reading instruction to the gaining of meaning. Like parents, they accept less than ideal responses (this time to print) in an encouraging manner - but insist upon sense.

They spend little time in drilling letters and words in isolation.

Neither do they give as much time to exercises in visual discrimination and phonic analysis. Theirs is a much less Pestalozzian approach and, apart from the emphasis on development of the child's experiential background (so that he can bring essential pre-understandings and 11 •

interest to the reading situation) and his oral language power

(so that he has a feel for the proper flow of language), they

straightway attempt to help children manage what fluent readers do i.e. sample, anticipate, check for sense and sound, confirm or correct.

Let us give some preliminary consideration to the more obvious

strengths and weaknesses of these opposing views. "Outside-in"

theorists suggest that readers process all the print on a page.

Now, average readers manage to scan and comprehend at a speed ranging

from 250 to 350 words per minute. If those words have a mean word length of 4 to 5 letters they are "reading" some 1500 letters per minute. But George Miller38 showed quite clearly that the human mind can process only about 7 pieces of random information (letters or digits) at one time. This researcher (whose work has been replicated by others) demonstrated that when the load on human memory exceeds

"the magical number seven plus or minus two", the pieces of information which occur earliest in the sequence are lost from memory. Since

Kolers and Katzman39 have shown that recognition of a single letter

takes between one quarter and one third of a second, the idea of

skilled readers' dealing with texts in a letter by letter manner

"adds up to somewhat of a mathematical paradox11 • 40 Even if one assumes that cluster by cluster or phrase-by-phrase decoding is taking place,

the speed of superior readers can hardly be accounted for, using the

"outside-in" reading model.

Many find the "voice in the head" aspect of this older view of reading

attractive. These observers hold that it is the sub-vocal "running

together" of recognised phonemes, the pronunciation of graphemes, that 12.

provides the key to sense. But it is quite easy to demonstrate the pronunciation depends upon meaning rather than the reverse. One has only to consider homographs (e.g. LEAD-LEAD, LIVE-LIVE and READ-READ) to realise that their contexts determine their proper pronunciations.

An oft-quoted example is:

"This LEAD sinker is heavy." (compared with the colloquial)

"This LEAD singer is heavy."

Here, the reader has to decode "sinker" and "singer" before the acceptable pronunciation of LEAD is determined. One grapheme's change has altered the meaning of the whole sentence (and, consequently, the appropriate pronunciation of LEAD). Smith, Goodman and Meredith41 provide this illustration:

Can "white" be pronounced in isolation? Most speakers would read "white" in a list with similar intonation. But what about the sentence: "In Washington, D.C., there is a white house called the White House but the White family doesn't live there." "White" has three different intonations in that sentence that must be precise. Any variation in the way "white" is stressed would change the meaning of the sentence completely.

Much of this present writer's time has been spent in marking students' scripts. He has noted that, upon approaching material for close correction, he "shifts gear" to take close account of all the print on a page. In other reading situations, especially where the material has been chosen primarily for the enjoyment it offers, he can make good sense of even badly printed texts. Often failing to notice deviations from standard forms, he samples the print rather than processing all the graphic information as "outside-in" arguments suggest. 13.

42 43 More substantially, Rose-Marie Weber, Kenneth Goodman, and

Marie Clay44 have made careful studies of the nature of readervs mistakes. If reading works as the "outside-in" theorists suggest, one would expect mistakes to resemble print on the page quite closely.

If the reader made a mistake with "two", he might have responded "tow"; with "gate", "gale". Here would be indications of perceptual confusion. But these researchers {and others since45 ) have learned that the majority of substitutions made by fluent readers have little visual similarity to the word on the page. Rather, the oral responses are generally semantically and syntactically appropriate in the 46 context. In the same way as "woods" was substituted for "forest",

"daddy" replaces "father", "horse" replaces "pony" and even "later on",

"after".

Now these results were obtained in ordinary reading contexts. The researchers did not isolate their readers in a laboratory situation.

Neither did they test subjects on more-easily controlled word lists or nonsense syllables. Pupils read continuous prose, often in the corner of a classroom where ordinary schoolwork was being carried on.

From what has been said already, it will be ovsious that psycholinguists interested in the reading process think both word-in-isolation identification and the decipherment of nonsense syllables of little relevance to the reading task.

"Outside-in" theorists probably look askance at results obtained in situations where uncontrolled variables such as noise and distraction may have been at work. Their "hard" research, which often involves the use of machines {e.g. tachistoscopes), careful measurement of reaction 14.

times, artificial alphabets and so on, is absolutely relevant to

reading research as far as they are concerned, and it yields

empirically respectable results.

"Inside-out" researchers, however, deny the validity of the premisses

from which their "opponents" operate. They argue that the experimental

tasks hinted at above bear little resemblance to reading in "the real world"; identification of nonsense syllables in milliseconds hasn't much to do with reading menus, let alone poetry. These involve intention, need, selectivity, prediction and comprehension of whole interconnected chunks of meaning. Similarly, they hold that experimentation in actual reading situations makes the results obtained more, rather than less, valid. If the context contains uncontrolled variables, it better reflects "real" reading as it occurs under station time-tables, in restaurants and in busy class-rooms.

"Outside-in" theorists assume that reading depends upon the mastery of a series of sub-skills. Because written language can be divided into sentences, clauses, phrases, words, syllables and letters, it is felt that the wise teacher will acquaint students with these in reverse sequence. As the child learns automatic recognition at each more complex level, he develops a system of skills that will ensure his reading fluently. But linguists have demonstrated that children learn to speak "the other way around"; they first hear, comprehend

and attempt to use whole meaning-bearing units of sound. For some,

even their one word utterances constitute "holophrases" which have a . 47 grammar o f their own. This thinking has influenced some teachers

whose skill-training takes quite a different direction. They accept 15.

that the child's own language is the best place to begin. Thus they

stimulate talk about pupilsv own experiences, then transfer this to print and use the resultant writing to encourage sampling, predicting and confirming or correcting.48

"Outside-in" theorists, even if they accept that fluent readers operate using syntactic, semantic and grapho-phonic cueing systems, find it most difficult to see that beginning readers work in the same way. They feel that readers new to print must leam automatic recoding to sound before they can make effective use of the other cueing systems, probably when they are eight years old and in Vear Three.

Certainly learner-readers have less initial success in getting the three cueing systems to complement and reinforce each other. But

Goodman 49 and Clay 50 have shown that beginning readers attempt to use exactly the same "tools" as fluent readers. It is when a young reader, clearly influenced by "outside-in" teaching approaches, becomes over­ concerned about deciphering the print and neglects to look for sense and listen for appropriate sound that serious reading difficulty grows.

This, then, is the "state of play" at the present time. Some very experienced (and generally successful) teachers have suddenly to look at implications for their practice of these recent, psycholinguistic findings. Naturally, perhaps, many feel somewhat threatened and are quick to point out that eighty five per cent of their pupils have always learned to read. Skilled observers, however, often notice that even most vociferous, "outside-in" phonics-oriented teachers urge their pupils to use their knowledge of the non-print cueing systems (although

they may not have thought of them in these terms). The same observers 16.

presume that many pupils are adventurous enough to look for clues

to correct decoding by guessing at what is sensible and what

"sounds right" though they may feel that they are "cheating".

In any case, can we be satisfied that eighty five per cent or so learn to read effectively? The percentage number of children physiologically incapable of learning to read is much less than

fifteen. 51 Surely new, more varied approaches should be employed to

"hook all children on books".

Essential to effective teaching is an understanding of how reading works. Teachers must come to disregard any disdain they feel for

"theory". "Theory" is more than an antonym for practice:

In reality, it is the basis from which practice flows, if practice is the result of thought and planning, and if it is the subject of continuing evaluation and revision. Without theory, practice consists of a set of unrelated actions and there is no basis for improvement.52

Let us proceed, then, to examine the theoretical underpinnings of the

"inside-out" view of the reading process, the insights and findings of linguists, psychologists and psycholinguists. 17.

References

1 Aims of Primary Education in New South Wales, (Sydney: N.S.W. Department of Education, 1977), p.10.

2 Ibid., p.43.

3 Thorsten R. Carlson, ed., Administrators and Reading (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p.1.

4 Judith D. Goyen, Adult Illiteracy in Sydney (Canberra, A.C.T.: A.A.A.r:, 1977).

5 G. Randall, "Grammar: practices, research and goals", English in Australia, 20th April 19?2, pp.15-24.

6 Graham Williams, "Do-it-yourself illiteracy", The Age, M~lbourne, 30th August 1976, p.B.

7 "When She's Bad She's Horrid", A.B.C. News Special, telecast 25th October 1978. Researched and presented by John Cribbin.

8 The Age, Melbourne, 12th March 1973. Reported by Barry Carozzi, "Literacy in Australian Schools", Education News, 15, No.s 3 and 4 (1975), 7.

9 "Education Now", A.B.C. News, broadcast 26th February 1974. Reported in Carozzi, .QE.• cit., p.7.

10 The Age, Melbourne, 10th April 1975. Reported by Carozzi, .QE.• cit., p.7.

11 Peter Harrison-Mattley. Reported by Williams, .QE.• cit., p.19.

12 Goyen, .QE.• cit., pp.1-62.

13 Williams, .QE.• cit., p.19.

14 Carlson, .QE.• cit., p.10.

15 A glance at the Contents of the Second Handbook of Research on Teaching, Robert M. W. Travers, ed., (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co, 1973) reveals that the section on reading research occupies 43 pages as compared with "Literature, Language and Composition", 26 pages and "Social Studies", 20 pages.

16 Jerome Brosner turned from opthamology to concentrate his study upon the physiological aspects of reading. 18.

17 Kenneth s. Goodman is Professor of Elementary Education at the College of Education, Wayne State University. His work will be referred to constantly in this report.

18 Dr Carl Bereiter was the originator of the Distar reading programmes in the U.S.A.

19 Reported by S. E. Lee in "Directions in primary English: the relevance for primary teachers of the U.N.E.s.c.o. seminar on the teaching of English", Ken Watson, ed., New Directions (Sydney: English Teachers' Association, 1972), p.70.

20 R.D. Walshe, ed., P.E.N. (Newsletter of the Primary English Teaching Association of New South Wales, c/- Epping Public School, Norfolk Rd., Epping, N.s.w. 2121.)

21 President of the International Reading Association, 1976. McGinitie's article is an assessment of the impact of Jeanne Chall 1 s Learning to Read: The Great Debate (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968).

22 Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908; reprint ed., Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968).

23 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957).

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965).

24 Frank Smith, Understanding Reading (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1972).

25 Kenneth S. Goodman, The Psycholinguistic Nature of the Reading Process (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).

26 Norman McCulla, "Towards a school reading policy", Primary Education Notes 5, Walshe, .£D.• cit., p.3.

27 E. Wanner, "Do we understand sentences from the outside-in or the inside-out?", Daedalus (Summer, 1973), pp.163-183.

28 Brian Cambourne, "Reading - Theory into Practice". Paper presented at the N.S.W. Department of Educationvs Directorate of Studies Conference, "Reading", Newport, March, 1977.

29 Ibid.

30 e.g. word recognition tests that supposedly yield a reading age: Schonell's R1. 19.

31 R. Smith, "Conflicting Approaches to Reading Research and Instruction". Paper presented at the conference on "Theory and Practice in Beginning Reading", Pittsburg, April, 1976.

32 Interview with Professor Kenneth S. Goodman, Detroit, n.d. (Issued in conjunction with Scott-Foreman's Reading Systems.)

33 An over-enthusiastic view of the school entrant, criticised by Professor M.A.K. Halliday at the English Teachers' Association annual conference, Sydney University, 1976.

34 Negatives and interrogatives continue to pose difficulty, even after the five-year-old stage. See Ursula Bellugi and Roger Brown, The Acguisition of Language (Chicago: Society for Research in Child Development, 1964).

35 Kenneth s. Goodman, ed., Miscue Analysis: Applications to Reading Instruction (Illinois: N.C.T.E. - ERIC, 1976), p.4.

36 It is the qualitative difference in readers' responses that causes Goodman to prefer the term "miscue" to "error".

37 Yetta M. Goodman and Carolyn L. Burke, Reading Miscue Inventory: Manual (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp.3, 4.

38 George A. Miller, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two", Psychological Review, 63 (1956), 81 - 97.

39 P. Kolers and M.T. Katzman, "Naming sequentially presented letters and words", Language and Speech, 9 (1966), 54 - 95.

40 Wolf, 1976. Reported by Cambourne, £E.· cit., p.7.

41 E. Brooks Smith, Kenneth S. Goodman and Robert Meredith, Language and Thinking in School (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p.271.

42 Rose-Marie Weber, "The Study of Oral Reading Errors: A Review of the Literature", Reading Research Quarterly, (Fall, 1968).

43 Kenneth S. Goodman and Carolyn Burke, Theoretically Based Studies of Patterns of Miscues in Oral Reading Performance. Final Report, project No.9-0375, Grant No. DEG-0-9. 320375-4269, U.S. Dept. of Health, Educ. and Welfare, 1973.

44 Marie Clay, Reading: The Patterning ~f Cemplex Behaviour (New Zealand: Heinemann, 1972). 20.

45 Peter D. Rousch and Brian Cambourne, "Psycholinguistic Dimensions of Oral Reading in Australian Children"; research in progress, funded by E.R.D.C., Riverine College of Advanced Education, Australia. 1977 - •

46 Goodman and Burke, lac. cit.

47 Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman, An Introduction to Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974), p.55.

48 This use of "experience stories" is a widely-used beginning tactic in the Language Experience approach.

49 Goodman, .QE.• cit., p.38.

50 Clay, .QE.• cit., p.31.

51 If reading is dependent upon the mastery of oral language, and if even mongoloid children are capable of some language development (E.H. Lenneberg, I.A. Nichols and E.F. Rosenberger, "Primitive stages of language development in Mongolism", Proceedings of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, 42nd Annual Meeting, New York, 1964), there should be many fewer illiterate children.

52 Phillip Hughes, ed., The Teacher's Role in Curriculum Design (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973). Introduction to Part 1. PART 1 21.

CHAPTER 1

CHOMSKY'S STIMULUS TO RESEARCH

INTO THE READING PROCESS

••• why should such exclusive attention be paid to just this one linguist, Noam Chomsky? The plain answer is that Chomsky's theory of generative transformational grammar was the first to force the psychologists to reconsider their whole approach to the study of language behaviour, and so heralded the psycholinguistic "revolution".1

It is true that the thirty years to the mid-195Os were characterised

by a "framework of secure tradition" which determined the problems, priorities, possible approaches and types of acceptable solution

as far as research into verbal behaviour was concerned. It is also true that Chomsky's postulations about language, first expressed in his Syntactic Structures2 and review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior~ proved an effective challenge to that tradition, pointing to

anomalies and caus~ng some "confusion and crisis". Indeed, there is even evidence of some researchers' undergoing a process akin

to "conversion"4 as they've taken account of Chomsky's claims and

formed that new interdisciplinary school of thought labelled

"psycholinguistics"5 Judith Greenevs "plain answer" may be justified.

T.S. Kuhn 1 s 6 conceptualisation, from which the terms used above have

been drawn, has been criticised as simplistic at the descriptive level 7

and as unproductive, even unhealthy, on the normative level. 8

But the history of competing research programmes into verbal behaviour

provides a nice example of a "scientific revolution". "Normal 22.

science" was carried on within a framework generally acceptable to working scientists. Whether it is most accurately described by

Kuhn's term "paradigm", 9 Collingwood 1 s "constellation of absolute presuppositions", 10 Polanyi's "tacit knowledge"11 or Ziman 1 s

"intellectual consensus", 12 behaviourism provided the "conceptual spectacles" through which learning-psychologists and linguists viewed their worlds prior to 1957. There was little of what John Watkins13 has called "heretical thinking" and few of the alternatives noted 14 by Feyerabend. Rather, thinking and research were organised through formal institutions, abstract principles, informed habits and concrete examples of past problem solving. It is not too much to say that some factual and theoretical novelties were suppressed. A leading psycholinguist, Frank Smith, has been moved to comment:

Psychologists have studied language development and use for the best part of a century, although the subject fell into a certain disfavor and even disrepute with the rise of behaviorism in the second decade of the present century. For about thirty years, any interest in the comprehension of language and other phenomena of mental life was widely interpreted in 15 the United States as being vaguely unpatriotic.

Chomsky's most powerful challenge came as a response to the first large-scale attempt to fit a theory of language acquisition and use in. t o a b e h aviouris. . t f ramewor; k Sk.inners 1 Ver b a 1 8 e h avior. 16 was published in 1957 and Chomsky's swingeing review in 1959. In carefully­ argued detail, the linguist pointed to aspects of the behaviourist's theory he thought anomalous and, by inference, began to erect an

"incommensurable", new paradigm. 23.

Chomsky, influenced by Ferdinand de Saussere17 and Edward Sapir, 18 also threw out a challenge to the established school in the area of linguistics. Leonard Bloomfield, 19 much influenced by J.B. Watson, had pushed the study of language towards "autonomy" and "science".

Besides exerting efforts to remove linguistics from studies in related fields such as anthropology, Bloomfield rejected all but observable, physically-measurable data. Chomsky's view - that concentration upon

"information about external stimulation at the expense of knowledge of the internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organises its own behavior"20 provided the linguists with quite as defiant a statement of dissent as it did the psychologists.

Perhaps Kuhn's preformulated interpretation fails to account for all scien. t·i f.ic reorien. t a t·ions: 21 perhaps some of his own examples of

"scientific revolution" hardly deserve as dramatic a description: 22 perhaps domination by just one "paradigm" as this cyclical schema 23 suggests (and requires) is rare and, perhaps, "The history of science has been and should be a history of competing research programmes

(or, if you wish 'paradigms')". 24 But Chomsky's challenge to "normal science", which characterised both psychology and linguistics until the late 'fifties, was to have significant repercussions for the study of language behaviour after that time - and reading was to be seen as an aspect of language behaviour. There was to be a "scientific revolution" in the study of the reading process.

Prior to publication of Chomsky's research results, "linguistic analysis coexisted quite happily with information theory and learning theory 24.

approaches to describing language behaviour 11 • 25 Sharing the same paradigm, they arrived, almost inevitably, at complementary conclusions.

The "Bloomfeldian" tradition dominated in the field of linguistics.

Any organism's behaviour, whether that of an amoeba or a human being, was thought to be explicable in terms of responses to stimuli as they occurred in an environment. An attempt was made to explain the learning of responses through the application of the familiar laws of physics and chemistry. Speech, a most complex but still overt and directly observable form of behaviour, was thought capable of satisfactory explanation in these terms - and even thinking processes, "talking with concealed musculature", similarly. Bloomfield, a convert from mentalism and, perhaps as a result, even more radical than many of the psychologists who influenced him, 26 claimed that, in principle, we could foretell whether a certain stimulus would cause someone to speak, predicting what would be said "if we knew the exact structure of his body at the moment". The meaning of a linguistic form was defined as 27 "the practical events" with which it was "connected" and, in a later chapter, as "the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer11 • 28

Bloomfield cited the following situation as one which would occasion speech: Jack and Jill are walking down a lane; Jill, being hungry and sighting an apple on a nearby tree, asks Jack to fetch it for her;

Jack climbs the tree, retrieves the apple and gives it to Jill who eats it. His behaviouristic account of this sequence of events went like this: Jill 1 s being hungry ("that is, some of her muscles were 25.

contracting, and some fluids were being secreted, especially in her

stomach") and Jill's sighting the apple (that is, light waves

reflected from the apple reached her eyes) provide a stimulus.

Jill does not respond directly (by collecting the apple herself);

rather, she makes a "substitute response" in the form of a particular

sequence of noises with her speech organs; this acts as a "substitute

stimulus" for Jack and he responds as if his "muscles were contracting ••• " and light from the apple had reached his eyes. It is clear that

Bloomfield saw language simply as a substitute for other kinds of non-symbolic behaviour.

It is also clear that his "conceptual spectacles" prevented him from giving much attention to meaning. If Bloomfield's commitment to behaviourism influenced him towards an "empiricist" methodology, it prevented him from giving attention to meaning (and, consequently, the manner of its transfer from speaker to listener). He thought

analysis of meaning "the weak point in language study" - and that it would remain so "until human knowledge advances very far beyond its 29 present state". Bloomfield was convinced that an adequate definition

of word meanings required a complete description of the objects,

states, processes, and so on, to which they refer. Complete

descriptions might be available in the form of technical terms used

in some of the physical sciences but the great majority of words could

not be so precisely defined; Bloomfield defies us to provide

scientifically adequate definitions of the words "love" and "hate"!

Bloomfield's Language, published in 1933, meant that the study of

meaning was to be neglected by the scientific community of linguists 26~

for almost thirty years. Certainly, the study of syntax and phonology proceeded - but without reference to semantics. For the

Bloomfeldians, it was necessary only to know "whether two uttered forms were 'the same' or 'different' "and, for this purpose coarse description rather than scientific definition was quite sufficient.

Semantic considerations were strictly subordinated to the task of identifying the units of phonology and syntax and were not involved at all in the specification of the rules or principles governing their permissible combinations. This part of the grammar was to be a purely formal study, independent of semantics.30

Chomsky's own teacher, Zellig Harris, took enquiry within this

"paradigm" to its highest point. His Methods in Structural Linguistics

"constitutes the most ambitious and the most rigorous attempt that has yet been made to establish what Chomsky was later to describe as a set of 'discovery procedures' for grammatical description11 • 31

His pupil (and, later, colleague and collaborator) readily acknowledged that Harris made possible Chomsky's own technical advances in the field but he was also to "challenge the paradigm", denying that the phonology and syntax of a language could, or should, be described as a purely formal system without reference to semantic considerations.

A similar, careful avoidance of semantics characterised psychologists' approaches to the study of language. O. Hobart Mowrer denied "that in the process of spoken or written communication, we, somehow transfer meanings from mind to mind 11 • 32 He preferred to think that language is "transferring meanings from sign to sign within a person, within a mind 11 ; 33 the symbols "call up" particular meanings in the mind of the listener or reader, arousing but not conveying meaning. 27 •

••• the sentence is, pre-eminently, a conditioning device and ••• its chief effect is to produce new associations, new learning, just as any other paired presentation of stimuli may do.34

He used "the familiar principle of conditioning" to explain the production and reception of the sentence, "Tom is a thief" but acknowledged that "too simple, too abbreviated (an) analysis of language in terms of conditioning plunges us into difficulties11 • 35

Thus he employed the notion of "mediation"(after Hull: 36 "pure stimulus acts"; Hi·1 gar d an d Marquis: . 37 "intermediate responses"; and Osgood: 38 "mediated responses") to describe language in terms of "a transfer of meaning from sign to sign, as opposed to mind to mind".

The view that "the subject-predicate complex which we call a sentence is, in effect, simply an arrangement for conditioning the meaning reaction produced by the predicate to the interoceptive stimulation aroused by the meaning reaction elicited by the subject"39 was supported by reference to various "Skinner-box" experiments which were seen as analagous to the generation of "thing-thing sentences",

"thing-sign sentences", "sign-thing sentences" and "sign-sign sentences". Although Susanne Langer's famous proposal, "it is the power of speech that makes (man) the lord of the earth", was quoted twice, the discussion of the production and reception of sentences was kept within animal-experiment parameters.

Charles E. Osgood, in his "Toward a Wedding of Insufficiencies11 , 4O made a considerable effort to overcome the "patently nonsensical" implications of Skinnerian operant theory when he contributed to 28.

Dixon's Verbal Behaviour and General Behaviour Theory. Still operating in the behaviourist paradigm, he was nonetheless able to understand that transformational grammars are not "mere logical exercises, as some psychologists would like to believe" and that

"S-R theory ••• is incapable of incorporating the phenomena described b y a t rans f orma t iona• 1 grammar - in• princip • • 1 e.II 41 He went on to argue that "a sophisticated behavior theory, utilizing Sand R constructs along with principles of association, is becoming increasingly compatible with theories of linguistic competence, as both mature 11 • 42

His proposal was for a "three-stage behavior theory, utilizing Sand

R constructs but including S-S and R-R association as well as S-R association", but he emphasised that this was "merely an extension or complication of the Skinnerian single-stage model" which "requires 43 no symbolic processes". The key to his modelvs superiority, according to Osgood, was the "integration level" which he added to both decoding and encoding processes; it included both S-S and R-R learning, based upon frequency, redundancy and contiguity principles, but not reinforcement •

••• the greater the frequency (redundancy and contiguity) with which sensory signals at the termini of sensory projection systems, or motor signals at the initiation of motor projection systems, are simultaneously active, the greater will be the tendency for their more central (integrative) correlates to activate each other.44

Anomalies in the existing paradigm had been highlighted by McNeill, 45 46 47 Johnson, and Garrett, Bever and Fodor so that Osgood proposed

an alternative, more complicated explanation for consideration.

Skinner's determination, that we must subvocally mimic a speaker in

order to understand him, was just one of the implications of operant 29.

theory found unacceptable by an increasing number of working scientists. Stimulus to this "confusion and crisis" had been provided by Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior in 1959.

The linguist's almost vitriolic attack upon the psychologist's "first, large-scale attempt to incorporate the major aspects of linguistic 48 behavior within a behaviorist framework" presented a challenge to the old paradigm at a high-point in its existence. Chomsky deplored

Skinner's concentration upon external observables and his paying no attention to internal structures and processes. He particularly objected to the behaviorist's reliance upon findings in the area of animal learning, questioning "their applicability to complex human behavior". (Here he drew on the findings of some "heretical thinkers" for support, those of Estes, Bugelski, Koch, Verplanck and Harlow.)49

Chomsky was meticulous in his explanation of Skinner's use of such terms as "respondent", "operant", "strength", "reinforcer", "stimulus discrimination", "discriminated operant", "occasion", "response differentiation", "secondary reinforcer" and "generalisation" and strongly attacked the psychologist's "analogic guesses", concluding that:

the book covers almost no aspect of linguistic behavior ••• with a metaphoric reading, it is no more scientific than the traditional approaches to the subject matter, and rarely as clear and careful ••• talk of "stimulus control" simply disguises a complete retreat to mentalistic psychology. We cannot predict verbal behavior in terms of the stimuli in the speaker's environment, since we do not know what the current stimuli are until he responds.50

Chomsky was as strong in his criticism of Skinner's "basic datum, the basic dependent variable in his functional analysis", 51 response strength. 30.

The definition of "response strength" as "probability of emission provides a comforting impression of objectivity" but that "is quickly dispelled when we look into the matter more closely"; it "is not clear how the frequency of a response can be attributable to anything

BUT the frequency of occurrence of its controlling variables if we accept Skinner's view that the behavior occurring in a given situation is 'fully determined' by the relevant controlling variables". 52

Skinner's attempt to take into account pitch, stress, quantity and reduplication occasion quite as scathing a demonstration of this argument's possible implications.

"Reinforcement" is the next notion subjected to scrutiny and Chomsky concludes that the behaviorist's use of the term "conditioning" suffers from similar difficulty:

Pavlovian and operant conditioning are processes about which psychologists have developed real understanding. Instruction of human beings is not. The claim that instruction and imparting of information are simply matters of conditioning is pointless.53

Chomsky expresses surprise that "Skinner pays so little attention to the literature on latent learning and related topics, considering the tremendous reliance that he places on the notion of reinforcement". 54

The fact "that children acquire a good deal of their verbal and nonverbal behavior by casual observation and imitation of adults and other children"55 could have easily been incorporated within the

Skinnerian framework:

It is simply not true that children can learn language only through "meticulous care" on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement, though it may be that such care is often the custom in academic families. It is a common observation that a young child of immigrant 56 parents may learn a second language in the streets •••• 31.

In charging that Skinner's whole notion of verbal behaviour is

"vague and arbitrary", Chomsky challenges assertions about "mands", saying that claims of their being "under the control of relevant deprivation" are empty; that the "obscurity of the notion 'stimulus control' makes the concept, tact, rather mystical"; that it "is evident that more is involved in sentence structure than insertion of lexical items in grammatical frames - no approach that fails to take these deeper processes into account can possibly achieve much success in accounting for actual linguistic behavior". 57

Concluding, Chomsky acknowledges a debt to Lashley {another "heretical thinker"?) who recognised, "as anyone must who seriously considers the data, that the composition and production of an utterance is not simply a matter of stringing together a sequence of responses under the control of outside stimulation and intraverbal association, and that the syntactic organisation of an utterance is not something directly represented in any simple way in the physical structure of an utterance itself". 58

This was the nub of Chomsky's challenge to the existing paradigm.

He gave new emphasis to the idea that language is characterised by a

"duality of structure". Below the secondary, phonological, level where sounds, which contain no intrinsic meaning themselves, are combined into units we call words - there is a primary, syntactic, level of analysis. Here, the rules whereby more or less arbitrary strings of audio (or graphic) symbols are ordered, so as to mean something, can be distinguished. Chomsky's objection to even the most sophisticated learning theory, carefully and strictly interpreted, is 32

that concentration upon the "elements" of a language (phonemes and individual words) at the expense of attention to the rules which govern the combination of these, ignores the fact that the "elements" are the results of the rules - not the other way around! He contends that we must start any study of language by characterising the nature of the sentence rather than seeking to find how individual sounds and words combine to form sentences.

A development and refinement of this notion is Chomsky 1 s conception of "surface structure" and "deep structure". The former refers to the physical aspect of an utterance or sentence, the sounds that pass through the air or the print that marks the paper. Deep structure is the information conveyed, the meaning of the sentence or utterance.

(An increasing concern with the semantic component, avoided in

Bloomfeldian considerations, is noticeable here.) Grammar, or syntax, is the "bridge" between surface and deep structure.

Without syntax there can be no understanding, because meaning is not directly represented in the surface structure •••• the sentence "Man catches fish" is quite devoid of any specific meaning at the surface level; the meaning can be extracted only by the exercise of our prior syntactic (and semantic) knowledge. The words "man", "catches", "fish" could each be a noun or a verb, and their actual semantic and grammatical function in the sentence is determined only through the manner in which they are combined, that is, by their syntactic relations. Similarly, the only reason that "man catches fish" can be distinguished from "fish catches man" (or from a quite meaningless arrangement like "catches man fish") lies in the way in which the words are ordered - the rules of syntax - and our knowledge of these rules.59

Chomsky 1 s central purpose is to construct a deductive theory of the

structure of language. He aims to make it sufficiently general to 33.

apply to all languages (and all possible languages) but also specific enough to exclude other systems of communication. The influence of

Sapir, who suggested that language is worth studying because it is 60 unique to man and indispensable for thought, and Jakobson, who pointed to "substantive universals" (different languages make use of the same formal operations in the construction of grammatical sentences), can be seen.

Quite as clear is the reaction to the Bloomfeldian linguists who were "remarkably, and at times almost ostentatiously, uninterested in general theoretical questions". 61 Chomsky concentrates his efforts upon providing rigorous and precise mathematical descriptions of aspects of language within the framework of a general theory. Now working in the rationalist philosophical tradition, and acknowledging the influence of Descartes, 62 Chomsky sees the structure of language as determined by the structure of the human mind; the universality of certain properties characteristic of language is, to him, evidence that at least this part of human nature is common to all members of the species, regardless of their race or class and their undoubted differences in intellect, personality and physical attributes.

It is not the purpose of this report to detail the controversy surrounding this belief. Even some leading psycholinguists63 disregard arguments about "genetic predispositions" to learn language and the possible existence of a "Language Acquisition Device" or "Language

Acquisition System". 64 It is a purpose of this report, however, to show how Chomsky's postulations reoriented thinking in the area of research into verbal behaviour and, to that problem, we shall address ourselves now. 34.

Chomsky's central insights - the "bones" of his variously-labelled grammatical theory, generative theory and transformational theory - are these: a language is a set of sentences, all and only those that could be spoken in that language; this set of sentences is unlimited in number because, although the number of words in a

"natural language's" lexicon is finite, the sentences are generated according to a number of recursive rules; this system of rules is the language's grammar; grammar is the essential link between meaning and sounds (or graphic symbols), providing the means whereby meaning is "mapped onto" sequences of phonemes or graphemes, enabling one person's thoughts to become another's; by implication, meaning exists apart from and prior to particular sentences but the sounds or symbols which express this meaning are always part of the sentences; once meaning has been mapped onto a sentence, that sentence has some

semantic interpretation.

As early as in his first-published Syntactic Structures, Chomsky

described grammar as "a device of some sort for producing the sentences

of the language under analysis". His choice of the terms "device"

and "producing" was less fortunate if these connote some sort of

hardware which replicates the behaviour of the speaker when he utters

a sentence - and, just the speaking and writing of sentences. Grammar

is as essential to the receptive language arts, listening and reading.

But the "deep structure" of his own statement is that verbal behaviour

is set apart from other forms of behaviour by its rule-bearing character.

Chomsky has taken account of the capacity of native speakers of a

language to "generate" (i.e. produce and understand) an indefinitely

large number of sentences that have neither been uttered nor heard before. 35.

Mowrer and Osgood argued that each element in a sentence is a reaction to some preceding stimulus and that these reactions are

"chained together" in a string. But, as Chomsky pointed out, our number of unlearned reactions is finite and new associations or conditioned responses are similarly limited. The limited number of stimuli to which generalisation occurs even restricts the number of responses which can be explained by 5-R generalisation. Chomsky holds that linguistic performance is much more than the running off or performance of a set of conditioned responses or associations.

After Wilhelm van Humboldt65 and Ferdinand de Saussere, he insists that language is "open-ended" or creative.

Every different sequence of words is a different sentence. That tiny proportion of the unlimited set of sentences that has or will ever be uttered provides the raw data upon which a grammar can be based.

But those "sample sentences" can only be classified as grammatical

"incidentally"; it is as if "the corpus" is projected onto the larger set, "the language". Of course, many of the sentences, as uttered, will be ungrammatical. For linguistically irrelevant reasons such as memory or attention lapses, or breakdown in underlying psychological mechanisms, some of the attested utterances have to be ignored - or "idealized". Exemplifying Chomsky's move from an empiricist to a rationalist position is his later use of the terms "competence" and

"performance"; "competence", rather like de Saussere 1 s la langue, is the abstract structure which conforms to the system of the language while "performance" (la parole) is the speaker's actual output,

deviations from that ~tructure included. 36.

In this same shift of position - away from the influence of Goodman and Quine and towards a Cartesian stance Chomsky abandoned the structuralist, Bloomfeldian "procedural" approach and determined to concentrate upon the development of a general theory. Finite state,

"left-to-right" grammars could not account for certain regular processes in English sentence formation. (This was examplified by the gaps in information theory.) Thus he began drawing upon finite automata theory and recursive function theory to formalise systems of general rules which had greater explanatory power. For Chomsky, the study of the formal propoerties and generative capacity of various types of grammar exists as a branch of mathematics or logic, independently of its relevance for the description of natural languages.

Some even believe that other aspects of complex, human behaviour will prove amenable to description within the framework of specially constructed mathematical systems based on transformational grammar. 66

It is argued that grammar has a number of components: syntactic, semantic and phonological. The syntactic aspect consists of a lexicon and a sequence of phrase structure rules which provide a base for the generation of "deep structure". Following connection with the semantic component, "deep structure" yields meaning. Diagrammatically, his theory might be represented thus:

SYNTACTIC COMPONENT

SEMANTIC REWRITE LEXICON PHONOLOGICAL COMPONENT RULES COMPONENT

BASE

TRANSFORMATIONAL RULES

Figure 5 37.

Even as the theory began to evolve, psychologists expressed interest and this new involvement was welcomed by linguists. "Such interdisciplinary osmosis, reflected in the adoption of the label

1 psycholinguistics 1 , marked a refreshing departure from the frequent impermeability of the boundaries between neighboring fields of study. 1167

"Man catches fish"-style demonstrations undermined the old belief that children learned to understand language by imitation and several psychologists adopted a more "cognitive" stance. Abandoning studies of languages that nobody actually spoke and moving through a neo­ behavioristic stage where explanations were still sought within a stimulus-response framework, they moved onto bold investigations of the "abstract rules" that individuals "hypothesise" and "test", perhaps as a result of a "biological predisposition" to learn language.

For their part, linguists broadened their considerations to take into account constraints upon how the brain works.

As another aspect of verbal behaviour, reading came in for closer scrutiny. Previously, reading had been considered either so complex that it was beyond all understanding, remembering the state of knowledge about the brain at the time; or so simple - merely the decoding of written symbols into sound - that attention would be more profitably spent upon spoken language. But now, it was suspected, the receptive language arts - listening and reading - were more active processes than had been thought. Those who receive messages (audio or graphic) must go beyond an examination of the observable features of a sentence (the surface structure) to an analysis of its deep structure, exercising rules sensitive to meaning, when they decode. 38.

AUTHOR

Meaning ••• Deep (transformational Surface (orthographic ••• Graphic Structure rules) Structure rules) Output

Figure 6

READER

Graphic Surface Deep Meaning Display Structure Structure 68

Figure 7

The important point for researchers into the reading process was that there is progression to meaning before there is any "sounding- out".

Graphic decoding encoding Oral Input Meaning Output

Figure 8

Because this oral output is an expression of the meaning derived rather than the "mouthing of words", it does not always accord perfectly with the graphic input.

And it was in close studies of readers' error behaviour that confirmation of this view was found. Most incorrect oral responses to the text are based on anticipated meaning and syntactic structures.

Fluent readers "see" syntactic and semantic structures that align with authorsv intentions and place these in short-term memory. It is when sense is lost or syntactic patterns are inappropriate that proficient readers return to the text to check the printed symbols. 39.

The confirmation mentioned above will be discussed in the following chapters. But it ought to be mentioned here that Chomsky's theory is nicely complemented by those of Vygotsky and Piaget. The former has written:

Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech; it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e. thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.69

And Piaget has described the child's progress from egocentric to socialised speech as a developing awareness of minds beyond his own. Thus there comes a stage when he can relate to written material, when he can interact meaningfully with the author via the print on the page.

Thus a new paradigm, incommensurable with the old, began to emerge.

Adherents to the old live on but, as far as reading is concerned,

Chomsky had provided a fillip to research generally, and a new direction to research into reading as an alternative language form. 40.

References

1 Judith Greene, Psycholinguistics (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Education, 1972), p.15.

2 Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957).

3 Noam Chomsky, review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, Language 35 (1959), 26-58.

4 James Deese, whose Psycholinguistics (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1970) contains views that stand in marked contrast to those in the same author's, "Association and memory", in Theordore R. Dixon and David L. Horton, Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory (Englewood-Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968).

5 "···afield of study that lies at the intersection of two broader disciplines, psychology and linguistics", in Frank Smith, ed. Psycholinguistics and Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p.1.

6 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Foundations of the Unity of Science, vols.II, no.2, rev.ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

7 P.K. Feyerabend, review of Scientific Change by A.C. Crombie, British Journal of the Philosophy of Science, 15, 244-254.

L. Pearce Williams, review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by T.S. Kuhn, Archives Internationales d 1 Histoire des Sciences (1963), pp.182-184.

K.R. Popper, "Normal science and its dangers", in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1970), pp.51-58.

8 Ibid.

John Watkins, "Against normal science", in Lakatos and Musgrave, E.E.• cit., pp.25-37.

9 Kuhn, E.E.• cit., p.43.

10 R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: O.U.P., 1933).

------, Essays on Metaphysics (Oxford: D.U.P., 1940). 41.

11 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

12 J. Ziman, Public Knowledge (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1968).

13 Watkins, £E.· cit., p.27.

14 Feyerabend, £E.• cit., p.246.

15 Smith, £E.• cit., p.2.

16 B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1957).

17 Ferdinand de Saussere, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).

18 Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1921).

19 Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1933).

20 Chomsky, £E.• cit., p.27.

21 R. Green, "The Kuhnian paradigm and Darwinian revolution", in Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology, ed. by D. Roller (New York: Norman, 1971).

22 M. Masterman, "The nature of a paradigm", in Lakatos and Musgrave, £E.• cit., pp.59-89.

23 Pearce Williams, lac. cit.

Popper, lac. cit.

Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (New York: Merrill, 1967).

------, "Vision and revolution: a postscript to Kuhn", Philosophy of Science, 39 (1972), 366-374.

24 I. Lakatos, "Falsification and methodology of scientific research programmes", in Lakatos and Musgrave, £E.• cit., pp.91-195.

25 Greene, loc. cit. 42.

26 John Marshall, review of Mentalism and Objectivism in Linguistics by E.A. Esper, Semiotica. Reported by John Lyons, Chomsky (London: Fontana/Collins, 1970), p.31.

27 Bloomfield, E.E.· ci t., p.27. 28 I bid., p.139.

29 Ibid., p .140.

30 Lyons, E.E.• ci t., p.34.

31 Ibid.

32 O. Hobart Mowrer, "The psychologist looks at language", in American Psychologist, 9 (1954), 663.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., p.665.

35 Ibid., p.667

36 C.L. Hull, "Knowledge and purpose as habit mechanisms", in Psychological Review, 37 (1930), 511-525.

37 E.R. Hilgard and D.G. Marquis, Conditioning and Learning (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940).

38 C.E. Osgood, Method and Theory in Experimental Psychology (New York: o.u.P., 1953).

39 Mowrer, E.E.• cit., p.671.

40 C.E. Osgood, "Toward a wedding of insufficiencies", in Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory, by T. Dixon and D. Horton, E.E.• cit., p.495.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., p.496.

44 Ibid., p.498. 43.

45 D. McNeil!, "Developmental psycholinguistics", in The Genesis of Language, ed. by F. Smith and G. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), pp.15-84.

46 w. Johnson, "Studies in language behavior", in Psychological Monograph, 56 (1944), 1-15.

47 M. Garrett, J. Bever, and J.A. Fodor, "The ~ctive use of grammar in speech perception", in Perception and Psychophysics, 1 (1966), 30-32.

48 Chomsky, E.E.· cit., p.26. 49 Ibid~, p.27.

5o Ibid., p.31.

51 Ibid., p.32.

52 Ibid., pp.32-34

53 Ibid., p.38

54 Ibid., p. 39.

55 Ibid., p.42.

56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., pp.46-54.

58 Ibid., p.55.

59 Smith, £E.• ci t., p.98.

60 R. Jakobson, "Implications of Language Universals for Linguistics", in Universals of Language, ed. by J. Greenberg (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1963).

61 Lyons, £E.• cit., p.4.

62 Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1966).

63 Smith, £E.• cit., p.4. 44.

64 Smith and Miller, £E.• cit., pp.38-39.

65 Wilhelm van Humboldt, Uber die Verschiedenheit des Menschlichen Sprachbaues (Darmstadt: Classen and Raether, 1949).

66 Lyons, £E.• cit., p.104.

67 Smith, £E.• cit., p.2.

68 P.O. Rousch (after K. Goodman), pictured in "Measuring reading performance by miscue analysis", by D.M. Kemp, Education News, 15 (1975), pp.82-87.

69 L. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. by E. Haufmann and G. Fakar (Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1962). 45.

CHAPTER 2

PSYCHOLOGISTS' FINDINGS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE READING ACT

And so to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologis~s achievement, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilisation has learned in all its history. 1

This description of reading as civilisation's "most remarkable specific performance", though written in 1908, is quite as true today. Similarly, the work of its author, E.B. Huey, remains of central interest to psychologists who investigate the reading process.

The common belief that reading involves its participants in steady

"sweeps" of the eye along lines of print was questioned as early 2 as 1878. Javal, while watching children's eyes during reading, noticed that they moved in a series of jumps with intervening

"fixation pauses". He described the eyes' progress as par saccades and gave this whole class of eye-movements its modern description of "saccadic". Then, in 1885 and 1886, Cattell 3 provided evidence that familiar words are read "as wholes": in his reaction-time experiments, he discovered that short words could be identified quite as quickly as single letters; in his experiments with the techistoscope, he found that the span of apprehension for letters combined in words was very much greater than for unconnected letters. The findings 4 of both·Javal and Cattell were confirmed by Erdmann and Dodge in 1898. 46.

These researchers were further able to show that the "fixation pauses" are the times of effective exposure and stimulation of the eyes. Thus "pause" is a less appropriate description, being the time when information is gathered, while the eyes see practically nothing during saccades.

In 1899, Pillsbury5 experimented with readers' perceptions of incomplete and distorted texts. Briefly, he discovered that his subjects noticed the omission of letters only 40% of the time: substituted inappropriate letters only 22% of the time; and blurred letters just 14% of the time. We shall return to examine Pillsbury's results in more detail later in this report.

The groundwork for Huey's research into the reading process had been laid. To obtain more detailed and precise results than those derived from direct observation, he copied a device developed by

Delabarre6 in 1898. A ring of polished plaster of Paris was applied to the anaesthetised eye of the subject; as he read, his eye­ movements were recorded on the smoked surface of a rotating drum by an aluminium pointer attached to the "corneal cup". If such an appliance seems relatively primitive by modern standards, it produced results that had a seminal influence in later psychologists' thinking about reading.

But the claim7 made in 1938, that Huey's research would "revolutionize the whole theory of reading", indicates that his work had no dramatic effect immediately. In fact, further investigation of the deeper implications of Huey's findings was to be left in abeyance for several 47.

more decades. However, the striking relevance of some of his conclusions was to become obvious when that paradigm which characterised both linguistics and psychology was challenged in the

'sixties.

It is refreshing to read Huey's thoughts and speculations on these matters in order to remind ourselves that in an earlier period it was considered legitimate - as it should ae even now (in 1968) - to raise deep questions even though it might not be possible to answer them immediately through systematic quantitative experiments. Huey's own experiments were ingenious and relevant enough ••• but the (best) parts of the book ••• are those in which he speculates about the process of language comprehension. Perhaps ••• recent developments in experimental psycholinguistics can now provide the tools that Huey lacked.B

Huey's device showed that readers usually pausedfour to six times as they examined a line of print, though this "rate of fixation" varied with the quality of the reader's skill and the relative difficulty of the text. He was led to conclude:

that during a pause one may read as much as even twenty to thirty letters when combined in a sense, and that one averages usually as much as ten letters (suggesting) that reading must go by some other means than recognition of letter by letter as was once proposed.9

He determined that readers use more information than that conveyed by the words on the page. They "keep in mind" information already derived from the text as their eyes "bounce" across the page, engaging in "parallel processing". The fact that we now know readers glance forward to confirm that they are "on line" with what the graphics

"say", and look back to find where they've gone wrong when their 48.

responses are incongruous, lends support to Huey's hypothesis.

"Serial processing", at least as far as the manner of examining the text is concerned, does not describe what the reader does as his eyes dart back and forth (and up and down) the page.

Huey noted that those ten letters perceived by the average reader during a fixation are not ranged equally on either side of the point of focus; rather, more letters to the right are "seen". Here was a hint as to the importance of the flow of association which provides the reader with clues about what is to come. But Huey was to decide that letters haven't to be seen as wholes to be recognised. Although interested by the work of contemporary researchers in Germany, 10 he disagreed with their theory that first letters and distinctively shaped letters had a "determining" influence upon readers' recognition of words. He used one of Goldscheider's own examples ("M k do" is more easily recognised as "Mikado" than "Mik__ o") to show that different parts of a word contribute differently to its recognition.

Huey argued that the whole print array has importance for readers' understanding print but that it is viewed very selectively so that even the down-stroke of an 'h' might have significance for·one reader at one time. Then again, a whole group of words containing an 'h' might be "skipped" in the next saccade. He agreed that first letters have particular importance, especially for beginning-readers, but denied the existence of any sort of automatic pattern-recogniser or distinctive-feature analyser. His observation that readers rely on various within-word letter clusters (and various across-word letter clusters) also caused him to deny that familiar words could form templates in a reade~s mind. 49.

For Huey, reading was an information-processing activity where an arbitrary though conventional set of symbols is used to transfer information from one mind to another. This most complex, human activity consisted of far more than a passive uptake of words in the order in which they appear on the page. "What the reader understands from what he has read is the result of a construction he makes and not the result of a simple transmission of the graphic symbols to his min.. d 1111 His demonstrations of readers' managing text that was partially obliterated, rearranged and distorted provided ample evidence of this. Huey concluded:

••• we read by phrases, words or letters as may serve our purpose best. But we see too, that the ease and power in reading comes through increasing ability to read in larger units.12

Another of those contemporary German researchers, Zeitler, had gone so far as to say that words can be "recognised visually" without recourse to an auditory representation. He had accepted Goldscheider and Mullers' finding that practice with words or parts of words operated so that "fewer and fewer clews suffice to touch off the recognition 13 of the word or phrase". And Huey's own teacher, G. Stanley Hall, spoke of the same kind of "automatisation of function" when he defined true reading as occurring:

when the art has become so secondarily automatic that it can be forgotten and attention be given solely to the subject matter. Its assimilation is true reading and all else is only the whir of the machinery and not the work it does.14

But Huey was very aware of the different behaviours which characterise readers at their different stages of development. Thus he could not 50.

abandon a tentative conclusion that there has to exist some sort of auditory image, even if it is silent or unvocalised. Beginning and poor readers, when faced with difficult or unfamiliar material, engage in a good deal of verbalisation resorting to "sounding-out" as the difficulty increases. But he had to recognise superior readers who manage hundreds and even thousands of words each minute too. These people simply have no time to form an auditory representation of all they read. Thus he recognised that different forms of imagery probably exist - auditory, kinaesthetic, even visual and noted that imagery may not be necessary to effective reading.

Skilled readers may read "meanings" directly.

Huey's theory of meaning has not received the same respect, as he other ideas. These have a very modern ring as do his "practical suggestions": that the home is the "natural place for learning to read"; that learning to read should not be made a "fetich" in the primary school; that the child should be taught to apprehend whole sentence meanings rather than single sounds or words; that appreciation of literature should go hand-in-hand with other reading instruction; that phonics training has its place in a reading programme but it does not constitute a whole reading-teaching method; and that legends have particular interest for adolescents. These recommendations, alone, give us some idea of why the seventy-year-old work of this psychologist is given such attentionin these days.

15 Dearborn, prompted by his meeting a professor who read Robinson Crusoe silently at a rate of eleven words per second, developed a method for recording readers' eye-movements photographically in 1906. This 51.

camera-recorder was modified by Schmidt16 in 1917 so that Buswe1117 was able to make a more sophisticated study of young readers' eye­ movements in 1922. Being able to record without the hindrance of lenses and levers, and on the vertical besides the horizontal plane, he made the very significant discovery that readers make regressive eye-movements, usually to correct errors but also to gain additional 18 information upon which to proceed. Around the same time Walker,

Robinson. 19 and Anderson 20 found that eye-fixations were of similar duration for all readers, skilled and unskilled, young and old on any type of reading material. Difficult texts, however, caused all readers to fixate more often per line. These studies complemented those of

Huey very nicely but subsequent research failed to come to grips with his deeper questions about perception and comprehension.

21 22 Crosland in 1924, and Vernon ten years later, examined eye- movements when readers were looking for graphic errors rather than meaning. Abernathy, 23 in 1929, and Gilbert, 24 1932, looked at eye-movements when their subjects were examining words whose spelling 25 was to be learned. Fransden, 1934, was interested in the relation 26 between eye-movements and scientific textual material; Terry, 1922, 27 and Robert, 1932, in the differences when numerals were being read 28 rather than letters; Futch, 1935, in eye-movements when readers 29 were processing Latin; Shen, 1927, when the material was Chinese; 30 Weaver, 1930, when it was a musical score.

Studies of more general interest appeared in the 'sixties. Taylor 31 had examined the nature of readers' eye regressions from the opthalmic point of view in 1957. He confirmed that saccadic motions occur at a 52.

near-constant rate in all literate people; all readers' eyes move about three or four times a second. (The difference between fast and

slow readers lies not in the speed of their eye-movements but in the kind of information they perceive during fixations.) Taylor found that 23% of first-grade readers' eye-movements are regressive whereas only 15% of college students' fixations are to correct and confirm responses. Morton, 1964, 32 confirmed that better readers made fewer 33 eye movements and Geyer, 1968, concluded:

••• a significant portion of the eye movement pattern is related to a necessity to balance temporarily input and output systems and that at point of error or voice pause, the eyes must take some corrective action in order to maintain or re-establish the temporal balance-.

Wanat, 34 1976, moved eye-movement study towards the realm of psycholinguistics in his investigation as to whether readers' fixations reflect their internalised linguistic rules. His wide-angle, camera-recorder showed that the reader selectively allocates his visual attention to different sentence areas and that less structurally predictable sentences require more of this attention; differences in the immediate constituent analysis of "left-embedded" and "right-embeddedh sentences affected the placement of forward fixations and differences in structural predictability (active versus passive constructions) influenced components of regressive fixation patterns.

And Kolers35 has taken research into readers' eye-movements to a

new height of elegance over the past ten years. Working with a

computerised machine that bounces a beam of light from the subject's 53.

retina, he has been able to make the most accurate record of the

way readers make reference to all parts of a page when processing

print. He has added confirmation to the various conclusions noted

above and is creating new frontiers in this area but remains

convinced that Huey "has gone further than anyone else" in developing

a successful theory of reading.

If the "icon", that image which persists after the reader avertss his

eyes to a new point of fixation, can be seen to have some relation to

"after-images", psychologists' interest in this facet of the perceptual 36 process extends back even further than that in saccades. Fechner

began investigating after-images in 1840 and this line of research 37 38 39 40 continued in the work of Helmholtz, Franz, Berry, , Shuey, 41 42 Ebbecke and Berry with Imus to 1935. But that relation between

"after-image" and "icon" is more tenuous than was once believed;

Neisser43 argues that the set of assumptions upon which this research

was based has to be abandoned because those assumptions "add up to the

position that is sometimes called 'naive realism' ".44 It is dmply

not true "that the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the

stimulus pattern"; neither "that the visual experience begins when

the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off";

nor "that this experience, itself a passive - if fractional - copy of

the stimulus, is in turn mirrored by his verbal report". 45 Rather:

The information reaching the eye is subjected to complex processes of analysis, extended in time. Visual experience results from some of these processes. As for verbal report, it depends partly on visual experience - .i.e. on further transformations of the information46 given there - and partly to other factors. 54.

Thus Neisser, to distinguish the kind of "visual persistence"

essential in reading from other sorts of images, coined the terms

"icon" and "iconic memory". His insistence that a subject's recall of a tachistoscopic display was more a matter of perception than of 47 memory reflected his commitment to Bartlett who began his work in

1932 (and to nineteenth century "act psychology"). Neisser's central assertion is that seeing, hearing and remembering are acts of construction which make more or less use of stimulus information as circumstances require.

Most influential in Neisser's thinking was the research of Sperling,48

1960, and Averbach and Coriell,49 1961. Sperling, understanding that the ten or so unrelated letters one sees during a fixation are perceived in an oval-shaped "icon", examined readers' ability to recall nine letters, set in a block and exposed for only 50 milliseconds.

(This prevented any directed eye-movements.) Four or five letters were the average number reported. But, signalling a particular row to be remembered after the exposure, led to subjects' recalling any three of these nine numbers with almost 100% accuracy. The rate of success, however, dropped dramatically as the time between exposure and signal was increased and delays of a second meant no "improvement" upon efforts at recalling the whole nine.

The signal used by Sperling was a tone; a high-pitched tone indicated

that the top row should be reported; a middle tone, the middle row;

a low tone, the bottom row. Averbach and Coriell required their

subjects to report only single letters rather than a whole row and

signalled using a pointer. Now, while their results were closely 55.

analogous to those of Sperling (Averbach and Sperling produced a joint paper detailing the correspondences in 1971 50 ) efforts at replicating 51 these failed. Sparling's results, on the other hand were comparatively easy t o rep 1ica. t e. 52 This is in no way surprising in the light of what we now know about "backward masking". Visual images persist for a relatively long time where the subject is plunged into darkness following exposure of the stimulus-graphics. But they decay quite rapidly when the subject is exposed to "visual noise". The pointer, a black bar, would have provided considerable "interference".

The significant implications of these experiments' findings are that the oval-shaped area of perception which results from each fixation does not dissipate immediately upon the eye's moving off on their next saccade. For about one second, the "icon" persists (Sperling showed that beyond this time, reports of single rows of letters were no more accurate than "whole reports"). During this time, the brain begins to process the information, at first in a fast, crude and holistic way but, soon after, in a more deliberate, attentive and detailed manner. This processing seems to be active and selective, with the brain synthesising or constructing a visual figure from information contained in "iconic memory".

Sperling suggests that the subjects in his experiments "scanned" the material during the brief period of exposure, selected certain information, "rehearsed it" (perhaps verbally: perhaps in other ways),

then reported what they had remembered of their rehearsal. He points

to the fact that some subjects' incorrect responses "sounded like"

letters that had been displayed, and that first letters in longer 56.

sequences (ones we assume were rehearsed) are the ones successfully recalled.

53 Mishkin and Forgays found that these "first letters" are to the left of a row where English subjects are concerned but those to the right where the subjects are Yiddish. Their interpretation of this observation (that experience had sensitised a portion of the visual system) was revised by Heron54 in 1957; he found that directing subjects to examine the letters in a certain order had a more significant effect. Bryden 55 complemented this finding when, in 1960, he had his subjects look at shapes rather than letters, and directed 56 subjects as to the order in which they were to be examined. Harcum's discovery that "last letters" are better recalled than "middle letters" might suggest that interference "clouds" symbols which have similar shapes either side - or, that memory has begun to decay. But here we are discussing isolated letters rather than letters "combined in a 57 sense", the stuff of reading in its proper sense. As Lashley put it:

Visual perceptions are rarely based upon a momentary stimulation of the fixed retina ••• most of our perception of objects is derived from a succession of retinal images being translated into a single impression of form.

This "translation" must be vitally important. If the skilled reader fixates about three times a line and for around 200 milliseconds on each occasion, why does he not "see" a rapid and bewildering series of

"snapshots"? And if iconic memory is all there is to perception, why

does the "masking effect" not obliterate each preceding perception?

Then, why can the reader see the whole page throughout this period of

rapid, directed fixations? 57.

It must be that a "residue of information", extracted from earlier fixations, remains available and helps determine what is to be seen in the present. Visual (together with auditory and kinaesthetic) perception is a constructive act where information derived from each new

"icon" is added to a constantly developing schematic model. Like

Vygotsky's "interior speech", the "icons" die almost as soon as they are "seen" but something more enduring - the meaning or deep structure - is established.

Returning to the work of Pillsbury, it seems that readers see words where none exist. In an experiment that included Titchener himself as a subject, clusters of letters such as "foyever" and "danxe" were read as "forever" and "danger" in the great majority of cases.

Following their performance, subjects were asked about their perceptions and it emerged that "words as wholes" were seen most distinctly.

(Only a few subjects remarked in such terms as, "The 1 r 1 seemed to have a hair across it.") Next most clearly seen were cert~n letters within words. It is interesting, however, that subjects admitted there were letters they did not see at all and other subjects who were quite definite that they had seen letters which were not in fact displayed. For these individuals, the centrally excited sensations were just as truly real parts of the word perceived as the peripherally excited.

Pillsbury, rightly, was to reject the idea that reading is a letter­ by-letter affair but then decided that "general word shape" was the important variable. Like another hypothesis - that word length. is the important clue to word recognition - this was disproved by later 58 research. 58.

The fact remains, however, that the brain performs a significant, executive function, constructing percepts so that observers

(including readers) can make sense of their world. (The manner in which human perception breaks down, meaningful piece by meaningful piece, when the effect of the eyes' natural "shiver" is overcome and rods and cones become "fatigued", provides a nice corollary here.

The image does not disappear immediately or blur gradually. Rather, significant parts - say, the ears on a head, the hair, the mouth - disappear one after the other. Where a word is concerned, 'BAT' 59 becomes 'PAT', then 'AT' and, at length 1 A1 .) Thus, when readers are presented with a continuing text, they haven't to identify every individual word. To elaborate on a "mathematical paradox" mentioned earlier, skilled readers manage to process many more than 300 words per minute. On less difficult or familiar material, they might fixate only three times each line. But the duration of this fixation is physiologically determined and, although words can be "recited" in

100 milliseconds, 200 milliseconds is required for "pronunciation" in "inner speech", or aloud when meaning has to be taken into account.

This implies that there is a definite, maximum reading speed of 300 words per minute. Word-for-word encoding characterises reading where the material provides problems (of meaning or presentation) or the reader is less skilled. Perhaps fortunately, the redundancy of

English is high and has been estimated to be as much as 50%. The brain has the opportunity to "fill the blanks", providing the reader takes an active role and brings his knowledge and experience to bear on the "partial text". As with all perception, reading is a matter of

decision-making that reflects past experience and future expectations -

as well as the information available at the time. The reader is really 59.

reducing his uncertainty to derive meaning from the text by looking

at the visual information (the surface structure of the language}

and all the deep structure and knowledge of the world at his

disposal.

Thus, providing the relationship between letters and words is not

altered, readers have surprisingly little trouble, even with altered

texts. Kolers, Eden and Boyer60 have studied the effect of various

"rotations" of text materials upon readers' speed of performance.

A line turned upside down is much easier to read than one where individual letters have been inverted or a "mirror-image" of the line produced. In spite of the fact that the first of these involved two transformations, inversion and reversion, it is much easier to handle than the latter two which involve single transformations.

In fact reading, in its true sense, would be an impossibility if all the information were concentrated in the words printed on the text.

The viscal system is not capable of getting information into the brain

fast enough to be entirely responsible for reading. What happens when the stimulus enters the brain? Sperling has written about

"rehearsal", a rather ambiguous term. Let us look at somemdels of what happens behind the eye.

61 Klatsky writes metaphorically of the brain as having compartments;

there is the Sensory Register, Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory.

A stimulus entering the brain goes into the Sensory Register where

comparisons are made with information held in Long Term Memory. The

stimulus is put against various alternatives until a match is found

and a decision made. (This is of course on a far more cognitive level 60.

than template matching that has already been discussed.) The nature of the decision "feeds back" into Long Term Memory for possible future use. It would seem then that information drawn selectively from the icon goes into an initial and very temporary information repository. She argues that it remains in a form that mirrors what was perceived at this stage.

Then the information passes to Short Term Memory for pattern recognition to take place. This is where a "bottleneck" occurs, the active verbal memory being able to hold only about 5 to 9 random pieces of information (for example, letters) at any one time. This was amply demonstrated by Miller in his classic paper, "The magic number seven, plus or minus two ••• ". These pieces of random information, drawn from each fixation, must "flood" Short-Term-Memory three or four times every second. This is where Klatsky thinks Sperling 1 s

"rehearsals" take place.

But random pieces of information could be much larger units than single letters. Smith reminds us that"··· this 'output' from a single fixation may be four or five letters, two unrelated words, or four or five words in meaningful sequence". 62 The larger these "chunks" the more chance that information stored in Long Term Memory has to build meaningful percepts. It is in this compartment that the reader 1 s permanent accumulation of knowledge is stored. Most important from the reading point of view will be the amount of syntactic and semantic information kept there, ready to assist in the decipherment and decoding of print. "It is clearly to the advantage of the reader, therefore, to be able to 1 group' his information into larger and larger units, to combine letters into words, or words into meanings."63 61.

Klatsky, in trying to explain the so rapid retrieval of information from Long Term Memory, draws an analogy with the way one vibrating tuning fork will set its "match" in motion while not affecting any others in a large array, each with a different pitch. Quillian64 theorises that Long Term Memory lies in a vast network of associations with a set of connections and all meanings stored close to one another.

This time the stimulus is supposed to strike a node, "lighting up" all associated meanings in the same way as a ball does on a pinball 65 machine. Anderson and Bower's "Human Associative Memory" model could be compared to a "fruit grading machine". In the same way as different sized fruit "drop through" suitably sized slots, words are supposed to "drop through" appropriate grammatical slots. Anderson and Bower believe that knowledge of grammatical function is essential to the gaining of meaning and that a wordis grammatical function acts as a "determiner" in its placement in meaningful context.

Whatever the mechanism by which knowledge contained in Long Term

Memory is put to work, helping in the reader's decoding process, it is quite essential that stored syntactic and semantic information be brought to bear so that meaning can be derived from print. Too much attention to the surface structure, with laborious sounding out, results in "a clutter" in Short Term Memory where, holding 5 to 9 single letters or blends, prevents that desire to make sense of a text and that

"feel for the flow of language" from exercising their effects. True, beginning-readers necessarily rely much more heavily on information conveyed by the graphic symbols. But it is vital that they be taught to appeal regularly to their developing senses of semantic and syntactic propriety; only then will they grasp the deep structure meaning from a 62.

minimum of surface clues. If they work so slowly that they "get lost" in the surface structure, they will not grasp any meaning because of their "word-barking" and lack of fluency.

It is essential that the brain provide more information from its side of the eyes than the reader gathers from the page. It is quite as essential that teachers of reading acknowledge this fact in their approach, their planning and their classroom practice. 63.

References

1 Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908; reprint ed., Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), p.6.

2 E. Javal, Annales d' oculistigue (1878, 1879). Reported by R.S. Woodworth, Experimental Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), p.577.

3 J. McK. Cattell, Brain, 8 (1885-1886), 295-312. Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.688.

4 B. Erdmann and R. Dodge, Psychologische Untersuchungen uber" das Lesen (1898). Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.715.

5 W.B. Pillsbury, "A study in apperception", American Journal of Psychology, 8 (1897), 315-393.

6 E.B. Delabarre, American Journal of Psychology, 9 (1898), 572-574. Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.578.

7 Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.716.

8 John B. Carroll, "Foreword" to Huey, E.P.• cit., p.xi.

9 Huey, E.P.• cit., p.71.

10 B. Erdmann and R. Dodge; A. Goldscheider and R.F. Muller; H. Helmholtz; and J. Zeitler.

11 Paul A. Kolers, "Introduction" to Huey, E.P.• cit., p.xvii.

12 Huey, E.P.• cit., p.72.

13 Huey, E.P.• cit., p.81.

14 G.S. Hall, Educational Problems (New York: Appleton, 1911), p.445.

15 w.r. Dearborn, Psychological Bulletin, 6 (1909). Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.716.

16 W.A. Schmidt, Supplementary Educational Monograph, 2 (1917). Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.722.

17 G.T. Buswell, Supplementary Educational Monograph, 21 (1922). Reported by Woodworth, E.P.• cit., p.723. 64.

18 R.Y. Walker, Psychology Monograph, 44 (1933). Reported by Woodworth, .£.P.• cit., p.724.

19 F.P. Robinson, Iowa University Studies, 39 (1933). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

20 I.H. Anderson, Psychology Monograph, 48 (1937). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

21 H.R. Crosland, Oregon University Publications, 2 (1924). Reported Woodworth, .£.P.• cit., p.734.

22 M.D. Vernon, British Journal of Psychology, 21 (1931). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

23 E.M. Abernethy, Journal of Educational Psychology, 20 (1929). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

24 L.C. Gilbert, Psychology Monographs, 43 (1932). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

25 A. Frandsen, Psychology Monographs, 16 (1934). Reported by Woodworth, .£.P.• cit., p.735.

26 P.W. Terry, Supplementary Educational Monograph, 18 (1922). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

27 G.N. Rabert, Journal of Educational Psychology, 23 (1932). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

28 D. Futch, Journal of General Psychology, 13 (1935). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

29 E. Shen, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10 (1927). Reported by Woodworth, .£.P.• cit., p.736.

30 H.E. Weaver, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, 1930. Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

31 E.A. Taylor, "The spans: perception, apprehension and recognition", American Journal of Opthamology, 44 (1957), 501-507.

32 J. Morton, "The effects of context upon the speed of reading - eye movements and voice span", Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55 (1964), 165-180.

33 J.J. Geyer, "Perceptual systems in reading: the prediction of a temporal eye-voice span", in Perception and Reading, ed. by H.K. Smith (Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association, 1968). 65

34 s. Wanat, "Relations between language and visual processing", in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, ed. by Harry Singer and Robert Ruddell (Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association, 1976), pp.104-136.

36 G.T. Fechner, Poggendorf 1 s Ann (1840-1850), pp.193-221; 427-465. Reported by Woodworth, E.e.• cit., p.558.

37 H.v. Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen 0ptik (1856-1866). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

38 S.I. Franz, Psychology Monograph, 3 (1899). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

39 W. Berry, Psychological Bulletin, 19 (1922). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

40 A. Shuey, American Journal of Psychology, 35 (1924). Reported by Woodworth, E.e.• cit., p.562.

41 U. Ebbecke, Archives gas Physiology, 221 (1929). Reported by Woodworth, E.e.• cit., p.558.

42 W. Berry and H. Imus, American Journal of Psychology, 47 (1935). Reported by Woodworth, ibid.

43 Ulrich Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, 1967), p.16.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 F.C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: c.u.P., 1932).

48 G. Sperling, "The information available in brief visual presentations", Psychological Monographs, 74, 11 (1960), 498.

49 E. Averbach and A.S. Coriell, "Short term memory in vision", Bell Systems Technical Journal, 40 (1961), 309-328. 66.

50 E. Averbach and G. Sperling, "Short term storage of information in vision", in Information Theory: Proceedings of the Fourth London Symposium, ed. by c. Cherry (London and Washington, o.c.: Butterworth, 1961).

51 M.S. Mayzner, E.L. Abrevaya, R.E. Frey, H.G. Kaufman and K.M. Schoenberg, "Short-term memory in vision: a partial replication of the Averbach and Coriell study", Psychonometric Science, 1 (1963), 225-226.

52 s. Glucksberg, "Decay and interference in short-term memory" (paper presented to the Psychonometric Society, Chicago, Illinois, 1965).

53 M. Mishkin and D.G. Forgays, "Word recognition as a function of retinal locus", Journal of Experimental Psychology, 43 (1955), 43-48.

54 W. Heron, "Perception as a function of retinal locus and attention", American Journal of Psychology, 70 (1957), 38-48.

55 M.P. Bryclen, "Tachistoscopic recognition of non-alphabetical material", Canadian Journal of Psychology, 15 (1960), 78-86.

56 E.R. Harcum, "Effect of pre-recognition exposure on visual perception of words" (paper presented to the Eastern Psychological Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1964).

57 K.S. Lashley, "The problem of serial order in behavior", in Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, ed. by L.A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley, 1951), pp.112-136.

58 Woodworth, .£e.• cit., p.729.

59 R.M. Pritchard, "Stabilized images on the retina", Scientific American, 204 (June, 1958), 72-78.

------, W. Heron and o.o. Hebb, "Visual perception approached by the method of stabilised images", Canadian Journal of Psychology, 14 (1959), 67-77.

60 P.A. Kolers, M. Eden and A. Boyer, "Reading as a perceptual skill", Research Laboratory of Electronics, Quarterly Progress Report (July, 1974), 214-217.

61 Roberta L. Klatsky, Human Memory: Structure and Processes (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975). 67.

62 Frank Smith, Understanding Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p.78.

63 Ibid.

64 M.R. Quillian, "The teachable language comprehender: A simulation program and theory of language", Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 12 (1969) 459-476.

65 J.R. Anderson and G.H. Bower, Human Associative Memory (Washington, D.C.: Winston, 1973). 68.

CHAPTER 3

LINGUISTS' STUDIES OF THE MANNER OF

CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

It seems plain that language acquisition is based on the child's discovery of what from a formal point of view is a deep and abstract theory - a generative grammar of his language - many of the concepts and principles of which are only remotely related to experience by long and intricate chains of quasi-inferential steps. 1

It has been proposed that, if the beginning-reader necessarily places greater reliance upon the graphic symbols in his deriving meaning from print, he must still appeal to his accumulating linguistic knowledge to develop effective reading skills. But just

"what language does the child bring with him to school"? What mastery has he of language processes to facilitate the interaction of his own thoughts with those of the author via the graphics on the page?

And if reading is "an alternative language form", and if speech is successfully mastered by a significantly larger proportion of the population than that which learns to read, what implications are there in this way children learn to talk for teachers of reading?

Kenneth and Yetta Goodman have commented:

Our contention is that acquisition of literacy is an extension of natural language learning for all children. Instruction which is consistent with this understanding facilitates learning. Instruction which does not build on the process of natural language learning will, in some respects, be at 69.

cross purposes with learnersv natural tendencies, will neutralise or blunt the force of their language learning strengths, and may become counter-productive. Learners may then have to overcome barriers placed in their way in order to become literate.2

And, more brutally, Herbert Kohl expressed the view that, "If talking and walking were taught in schools, we might end up with as many mutes and cripples as we now have non-readers". 3

Teidemann,4 a German biologist, documented the language growth of a child as far back as 1787. Darwin5 and Taine6 contributed other pioneer studies ninety years later but it was Preyer,7 meticulously recording his son's first three years of linguistic development to 1882, who established a tradition of careful description in the area we call "Developmental Linguistics". This was evidenced in the work of Shinn8 and Sully9 besides the Sterns10 and Leopold. 11

In fact that beneficent influence still operates upon the work of linguists today, although the direction of thinking has changed under the influence of Chomsky:

The methodological implications of this new picture can best be understood by comparing earlier with recent studies of child language. For many long years this was a dreary subfield of developmental psychology consisting of word counts, phoneme counts, counts of sentence types, and the like - all classified on the basis of age. Since the childrenvs words were classed in terms of their part-of­ speech membership in adult English, most of these careful and tedious studies ••• are impossible to interpret, because the important question is not what part of speech a word is in the adult language, but what role it plays in the childis language system.12

Some modern scholars decry this "tendency to forget that the

scientific study of child language has an important and thoroughly 70.

respectable heritage of observation and theoretical discussion11 •13

Similarly, they question the value of "the contemporary practice of vilifying behaviourism for its misleading and inept attempts t o exp 1 ain. 1 anguage acqu1s1. ·t· ion.... 1114 • But they have to agree that children's language is more than a result of mimicry and reinforcement. They know that even young children's sentences are

"hierarchies of units1115 organised according to grammatical principles, rather than mere strings of words.

The speed with which children infer these rules and the way they then use them to construct utterances they have never heard before may not point inevitably to a rationalist hypothesis of innate ideas, but these facts do suggest that children "creatively construct a

1 anguage on th eir• own in • accor d ance wi• th in• t rinsic• • capaci • t ies.• II 1 6

This is not to deny the importance of those childrenvs speech environment:

A young child's success in learning to talk depends on his ability to perceive and organize his environment, the language that is part of that environment, and the relation between the two •••• The acquisition of language is a complex process that is crucially related to the child's cognitive-perceptual growth and his interaction in an environment of objects, events and relations.17

Recent studies18 of two-month-old babies' "proto-language" suggest that there is interaction between mother and child even at this very early stage. Still, as Lenneberg 19 has noted, normal children of congenitally deaf parents are very little retarded in their linguistic development although the speech of their parents is highly abnormal.

And deaf children, themselves, go through that early "babbling" stage 71.

just as their hearing-peers do. This might indicate considerable innate predetermination: it certainly indicates that sources of linguistic information "outside" the child have been somewhat overemphasised in the past.

Some might see clear evidence of cognitive tendencies in children's apparent sensitivity to patterned regularities. Although children's speech deviates from adult talk, it does so in a systematic way and in accordance with their partial analysis of what they hear. While making an "unconscious" progress towards an understanding of syntax

(Ervin-Tripp stresses that qualification as a native speaker requires one to behave as if one knew the rules20 ), children provide striking evidence of the constituent structure of sentences as they expand their utterances.

The "babbling" stage has its interest; it would seem that patterns of intonation begin to emerge and there is a gradual restriction of phones produced to those that are heard in the home environment. 21

And the one-word utterance stage has involved researchers such as 22 McCarthy and Lenneberg; they argue that these "holophrases" imply their own syntax. But students of language are generally more interested in longer statements where the relationships between words are easier to define. A "corpus" of two-word utterances provides a beginning-point and these appear in children's language when they are about 18 months old, no matter what the culture to which they belong.

There were three major collections of child-talk in the ¥sixties.

Braine23 had two mothers keep written records of their oral exchanges 72.

with two children, and he audio-recorded a third child over an extended period of time in 1963. Brown and Bellugi24 audio-recorded three other children over different periods ranging from ten to twenty-one months, beginning in the same year. Miller and Ervin25 began a little later, recording the talk of five children with an investigator over a longer period again; in the beginning, these sessions ran for forty-five minutes each week but later the children were each recorded for four to five hours every two months.

26 Brown, this time with Fraser, began an analysis of these "corpera"; and Brown and Bellugi, Miller and Ervin, and Braine with McNeill, 27 an analysis of samples soon afterwards. On the basis of privileges of occurrence, the words in the children's utterances were grouped into classes and rules were derived for the ordering of these classes.

All researchers agreed that even the earliest two-word utterances were systematic and rule-governed. In addition, all investigators agreed about the nature of the rules which underlay children's syntactic constructions. When the utterances were analysed in terms of the form and distribution of their elements, and the elements classified on the basis of their co-occurrence, there seemed to be essentially two classes of words. Juxtaposed with a large class of "open" or "x" words which occurred less frequently, was a smaller class of "pivot" words whose position in the "sentence" was relatively fixed. The

"open class" contained words with some lexical content while the

"pivots" acted as syntactic operators. The terms "pivot" and

"x-word" were coined by Braine but Brown and Bellugi preferred "functor" and "contentive". Miller and Ervin, on the other hand, used "operator" and "non-operator". If a child has the word ",on," amongst his 73.

smaller store of "operators", one is likely to hear "sentences"

like "boot on", "tape on" and "fix on". That child might also have

the word ",more," in that same accumulation. Thus one would expect

utterances such as "more lolly", "more hot" and even "more sing".

For him, the "pivot" has a fixed position. There is at least one

case, 28 however, of a child's varying that word's position. This has led Slobin to conclude that "operator" is a superior term since

"pivot" has come to connote "fixed position".

The number of two-word utterances grows rapidly. Braine29 documented one case where the child, who used fourteen such structures in his eighteenth month, managed twenty-four, fifty-four, eighty-nine, three hundred and fifty, fourteen hundred, and more than two thousand five hundred in consequent months. The number of "operators", however, grows relatively slowly, only a few entering the child's vocabulary each month. McNei11 30 traced these "operators" and many more

"non-operators" in the utterances of one of Braine's subjects:

"Operators" "Non-operators"

allgone boy byebye sock big boat more fan pretty milk my plane see shoe night night vitamins hi hot Mummy Daddy Etc.

Almost any of the former might have been combined with any of the

latter, even though that would have contravened our adult classification

of words by function. The point is that the child is operating according 74.

to his own rules, indeed his own system, which is based upon what he has heard. But his speech consists of much more than reduced or delayed imitations of adult utterances.

If "allgone sticky" (after washing his hands), "allgone outside"

(after a door was shut, obscuring the view), and "more page" (to encourage the continuance of a story) have their charm, it can be seen that the analyses described above centre on the form rather than the content of the utterances. Reflecting a general trend, recent work has concentrated to a greater extent upon semantic questions with more attention being devoted to intention and the corresponding surface structure.

Bloam31 claims that "the notion of 'pivot grammar' describes children's utterances in only the most superficial way". He points 32 to the language of Kathryn, a 21-month-old, where she used

''Mammy sock" in two separate contexts. In the first, Kathryn indicated that she had picked up her mother's sock: in the second, she was

"saying", "Mummy is putting my sock on my foot". The two utterances are more similar than Chomsky's famous "John is easy ta please" versus "John is eager to please" but they have at least as different underlying structures. Thus Bloom appeals to Chomsky 1 s notion of deep and surface structure and agrees to "the essential relevance of 33 the semantics of a sentence for the specification of its structure":

the semantic-syntactic relation between "Mammy" and "sock" was necessarily specifiable for the two utterances in two different ways to account for the fact that in one instance "Mammy" was an actor-agent and in the other 34 instance "Mammy" was an attribute of the sock. 75.

He agrees with Brown and Bellugi that young children speak "very much in the here and now", and he makes use of the "aid of situation", just as Leopold did.

Slobin35 does not agree that "Kathryn sock" constitutes a "pivot" structure. He complains that both words are "open-class" and might separately be joined with "operators" to form typical two-word utterances. Looking at "Kathryn sock" and four other Bloom-examples, he claims that these are different two-word utterances that appear in addition to "pivot" structures. But he agrees with Bloom that they evidence dual structure, and identifies five possible different under­ lying semantic relationships:

1. cup glass; e.g., I see a cup and a glass:­ conjunction

2. party hat; e.g., This is a party hat:­ attribution

3. Kathryn sock; e.g., This is Kathryn's sock:­ possession

4. sweater chair; e.g., The sweater is on the chair:­ location

5. Kathryn ball; e.g., Kathryn will throw the ball:­ subject-object

Bloom, Slobin and all those other researchers mentioned here agree that even syntactic analysis demonstrates that two-word utterances serve a variety of functions in children 1 s speech. Those functions are the really basic operations of language: objects are named and actions described in subject-predicate constructions; quantitative and qualitative modification can be traced, as can a simple form of negation. And they characterise the language of beginning-speakers in all cultures. 76.

Slobin36 has consolidated the published and unpublished findings

of many linguists in a table which displays some "striking

cross-linguistic similarities". Utterances from six languages are classified according to function: naming, demanding, negating, describing, indicating ownership, modifying or qualifying, and questioning. Here are the first examples in his "naming" category:

English German Russian

there book buch da Tosya tarn (book there) (Tosya there)

Finnish Luo Samoan

tuossa Rina en saa Keith lea (there Rina) (it clock) (Keith there)

For this researcher, anyway, here is evidence to support the linguistic-universals hypothesis of Chomsky.

Further indications of children's sensitivity to grammatical regularities appear in the next stage of their linguistic development. Braine37 has noted the existence of "replacement

sequences" in the speech of two-year-olds. The child begins with a predicate phrase but immediately replaces it with a more

sophisticated subject-predicate construction. Thus "want that" is "cancelled" by "Andrew want that", or "build house" with "Cathy

build house". Whether one constructs a complete or simplified

"tree diagram" of this last utterance: 77.

sentence

noun phrase verb phrase

noun (proper) verb noun phrase

Cathy verb ~(stem) present article noun I build ~ house

Figure 9

OR

sentence

noun phrase verb phrase

Cathy

build house Figure 10 38 the immediate constituents are revealed in a hierarchical structure.

(Gradual approximation to the ideal form can also be seen to have begun.)

Brown and 8ellugi39 took careful note of children's hesitations as they produced slightly longer utterances. They found this pattern of 78.

pauses typical, "Put . . the red hat . on." but none reflecting this, "Put the . red . . . hat on." or this, "Put the . . red hat on." They concluded that noun phrases function as units in childrenYs speech; even their short and idiosyncratic utterances would seem to operate according to grammatical principles.

The child's creative contribution to his language-growth process is probably most impressively demonstrated in his over-regularisation of inflections. Youngsters' use of such "words" as "corned",

"breaked", "goed" and "doed" is a matter of common observation.

Irregular verbs are inflected to indicate past tense as if they were regular (or "weak") verbs. And teachers of infants, or even junior primary classes, still hear expressions like "foots" and "mouses".

In spite of the fact that children use "strong", irregular verbs correctly for a time, apparently having learned them as separate lexical items, the appearance in their speech of even one or two regular past tense forms signals an extended period of incorrect overgeneralisation from these regular forms. The significant aspect of this process is that the correct "came", "broke", "went" and "did", practised for several months, are "driven out" because of language-learners' sensitivity to regularities during their "internalisation" of grammatical rules. And apart from this being true of first-born children from relatively privileged homes who would not have heard such utterances, it is apparently the case for children in all cultures, 79.

especially the Russian where "the abundance of inflections allows for many more overgeneralizations than in English". 40

Similarly, children's dialect-backgrounds seem to have little effect upon their making analogical errors which demonstrate growing syntactic awareness. Brown 41 studied the language of "Adam", "Eve" and

"Sarah", and this data was supplemented with an examination of eleven, lower-class, black children's speech. Inappropriate inflections were categorised into noun and verb classes and subdivided according to the rule that was overgeneralised. Here, for example, are the results where "double plurals" were concerned:

Eve Adam Sarah Black children

auntses pantses sockses schoolses tosses toyses and here, where nouns with no plural form were considered:

Eve Adam Sarah Black children

peoples dears dears reindeers sheeps peoples fishes reindeers reindeers

The similarity of incorrect expressions is obvious.

Then again, there is also some indication of the amount of individual variation. Looking at all the results, we might assume that Eve would say "foots" or even "feets" but, from the above, we could not assume she would say "footses" or "feetses". Some children, having heard "box" pluralised in "boxes", generalise "foot" to "footses".

Others, noticing "glass" becomes "glasses", decide that "foot", when pluralised, ought to be "footez". Ervin-tripp concluded that "even highly practiced, familiar plurals may be temporarily changed in form by overgeneralization of new pattersn". 42 BO.

During the stage of two-word "sentences", it is difficult to identify transformations in childrenvs talk. If their utterances have more complex deep structures, there is no clear evidence of systematic rules relating underlying meanings to these surface structures.

Performance limitations (especially those of memory; usually, only three items can be held in short-term memory) restrict the child to very brief utterances - and to marking features like interrogation and negation by such simple means as rising intonation and the attachment of "no" or "not". But as the child feels the need to express more and more complicated meanings, these simple devices prove inadequate and he has to invent a sort of transformational grammar for the sake of efficiency. Let us examine the rule-governed development of one of these language features to demonstrate its cognitive nature.

Bellugi and Brown 43 traced the development of interrogative forms of utterance through various stages that they labelled: "yes-no questions", "Wh-questions", "tag", and "indirect" questions.

Concentrating upon the language of Adam, but stressing that the descriptive statements applied equally to Eve and Sarah, they were able to argue that the development process was common to the three children even if, once again, there were wide variations as far as individuals' rates of progress were concerned. The first interrogative form managed successfully by all three children was the simple, single transformation from an assertive statement. "The boy can drive the car" becomes the question, "Can the boy drive the car?" via the exchange of the auxiliary "can" with the subject-noun phrase "the boy".

"Wh-questions" require two transformations. If the declarative statement was, "He is going somewhere", the appropriate question word 81.

("where", "when", "what", "who", "which" or "how") has to be substituted for the indefinite pronoun, "somewhere", and placed at the beginning of the sentence. Then, the same transformation required for "Yes-no questions" i.e. transposing the auxiliary, here a form of "be", and the subject-noun phrase, has to be applied to obtain the final form, "Where is he going?". This greater demand means that some children ask such questions as, "Wha€ the boy hit?" and "What he want?";

"Where I should put it?" and "Why he 1 s doing it?". These children are performing one grammatical operation successfully i.e. preposing the question word; but failing to manage the other i.e. inverting the subject and the auxiliary. While handling such questions as,

"Can he ride in a truck?", these children were asking, "What he can ride in?". But the former implies the latter and, with the investigators, we might conclude that there is some restriction, some limitation upon "sentence programming span", that blocks the application of both operations at once by children at this stage of development.

Further, invitations to imitate correct forms fail because of the way children "filter" sentences through their own rule systems. The investigator asked, "Adam, say what I say: 1 Where can I put them?' "•

Adam replied, "Where I can put them?". The child seems to impose his own structure upon what he hears just as Pillsbury's subjects saw "words that weren't there".

But later the "sentence-programming span" seems to increase and the child is able to perform both operations, producing utterances such as,

"Why can he go out?". However, he still cannot manage three operations at once; if we introduce a negative element that must be attached to 82.

an auxiliary, the child "reverts to" such utterances as "Why he can't go out?". Although he can transpose the affirmative, he can't prepose and indicate negation. Bellugi asked Adam, "Adam, ask the old lady (an appropriately-shaped puppet) where she can find some toys.". Adam replied, "Where you can find some toys?". And to the request that Adam ask the old lady "why she canvt run", he responded,

"Old Lady, why you can't run?". As the researcher determined, "In his responses, all affirmatives were inverted, all negatives were not.

The interpretation again fits with the notion of a limit on the 44 permitted complexity at one stage".

"Tag questions", where the speaker makes a statement and then asks for confirmation of it, and indirect questions, where "Yes-no" and

"Wh-questions" are embedded in the noun phrases of other sentences, appeared in the children's language last - when they were about three and a half years old. Here there was the widest individual variation with Sarah well ahead of Adam.

Now Sarah's father was a supermarket employee who, like her mother, had not gone beyond high school. Adam's father, on the other hand, was a graduate student at Harvard. This raises the question as to the importance of talk in the home, especially that between mother and child:

Talking in baby talk to a child for the first five years of his life would surely hinder his learning, but so would speaking in the language of an encyclopaedia or a diplomatic treaty. There must be an optimum level of language complexity, challenging to the child but not impossibly so.45

Shipley, Smith and Gleitman46 studied the spontaneous responses of young children to commands that varied in structure. They found that 83.

children past the one-word stage responded appropriately more often when the command was cast in adult form rather than in a simplified construction, similar to that of the children's own language.

Spring47 recorded a mother talking to her twelve-month-old and to an adult. These oral performances were put on separate tracks of a tape recorder and other twelve-month-olds offered the choice of listening to either via a simple switching device. Most preferred the maternal talk to other infants' speech.

Snow 48 had two- and three-year-old children listen to a taped story while looking at pictures. Half of the story was "as written" while the other half had been "translated" into language characteristic of the age group. This time, the subjects were rated as being more attentive to the simplified version.

Clearly, the one-year-olds would be more attentive to intonation patterns while the older group had more access to meaning via the simplified vocabulary and syntax. But the extent of, or need for, simplification in maternal speech should not be over-estimated. Brown 49 and Hanlon calculated that only 30% of the sentences heard by the child are simple, active, affirmative and declarative. The remaining

70% are complex, passive, negative, interrogative, fragmentary and

so on. It seems "that it is not so much parental speech that directs

the path of language acquisition but, rather, what the child does with

i"t" • 50

To return to the question··of a school-entrant's accumulated language

skills, it can be seen that they are considerable in number and complex 84.

in character. If the child is not "a linguistic adult", a rather over­ enthusiastic view still held by some, he has gained control of the major language processes that characterise all languages studied to this time. His syntactic language-development continues for some 51 time, however, as has been described by Carol Chomsky.

Her study focused on several aspects of syntax which require specific knowledge and which develop during the elementary school years.

She agrees, of course, that the five-year-old uses speech constructions

"hardly discernible" from those common amongst adults but believes that children of this age have inferior comprehension of particular syntactic structures:

Under direct examination, the childis lack of knowledge of a number of constructions which are commonplace to the adult becomes apparent. The children's observed failure to correctly interpret a number of such constructions is indicative of several areas in which their underlying knowledge falls short of the adultis. Furthermore, the nature of the childrenis mistakes in interpreting these constructions is important in bringing out various aspects of the implicit linguistic knowledge which they do possess. For we find that children do in fact assign an interpretation to the structure that we present to them. They do not, as they see it, fail to understand our sentences. They understand them, but they understand them wrongly.52

Chomsky found four constructions that deviated from established language patterns, or whose surface structure was relatively inexplicit.

They were these:

1. John is easy to see. 2. John promised Bill to go. 3. John asked Bill what to do. 4. He knew that John was going to win the race. 85.

She tested the comprehension of these structures by forty children aged from five to ten and found, as had Brown, that there was considerable variation in individuals' ability to handle the difficulties, but that the sequence of mastering the constructions was the same for all children. Structures 1 and 2 were acquired between the ages of 5 and 9 but were known by all children older than

9. Structure 3 posed most difficulty with some ten-year-olds still failing to recognise the subject of "do". Structure 4 was acquired fairly uniformly at about age five or six.

In the same way as the child unconsciously recognises patterned regularities in the language's syntactic structure, he appears to come to terms with the semantic system in a gradual, yet regular, way.

Just what the pattern is, however, is far more difficult to establish.

Development seems to proceed on a number of levels, beginning with simple, sound-object correspondence. This is characterised by rather coarse categorisation in the early stages; a two and a half year old might label all men "Daddy" and all four-legged creatures "doggie".

This is not to say he does not recognise "Daddy" as special amongst his kind or that horses are different from "doggies" but it would appear he lacks labels to refine his cognitive organisation of the world.

The child then seems to learn that the same word can have different meanings, depending on context. With his developing sense of synonymy comes new understandings of antonymy, inclusion and reciprocity.

But there has been little study of these processes and published findings concern fragments of larger areas such as the three-to-four year old 1 s handling "more" correctly most of the time but his equation 86.

of "less" with "more". 53 "Before" and "after", "either" and

"neither" cause similar confusion.

Following Preyer, Leopold made the development of concepts (intrinsic to language after all) the focus of his study. His conclusion

(written in 1948) is still a fairly adequate summary of what we know about the manner of childrenvs semantic development.

The process is parallel, in its general outlines, to the learning of sounds, grammatical forms, and syntactic constructions. The material to be learned is taken over in an organization which reproduces at first only the crudest outlines of the standard organization. Little by little, finer classifications of the standard are recognized and reproduced. This requires the addition of more and more items of vocabulary, which cover less and less semantic territory. The outlines of the areas to which each word is applicable become more and more distinct, and coincide progressively with standard practice.

The tangible progress from a single series to two contrasting series and later to finer subdivisions applies less clearly to semantics than it does to sounds and syntax. The only semantic area in which it can be followed definitely is of opposites in which the standard languages themselves show the sharpest logical cleavage by contrast.54

Reflecting a somewhat different orientation, Halliday55 has taken a more properly integrated view of these aspects of childrenvs language development. Understanding that "function precedes form" and that meanings exist in whole-sentence units (even if these are mere "pivot" utterances), he has identified seven models of language use. The

"Instrumental Model" refers to that language used for satisfying material needs; "want dinner" exemplifies this language function in the "corpus" of an eighteen-month-old. 56 The same child said, "Daddy.

can I have can I have a chocky if you 87.

if you please Daddy?" when she was three; this illustrates the same function but also Halliday's second model, the "Regulatory".

Language used between people in close and less personal relationships is classified as "Interactional":

Adult: What are you going to be when you grow up? Child: I don't know . . I must be a a . . I' 11 be a washer up . . . a . . a jobber . . I' 11 be Adult: A jobber? What's that?

Child: You know donvt you work

"You know, don't you?" exhibits a prior knowledge of the adult and of an expectation that he "knows all". As the child discovers and makes public her own individuality, beginning to understand herself and her relationship with others, she starts to intimate feelings and attitudes:

A: I want you to tell me about the Queen. Where does the Queen live?

C: In her big palace.

A: In a big palace - and where is that?

C: At 27, Elm Rd.

A: At 27, Elm Rd - I see. And what about the Queen's mummy?

C: Oh • I haven't got one I don't need one.

A: You don't need one - I see.

C: Do I? (anxiously)

A: Do you need a daddy?

C: Yes, of course •• to give me food of course, donvt I? (in a tone of certainty)

In attempting to determine her own place in the family and her relationships with its members, she "becomes" the Queen and provides an excellent example of "Personal" language. 88.

Halliday's "Heuristic Model", as one would expect, refers to language used in the child's efforts to discover things about the world:

A: What else was there in the old days?

C: I don 9 t know . how did they get how did they

A: Yes

C: How did how did they get plants and things like that?

When three and a half, our subject provides many charming examples of language that exemplify the sixth model, the "Imaginative". One was in reply to a request for a poem about a swing:

Swing, swing, swing,

Round and round the wind carries me,

The wind carried me, wind carries me,

Who told me,

Oh my daddy told me,

Oum dumdum; dum, dum, dum,

Here comes Tim; here comes Tim,

Here comes Tim; walkity walk.

The last model is too often regarded as the one which appears first.

But conveying messages, passing on information, which so often dominates teacher-sponsored, language activities in the classroom, is placed last in Halliday's list:

A: What does (a policeman) look like?

C: He lookslike • he's got grey trousers with a black hat on and he's grown up he has white gloves on •••• 89.

Halliday 1 s more holistic approach provides quite as impressive evidence of the extent and complexity of those language skills the child brings to school. If the school-entrant's mental abilities are limited in some ways, he enters his first class "a full-fledged member of his language community, able to produce an endless variety of novel yet meaningful utterances in the language he has mastered". 57

Now let us attempt to identify some aspects of this early linguistic development which have relevance for teachers of reading. Clearly, the child's ability to speak results from his desire to communicate, first with his mother but later with his immediate and larger families; then with his immediate and larger worlds. Through talk, he knows he can derive satisfaction of his physical and emotional needs.

Similarly, it is in speech that he gains a place in an ever-extending network of human relationships. And, of course, talk yields answers that satisfy curiosity. Teachers of reading have to demonstrate that their "alternative language form" can yield similar satisfactions.

Those meanings, represented on the page, can provide similar emotional reinforcement and satisfying answers. Books, relevant to the young reader's interests and needs, will provide enjoyment and fulfilment that parallel those provided by talk. Teachers of reading must present print that is of immediate relevance to their pupils's own needs and interests.

Learning to talk is, in large measure, a creative process. The child is constantly constructing theories of language, modifying and discarding old ideas about its structure, as he goes. If children imitate what they hear, they produce many variations upon the model presented. 90.

That "telegraphic stage", where children produce "sentences" of two

and three meaning-laden words, typifies their concern with

communicating the message. They approximate the model as best as

their capacities allow but, to them, function is of more importance

than form. Teachers of reading must emphasise that their subject is about the gaining of meaning. Utterly correct oral (or even silent)

"word-calling" is of little significance if the young reader fails to derive sense. The teachers must give highest priority to comprehension and not give in to the temptation to over-emphasise individual words' correct recoding while ignoring the more difficult business of decoding whole, meaningful units of print. Basal reading texts, which emphasise constant repetition of certain words at the expense of interest, operate in contradiction to the fact that children are first concerned with the message, then with the medium. The teacher must learn to accept some errors that reflect the individual's language immaturity, providing the reader is seeking to make sense of the material set for study.

To the infant, even his first utterances are whole, meaning-bearing units. Perhaps this is the most important implication for teachers of reading:

No one can get meaning from the printed page without taking in whole language patterns at the sentence level, because these are the minimal meaning-bearing structures of most written communications. While this ability in itself is no warranty of success in reading, it is a minimum requirement. (This) is the application of a modern linguistic description of speech patterns to their graphic counter­ parts, or equivalent patterns in writing and print.58

Lefevre goes on to assert that, "Traditional reading methodology ••• 91.

does not concern itself rigorously with language. Instead, it

concerns itself largely with psychological problems, with visual perception especially •••• " He argues that "the word is a minor language unit" and that "intonation patterns, grammatical and syntactical word groups, clauses and sentences" are far more significant; these "larger constructions ••• comprise the flow of speech and (they} bear meaning". He agrees that concentrating upon single words probably contributes "to the frequency of serious reading disability among pupils of all ages". The remarkably regular way children develop an understanding of syntax has been recorded here in some detail - and semantics to a lesser extent. It is difficult not to be impressed with the way children internalise rules about "the flow of language" and "what makes sense". It would be absurd to disregard this ability-­ and accumulated language skill - when teaching them to read.

(Intonation patterns have received only peripheral attention in this report but Lefevre's point is well taken; the pitch, stress and tone that characterise utterances are first-noticed and remain a valuable cue to readers who are in search of sense. Teachers should never be afraid that they are wasting time when reading aloud to students, even if these belong to a specialist class in a high school.)

Although it has been shown that language development is not complete

for pupils entering school, it has been argued that the mass of basic linguistic tasks have been overcome by most five-year-olds. Lenneberg 59

argues that this period of very rapid language acquisition is "critical",

being biologically determined. Certainly language-learning beyond

puberty is a very different proposition. Adolescent students of foreign 92.

languages must look with envy at younger people who can pick up three and more languages simultaneously, and with equal facility.

If reading is dependent on language development, there ought to be some optimal relationships between learning ta talk and learning to read. Teachers must be aware of these.

In all the meticulous study of the way children's language develops towards adult form, it has been stressed that children vary greatly in the rate at which they progress. It seems that periods of little or no progress are found in the great majority of cases, leading some theorists to believe that these "plateaux" probably have a significance of their own. They may be periods of consolidation!

In any case, teachers of reading must accept that regular progress towards complete efficiency is not the norm and must not be expected.

Times of little progress, or of "stagnation", have to be accepted, as do wide divergences between individuals' reading development rates.

A reading programme has to acknoweldge this, allowing the maximum amount of "individualisation" that circumstances allow. If a young pupil is still ~t Piaget's stage of "centration", it must be understood that he will have trouble discriminating letters from their background, let alone dealing with their sounds at the same time as he is trying to perceive them visually.

Mention has been made of some speakers of variant dialects. The consequent problems, where speakers of different styles meet standard

English texts, do not afflict teachers of reading to as large an extent in Australia as in some other countries. But Australian talk has as many registers as other English-speaking countries. The same 93.

sorts of tactics, minimising the differences between certain speech styles and the print actually presented to the beginning reader, are as appropriate. One hasn't to "translate" standard forms into different "codes" (or worse, to some "mixed code") but the context that often fosters such registers has to be taken into account.

For many children, the home situation is relatively troubled so that instead of developing strategies for attending to information, it tends to force their development of strategies to "cut off" that information.

Here, then, are some aspects of the manner of children's language acquisition, as revealed by linguists; and their implications for the pedagogy of reading. 94.

References

1 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965), p.58.

2 Kenneth and Yetta Goodman, "Learning to read is natural" (paper presented at the Conference on Theory and Practise of Beginning Reading, Pittsburgh, 13th April 1976), p.2

3 Herbert Kohl, Reading, How to (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Education, 1974), p.9.

4 D. Tiedemann, Beobachtungen uber die Entwicklung der Seelenfahigkeiten bei Kindern (1787). Reported by John Lyons, New Horizons in Linguistics (Harmondsworth, England: Pelican, 1970), p.243.

5 Charles Darwin, "A biographical sketch of an infant", Mind, 2 (1887), 285-294.

6 H. Taina, "On the acquisition of language by children", .£D.• cit., pp.252-259.

7 W. Preyer, Die Seale des Kindes (1882). Reported by Werner F. Leopold, "Semantic learning in infant language", Word 4 (1948), 173-180.

8 N.W. Shinn, Notes on the Development of the Child (Berkeley: University of California, 1893).

9 J. Sully, Studies of Childhood (London: Longmans, 1895).

10 Clara and William Stern, Die Kindersprache (1907). Reported by Leopold, .£D.• cit., p.173.

11 Werner F. Leopold, Speech Development of a Bilingual Child (1939-1949). Reported by Lyons, lac. cit.

12 Dan. I. Slobin, Psycholinguistics (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1971), p.41.

13 Lyons, lac. cit.

14 Ibid.

15 A demonstration of constituent structures analysis, revealing hierarchical structure, appears later in this chapter. 95.

16 Paraphrase of Slobin, .2.E.• cit., p.40.

17 Slobin, ibid.

18 For example, by Colwyn Trevathan, Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh. Reported by M.A.K. Halliday, "Language across the curriculum" (paper presented to a conference of primary teachers, Sydney, 30th June 1978). See also, "Conversations with a two-year-old", The New Scientist, 2nd May 1974.

19 E.H. Lenneberg, "Speech development: its anatomical and physiological concomitants", in Brain Function III, ed. by E.C. Carterette (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1966).

20 Reported by Slobin, .2.E.• cit., p.55.

21 Reported by E. Ingram, "Language development in children", in Applied Linguistics and the Teaching of English, ed. by H. Fraser and W.R. O'Donnell (London: Longmans, 1969), p.167.

22 Dorothea McCarthy, "Language development in children", in Manual of Child Psychology, ed. by Leonard Carmichael (New York: Wiley, 1954), pp.492-630.

E.H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundations of Language (New York: Wiley, 1967).

23 Marti·n D•• S Brains, . "Th e on t ogenyo f Eng 1·is h p h rase s t rue t ure: the first phase", Language, 39 (1963), 1-13.

24 Roger Brown and Ursula Bellugi, "Three processes in the child's acquisition of syntax", Harvard Educational Review, 34 (1964), 133-151.

25 Wick Miller and Susan Ervin, "The development of grammar in child language", in The Acquisition of Language, ed. by Ursula Bellugi and Roger Brown (Monograph of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29 (1964), p-34).

26 Roger Brown and Colin Fraser, "The acquisition of syntax", in Verbal Behavior and Learning, ed. by Charles N. Cofer and Barbara S. Musgrave (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp.158-197.

27 David McNeil!, "Developmental psycholinguistics", in The Genesis of Language, ed. by Frank Smith and George A. Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), pp.15-84.

28 Melissa Bowerman found that the free word order of adult Finnish was reflected in the two-word utterances of one of her two subjects (though not in the other). Reported by Slobin, .2.E.• cit., p.42. 96.

29 Braine, .QE.• cit. p.2.

30 McNeil!, .QE.• cit., p.22.

31 Lois Bloom, Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970), p,5.

32 Ibid.

33 Bloom, .QE. • ci t., p.7. 34 Bloom, .QE.• ci t., p.B.

35 Slobin, .QE.• cit., p.47 • 36 Slobin, .QE.• ci t ., p. 46-7 37 Ibid.

38 Slobin, .QE.• cit., p.48.

39 Bellugi and Brown, .QE.• cit., p.136.

40 Slobin, .QE.• cit., p.50.

41 Reported by a member of the team, Courtney B. Cazden, Child Language and Education (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp.29-48.

42 Susan Ervin, "Imitation and structural change in children's language", in New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. by E.H. Lenneberg (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1964), p.177.

43 Bellugi and Brown, .QE.• cit., pp.49-56.

44 Bellugi and Brown, .QE.• cit., p.46.

45 Philip S. Dale, Language Development: Structure and Function (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p.145.

46 Reported in Dale, .!EE.• cit.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid. 97.

49 R. Brown and C. Hanlon, "Derivational complexity and order of acquisition in child speech11 , in Cognition and the Development of Language, ed. by J.R. Hayes (New York: Wiley, 1970).

50 Dale, lac. cit.

51 Carol Chomsky, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from Five to Ten (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969).

52 Chomsky, .9.P.• cit., pp.4-5.

53 Dale, .9.P.• cit., pp.165-166.

54 Werner F. Leopold, "Semantic learning in infant language11 , Word, 4 (1948), 173-180.

55 M.A.K. Halliday, "Relevant models of language", in The State of Language, ed. by A.M. Wilkinson (England: University of Birmingham, 1969).

56 Child-language examples from A.M. Wilkinson, The Foundations of Language (England: Oxford University Press, 1971).

57 Slobin, .9.P.• cit., p.40.

58 Carl. A. Lefevre, Linguistics and the Teaching of Reading (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p.viii.

59 E.H. Lenneberg, The Biological Foundation of Language (New York: Wiley, 1967). 98.

CHAPTER 4

PSYCHOLINGUISTS' VIEWS OF READING AS

AN ACTIVE PROCESS

As the reader responds to cue systems that exist in the flow of language, he is able to utilise the same decoding procedures in ultimately decoding from written input, which he has learned ta use in decoding aural input ••••

As he fits his recoded aural input into a familiar pattern, he uses his well-learned knowledge of the structure of the language to test its fit.1

Psycholinguists claim "to bring together the theoretical and empirical tools of both psychology and linguistics to study the mental processes underlying the acquisition and use of language". 2 Believing that the other language forms (reading and writing) devolve from listening and talk, they have been much influenced by Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar and its application to the "print-and­ paper" language arts.

Their interpretation of the reading process places special emphasis on the need for the reader to be actively involved. If the author

exercises his sophisticated syntactic, semantic and phonological

awareness in producing the written material, the reader must draw

upon his own effective language system when applying constructive

perceptions that give meaning ta his experience. The author's task

is a productive one; he must express meaning according ta orthographic

rules that provide a medium through which he and the reader can 99.

interact. The reader's response is receptive in nature but has an essentially active aspect; he must intuit the author's deep structure as he examines acceptable surface structures contained in the visual, symbolic display. The psycholinguists see reading as an effective interaction of author's thoughts with reader's through the concepts and language skills at their disposal.

The influence of cognitive psychologists' and linguists' findings is clear, even in this brief summary of their position. There is an implied acknowledgement that the language awarenesses and knowledge the reader brings to the page are indispensable to his processing print. Visual perception of the graphic display is necessarily selective and has to be complemented by linguistic and other knowledge held in long-term-memory. As with learning-to-talk, the process of learning-to-read is very much an "inside-out" process. In the same way as the beginning-speaker creates tentative hypotheses according to rules which he has deduced from what he hears, the beginning-reader makes "educated guesses" about words he sees on the page. These guesses are influenced by his developing awareness of syntactic and semantic propriety.

The "window into this process" is provided by readers whose responses deviate from the text. If reading involves language interacting with thought during a search for meaning, if it operates at this deep and complex level, one has to expect that readers' responses will be more, and less, appropriate. For this reason, the term "miscue" has been substituted for "error" by psycholinguists who have made careful studies of readers' deviant responses. It turns out that miscues are 100.

quite as characteristic of proficient as of beginning readers.

The mark of more efficient readers, however, is their unwillingness to accept the inappropriate so that they return to the graphic symbols to get additional information upon which to base more acceptable responses.

Miscues have provided the focus of many psycholinguists' studies but there is earlier research relevant to their orientation. Pillsbury 1 s 3

1897 experiments, where subjects failed to notice "misprints" but proceeded to "construct" acceptable words, have been described. His suggestion that readers do not notice the omission or repetition of function words ("operators") in a context is also noteworthy. Here is an indication of the redundancy of certain aspects of the visual display to readers' purposes.

In 1917, Thorndike4 observed that readers who lost meaning were those who failed "to see the wood for the trees"; they did not utilise the most relevant information to integrate ideas in a coherent manner.

Pressey and Pressey, 5 1921, suggested that background information, besides reading vocabulary, is an important variable in the under­

standing of printed material.

Allbright6 pointed to the importance of context in reading

comprehension, in 1927. Apart from the need for understanding the

questions, readers have to isolate the elements of contextual

statements, inter-relate these and fit them into the whole contextual

setting. 101.

Richards, 7 1929, worked with older subjects in his investigations of poetry appreciation. This might seem of peripheral interest but a closer examination of his findings - that capable readers appreciate the poet's emotions, attitudes and intentions - align well with the psycholinguists' thesis; effective reading exists in author-reader and language-thought interaction.

Close correlation between third-grade children's "sentence sense" and reading achievement was established by Gibbons8 in 1941. In

1944 (and again in 1967 and 1968), Davis9 argued that "a reasoning in reading" skill was important, with a reading vocabulary, in readers' getting to meaning. Holmes10 isolated the following as best predictors of comprehension skill in 1948: knowledge of vocabulary in context; Otis I.Q. performance; perceptions of relations between words; and eye-fixations per one hundred words.

Brown and Berko11 further emphasised the importance of the use of context in effective reading when, in 1960, they showed that children could use nonsense words in appropriate positions in sentences. This highlighted the importance of readers' using their "feel for the flow of language", their syntactic cueing system.

In 1961, Smith, 12 working with fifth-grade children, discovered that their ability to formulate a purpose for reading had an important bearing on their consequent performance. A determination to make sense of what they read seems to have significance in childrenYs reading and this points to the importance of the semantic cueing system. 102.

13 Jones researched primary school children's reading in 1965 and claimed that context provided even young children with sufficient information for them ta succeed. She argued that there was no need to base primer reading material on limited, highly frequent words

(which risk losing the children's all-important interest). Rather, children should be encouraged to get to the sense without dwelling on visual characteristics.

14 Hafner made a controlled study of fifth-grade subjects in 1965.

He suggested that the teaching of context clues and the relationships between descriptions and meanings assisted the development of efficient reading. Meaningful elements rather than letter-word features should be the focus of reader's attention. Hafner used

"cloze procedure" to measure performance; this strategy for measurement and remediation will be given closer attention in Part II of this report.

Cloze was also used as a measure of reading achievement by Blumenfeld and Miller15 in 1965. Working with college subjects, they investigated the possible benefit of teaching the grammatical concepts and relationships of transformational grammar. Reading skills did, in fact, improve although teaching traditional grammar had no similar effect.

16 Fodor and Bever conducted a most significant experiment, also in

1965. Subjects had to listen for clicks that were presented through headphones while they read. There was evidenced a strong disposition to report that the clicks had occurred between phrases in the subjects' reading although these had been sounded in random fashion. This 103.

reinforced the belief that phrases are perceived as units during reading.

Further work on the importance of context as a meaning source was 17 completed by Ames in 1966. Knowledge of all word meanings was found to be unnecessary for proficient readers who made sense of "nonsense" 18 words in a sensible context with ease. In 1967, Ruddell established the significance of a relationship between subjectsv ability to handle the morphological and syntactic aspects of oral language and their comprehension of written language.

19 Wardhaugh, in 1968, argued that deriving meaning depended upon readers' relating correct deep structures to relevant surface structures and this required projecting "a consistent semantic reading on the 20 individual words". Like Katz and Fodor, 1963, he believed a reading of any passage's deep grammatical structure as important as any reading of its semantic content.

Recalling the work of Smith, Fincke21 showed how directing reading via questions aids subjects' obtaining meaning. Using an Informal

Reading Inventory, this researcher measured significantly greater reading achievement amongst the experimental reading group whose purposes had been made specific. Again, as with Smith, there is the implication that encouragement of readers to use their semantic cueing­ system has its effect.

In 1969, Bradley 22 again pointed to the importance of accumulated knowledge when he discovered that deletion of nouns has the most 104.

deleterious effect upon reading performance. In addition, he confirmed reading teachers' common observation that questions about a passage often provide sufficient cues for a subject to answer them from his accumulated knowledge and experience, the resources he brings to the page.

Ryan and Semmel!, 23 working very much within the psycholinguistic paradigm, completed an influential study in 1969. They concluded that it was essential to teach readers to strive to make sense of a passage, ignoring redundant features in the printed text. They emphasised the necessity for concentration upon conceptual features (rather than the graphics) for efficient reading to proceed.

24 Cohn came to a similarly influential conclusion in the same year.

Confirming the psycholinguists' contention that reading is a process of interaction, he summarised the causes of ineffective reading under the heading of "passivity". Although readers may have ~rd analysis skills, their failure to use the context to determine the passage's main idea, to recognise items as more important or sub­ ordinate, and to manipulate the text to gain sense, make their efforts ineffective. These readers sometimes either give up trying to get meaning from print or even fail to begin ta expect sense.

25 Hockberg 1 s work in 1970 recalled that of Ryan and Semmel!. He

questioned the point of a reader's attending to all the graphic

information on the page and recommended concentration upon the text's

meaningful elements. Selection of these from amongst the redundant and

irrelevant print-information is the key ta proficient reading. 105.

Goodman, 26 whose work will be given special attention in a section about miscue research, influenced Brown 27 to investigate readers' prediction habits in 1970. This researcher confirmed that readers make educated guesses and also that inappropriate syntactic and semantic responses cause them to look back for additional information.

Kolers 28 implied further confirmation of this anticipatory aspect of reading behaviour when he found how little attention mature readers pay ta surface features of the text as they interpret the meaning.

He also found that proficient bilingual readers encode a foreign textVs meaning rather than an oral realisation of the graphic input.

29 In 1971, Wanat took research a stage further when he investigated the nature of readers' selective behaviour. He found that his subjects attended first to main verbs. That year, Smith30 argued that reading was "an uncertainty reducing process". He based his hypothesis on the fact that good readers use only as much of the graphic information as they require and that they eliminate alternative responses according ta what is possible from the syntactic and semantic points of view.

Previously, in 1965, Goodman 31 had noticed that significant differences exist between readers' recognition of words in isolation

and their interpretation of the same words in context. He concluded

that textual context affects reading behaviour and that reading

responses derive from the interaction of participant and text.

His research prompted Clay32 and Weber33 to become involved in

complementary research which confirmed Goodman 1 s conclusions. 106.

In 1967, Yetta Goodman 34 investigated a common observation that comprehension correlates closely with subjects' interest and experience - but also that miscues are qualitatively different. If the less proficient reader produces miscues that look and sound more like the word on the page, better readers produce graphically and phonemically dissimilar "errors" which are far less incongruous from the semantic and syntactic points of view.

Burke35 decided similarly in 1969, following her analysis of the oral reading miscues of six highly proficient sixth-graders. Their deviations from the text were moderately like the words on the page graphophonemically - but were far more noticeable acceptable, syntactically and semantically. As far as numbers of miscues were concerned, they were found to bear no relation to comprehension.

36 Allen analysed the miscues of subjects from grades two, four and six in 1969. Again it was found that good readers produce deviant responses as do the less proficient but the former are "marked off" by their superior comprehension of the text. This often results from a willingness to correct less appropriate oral responses, though not always.

In 1970 Carlson37 concentrated on miscues produced by average fourth­

grade readers. He established that the number of miscues does not

correlate with the ability to recall a story. In the same year, Page38

worked with second, fourth and sixth grade readers and examined the

quality of their miscues. He decided that some might as well be called

plain "errors" while others could be labelled "supercues". 107.

Menosky, 39 1971, studied the relative quality of miscues as readers worked through a passage. She determined that the length of the context is a significant factor in readers' effectiveness and that the ability to supply appropriate syntactic structures sometimes varies from the ability to substitute acceptable semantic structures. 40 Contemporaneously, Gutknecht examined miscues from a qualitative angle but chose subjects who had been classified as perceptually handicapped. He found that syntactic and semantic miscues were more

"potent" as far as a tendency to correct is concerned.

These, and other studies, contribute to our present (though still incomplete) understanding of the reading process. It has been most clearly summarised by Goodman:

1. The reader scans a line of print from left to right and down the page, line by line.

2. He fixes at a point to permit focus. Some of the print will be centrally located, and some peripheral.

3. He selects by using graphic information cued by prior choices, his language knowledge, his cognitive styles, and learned strategies.

4. He forms a perceptual image using these cues and anticipated cues.

5. The memory is searched for related syntactic, semantic and phonological cues, which may cause selection of further graphic cues and a reforming of the perceptual image.

6. He makes a tentative choice consistent with graphic cues. Semantic analysis leads to partial decoding. This meaning is stored in short-term memory as he proceeds.

7. If no tentative guess (choice) is possible, he checks the recalled perceptual input and tries again. If a guess is still not possible, he gathers more graphic cues from the text. 108.

B. If a decodable choice is possible, he tests if for semantic and grammatical acceptability.

9. If the tentative choice is not acceptable syntactically or semantically, he regresses, scanning from right to left along the line and up the page to locate a point of semantic or syntactic inconsistency. When this is located, he starts reading again. If no inconsistency is identified, he reads on, seeking some cue which will make reconciliation possible.

10. If the choice is acceptable, decoding is extended, meaning is assimilated with prior meaning, and prior meaning is accommodated, if necessary. He forms expectations concerning input and meaning that are to come. . 41 11 • Th e eye1 e con t inues.

Clearly, this research is based on the assumption that silent reading behaviour is reflected in the reading-aloud situation. And

research now in progress42 seems to be confirming the validity of that

assumption. But Goodman and other psycholinguists reject any idea that

oral performance is an essential part of the reading process. Rather,

processing textual material requires the recreation of authors'

meanings and this activity precedes any optional, oral rendition of

the graphic symbols.

Whether in materials prepared for mature or beginning readers, the

print represents the surface structure of the authors' meanings. The

information represented there has to be "filtered" through the reader's

transformational processes if he is to understand. Thus that reader's

cognitive and language competence has its significance; his own

orally acquired and practised rules of transformation have to be

applied to derive meaning. 109.

It follows that the psycholinguists do not accept some traditional

assumptions about the reading process: they do not believe reading

requires a continuous, precise, sequential identification of letters

or words; they do not believe that reading necessitates a series of hierarchical decisions when letters are combined into digraphs, blends,

syllables and words; they do not believe that comprehension follows naturally upon an absolutely, accurate "sounding-out" of the text.

Rather, they maintain that the reader brings expectations of meaning to print which are based upon experience and language competence.

When these are interwoven with thinking processes, the reader has a basis upon which to select the fewest, most productive cues necessary to his generation of reasoned guesses about content. This sampling is effective when anticipated meanings are used to predict words, phrases or even sentences which can be confirmed or rejected following

further selective reference to the print.

Goodman43 identifies three essential elements in the reading process.

He calls the first "graphophonic" and refers to the obvious necessity

for readers to perceive the correspondence between symbols and related

sounds. These sounds, however, are neither single graphemes, digraphic

nor syllabic groups. For the psycholinguists, they are morphemes,

or minimal meaning-bearing units. The second element consists of

grammatical pattern markers (conjunctions and the like), and word

order. These features aid the reader in his prediction and confirmation

of word, phrase and sentence structures. Since the deep structures

of written and oral language are the same, the reader - like the speaker -

infers the underlying structure via word order to establish meaning.

Goodman labels this aspect "syntactic". The reader must be able to 110.

provide word meanings if he is to continue comprehending. This

"semantic" element of the process refers to the reader's experience and conceptual back ground which enable him to make literal sense of the words he is reading.

These constitute the cueing systems to which reference has already been made. The three operate simultaneously and interdependently, providing a far more complex model than the simplistic, traditional claim that reading stems from knowledge of letters and sounds.

Goodman argues that the usefulness of graphic information depends upon the amount of syntactic and semantic information available.

In some conditions a meaning element may be needed to help the reader identify a grapho-phonic unit, thus initiating accurate prediction of a complex sequence of words and ideas. In other conditions a single unknown or unidentified graphophonic unit may destroy comprehension of a passage.44

Goodman45 also maintains that it is possible for the reader to make many miscues and still be able to comprehend. Certainly unfamiliar or difficult material will cause readers to "miscue" more often.

This is true of mature readers who confront highly technical tracts and of beginning-readers who are made to face artificially reps t e tive, . s t y1· ise d t ex t s. But Li"pton46 has pain· t e d au t th a t many miscues result from a reader's successfully re-structuring linguistically "uncomfortable" material. And Goodman 47 argues that the author 1 s presentation is often spontaneously recoded by the reader to fit his own meaningful expectations. 111.

An attempt to illustrate how cues, strategies and analytic techniques fit into a cyclical arrangement with comprehension as the continuous focus follows:

CUES Graphophonic Semantic Syntactic

BASES STRATEGIES Language Competence Predicting, Scanning, Testing, Perceptual Competence Confirming, Regressing, Cognitive Competence Correcting t t EXPERIENCE ANALYSIS Including language Decoding experience Recoding \ Encoding

~EANING RECOGNISEO/ AND ACCOMMODATED Figure 11

According to his linguistic, perceptual and cognitive competence, the reader recognises graphophonic, semantic and syntactic cues while predicting and scanning the graphic display. If identification of the collective symbols confirms his expectations, transformation of the author's deep structures into his own via recoding of the surface structures occurs. (If his expectations are not fulfilled, the reader regresses, tests and self-corrects.) He recognises the meaning contained in the author's deep structure, accommodates it so that it is integrated into his experiential store, and thus refines his language, perceptual and cognitive competencies.

These competencies, listed under the heading "bases", are accorded 112.

more considered respect by psycholinguistically-oriented teachers of reading. Clay remarks that even:

a school entrant who can already read may need to develop further his control over the motor, spatial and visual perception aspects of the task despite his apparent control over the reading process. A serious limitation for the child studied seemed ta be his inability to use several sources of cues, as the older child does. He tended to focus on one type of information which often led him to false conclusions.48

She adds parenthetically, "Piaget's theory would predict this".

And in an article entitled "Do you have to be smart ta read? Do 49 you have to read ta be smart?", Goodman insists that teachers take a more careful view of cognitive and linguistic competence. He argues that any correlation that seems to exist between intelligence test scores and reading ability depends to a large extent upon their requiring the same thing of subjects; the ability to read. He decries the tendency to expect more intelligent people to read better than those whose I.Q. performance is inferior. It is easy of course, with Goodman, ta point to proficient readers whose scores on so-called tests of intelligence are twenty points and more below the average. It is regrettably at least as easy to indicate readers twenty and more points above the mean who experience tremendous reading difficulty. 50

Goodman 1 s implied warning is to teachers whose expectancies of pupils' reading abilities are modelled by their knowledge of I.Q. scores.

These expectations are too often fulfilled! 51

52 Accepting the evidence of such researchers as Lenneberg, and

reminding his readers that "written language is not a secondary

representation of speech, it's an alternate language form", Goodman 113.

points out that:

You don't have to be smart to learn language. People at the widest possible range of intelligence learn to talk. They may not all be talking in especially wise ways, but they're all talking.53

Clearly there can be no beginning reading without certain perceptual, cognitive and linguistic bases. I~ the school entrant's language development is retarded to the point where there's a lack of familiarity with usual word orders and a basic sight-sound vocabulary

(this will include both "contentives" and certain "operators"), ability to anticipate syntactic and semantic structures will be necessarily limited. This is quite as true of the immigrant child who ought to have sufficient oral mastery of English before reading instruction begins. For such children, an excursion to the local market will have more point than many so-called "reading exercises", especially if it includes talk and activity aimed at developing print- awareness.

The diagram also indicates that the psycholinguists put a readerYs knowledge of sounds and symbols in a different perspective. Since the graphic array conveys much more information than that contained in individual print items, the semantic and syntactic aspects are given equal prominence with the graphophonic which once attracted a great deal more attention. In effect, the psycholinguists have directed practitioners' attention to the very important non-visual sources of information. Reliance upon just one cueing system is criticised as being uneconomic (at best) and, for some pupils, quite ineffective

(which can lead to situations that are "tragically worst"). 114.

The fact that some pupils fail in the course of most careful phonics-oriented instruction should not surprise. Berdiansky, 54 Crannell and Koehler attempted (rather modestly) to establish a set of correspondence rules for the 6092 one - and two - syllable words among 9000 different words in the comprehension vocabularies of six-to nine-year-old children. (The words were chosen from usual children's books and adjudged as ordinarily recognisable by that age-group.) Although the researchers wanted their rules to account for as many of their words as possible and generalised to include quite a number of "exceptions":

their 6000 words involved 211 distinct spelling­ sound "correspondences" •••• Eighty-three of the correspondences involved consonant grapheme units, and 128 involved vowel grapheme units, including no fewer than 79 that were associated with the six "primary" single-letter vowels a, e, i, o, u, y. In other words, there was a total of 79 different ways in which the single vowels could be pronounced. Of the 211 correspondences, 45 were clusters of exceptions, about half involving vowels and half consonants. The exclusion of 65 correspondences from the "rules" meant that nearly ten per cent of the 6092 words had to be regarded as exceptions.55

Clearly the reading act has to be viewed as a process whose complexity requires attention to several aspects rather than one part of the whole. The psycholinguists particularly criticise diagnostic instruments intended to measure one of the sub-skills previously thought to constitute the whole process. The gist of their argument is that the sum of the parts does not equate with the larger whole and the measures of such minutiae as recognition of words in a list gives 56 a very poor indication of a reader's overall performance.

The heading, "Strategies", on the diagram points to some of the 115.

"mechanics" of proficient readers' activity. Properly detailed manners of reading-behaviour analysis such as The Goodman Taxonomy of Reading Miscues57 allow a teacher to focus attention upon the reader's actual point of breakdown. The psycholinguists urge teachers to note such symptoms as inordinately long pauses and the production of a series of unconnected guesses, and to investigate the causes before determining upon remedial strategies. Teachers should attempt to decide whether the reader is trying to predict the end of the sentence, whether he is scanning to gather relevant cues, whether he is testing his interpretation of word meanings against his understanding of the passage to that point, whether he is self­ correcting and upon what basis, and so on.

Quite as important in any examination of a reader's difficulties is the teacher's attention to attitudes. If beginning-readers are expected to emulate the proficient in anticipating, predicting and making "educated guesses", it is vital that they approach the task with genuine interest and some confidence. Certainly, any serious concern at the possibility of "failure" will be anathema to success in this part of the process. The development of an habitual curiosity­ anxiety association poses the reader (and his teacher) with most serious difficulties.

"Decoding", according to the psycholinguists, lies in the reconstruction of authors' meanings, not in the mere oral rendition of graphic symbols on the page. This is of key importance in the interpretation of the "Analysis" phase, as pictured on the diagram.

It suggests that reading teachers who are aware of late findings will 116.

be most concerned with young readers' comprehension of the texts they face. But that implies a concern with all aspects of the whole process: with the blending of sounds and the integration of syllables; with the recognition of appropriate connectives and the significance of punctuation marks; with the necessity of bringing prior knowledge of phrasing and intonation patterns to bear; and with the significance of visual "sweeps" which should not be inhibited by a desire to "sound out" all phonemes for teacher, or self. Recoding techniques can be examined during the subject's repetitions of words and phrases as he attempts to "sort out" meaning. Such going over old ground, together with "running starts" while the reader contemplates

"words-to-come", provides aware teachers with information about cues and skills of analysis which are not part of the reader's repertoire.

Encoding, the "crystallisation" of meaning by the reader, can also be assessed by the teacher; he needs only to examine the number and nature of the reader's self-corrections or, more simply, to ask him direct questions about the passage's content. Remedial strategies, aligned with these psycholinguistic insights, will be examined in the chapters to come, but whether a teacher is interested in diagnosis or remediation, Goodman's questions of the reader, "Does that make sense?",

"Can we say it that way?", or "What does the rest of the sentence say?" remain especially pertinent.

The psycholinguists have made three particularly notable contributions to our knowledge of best styles of reading instruction: emphasis must always be placed upon the extent to which meaning is being extracted; constant attention has to be paid to the style of material set for 117.

reading which should be as like the child's own oral language

as possible; the needs, abilities and interests of each individual

reader should be kept uppermost in teachers' minds.

Let us proceed to examine the implications of these findings for

curriculum-planning and teaching-practice. 118.

References

1 Kenneth S. Goodman, ed., The Psycholinguistic Nature of the Reading Process (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968), p.22.

2 Frank Smith, ed., Psycholinguistics and Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p.1.

3 W.B. Pillsbury, "A study in apperception", American Journal of Psychology, 8 (1897). Reported by Ulrich Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), p.108.

4 E.L. Thorndike, "The understanding of sentences", Elementary School Journal, 18 (1917), 98-114.

5 L.W. and S.L. Pressey, "A critical study of the concept of silent reading", Journal of Educational Psychology, 12 (1921), 25-31.

6 B.F. Allbright, "Typical reading disabilities of college entrants". Unpublished master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1927.

7 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929).

8 H.D. Gibbons, "Reading and sentence elements", Elementary English Review, 18 (1941), 42-46.

9 F.B. Davis, "Fundamental factors of comprehension in reading", Psychometrika, 9 (1944), 185 ff.

-----, Identification and measurement of reading skills of high-school students (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1967).

-----, "Research in comprehension in reading", Reading Research Quarterly, 4 (1968), 499-545.

10 J.A. Holmes, "Factors underlying major reading disabilities at the college level". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1948.

11 R. Brown and J. Berka, "Word association and the acquisition of grammar", Child Development, 31 (1960), 1-14.

12 H.L. Smith, "Research in reading for different purposes". In J.A. Figural, ed., Proceedings of the International Reading Association, 6 (1961), 119-122.

13 M.H. Jones, "Some relationships between reading and listening", Claremont Reading Conference Yearbook, 19 (1965), 166-172: 119.

14 L.E. Hafner, "One-month experiment in teaching context aids in fifth grade", Journal of Educational Research, 58 (1965), 472-474.

15 J.P. Blumenfeld and G.R. Miller, "Improving reading through teaching grammatical constraints". Paper presented at the Annual National Council of Teachers of English Convention, Boston, 1965.

16 J.A. Fodor and T.G. Bever, "The psychological reality of linguistic segments", Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 4 (1965), 414-420.

17 W.S. Ames, "A study of the process by which readers determine word meaning through the use of verbal context". Unpublished manuscript, University of Missouri, 1966.

18 R.B. Ruddell, "Reading instruction in the first grade with varying emphasis on the regularity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the relation of language structure to meaning: Extended into second grade", Reading Teacher, 20 (1967), 730-739.

19 R. Wardhaugh, "Linguistics-Reading dialogue", Reading Teacher, 21 (1968), 432-441.

20 J.J. Katz and J.A. Fodor, "The structure of semantic theory", Language, 39 (1963), 170-210.

21 W.M. Fincke, "The effect of asking questions to develop purposes for reading on the attainment of higher levels of comprehension in a population of third-grade children". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Temple University, 1968.

22 M. Bradley, "Effects on reading tests of deletions of selected grammatical categories". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia, 1969.

23 E.B. Ryan and M.I. Semmel, "Reading as a constructive language process", Reading Research Quarterly, 4 (1969), 59-83.

24 M.L. Cohn, "Structured comprehension", Reading Teacher, 22 (1969), 440-444.

25 J. Hochberg, "Components of literacy: speculations and exploratory research", in Basic Studies on Reading, ed. by H. Levin and J.P. Williams (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

26 Kenneth S. Goodman, ed., The Psycholinguistic Nature of the Reading Process (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968).

27 E. Brown, "The bases of reading acquisition", Reading Research Quarterly, 6 (1970), 49-74. 120.

28 P.A. Kolers, "Three stages of reading", in Basic Studies on Reading, ed. by H. Levin and J.P. Williams (New York: Basic Books, 1970).

29 S. Wanat, "Linguistic structure and visual attention in reading". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1971.

30 Frank Smith, Understanding Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

31 Kenneth S. Goodman, "A linguistic study of cues and miscues in reading", Elementary English, 42 (1965), 639-643.

32 M.M. Clay, "The reading behaviour of five year old children: A research project", New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2 (1967), 11-31.

33 R. Weber, "A linguistic analysis of first grade reading errors". Unpublished research report, Cornell University, 1967.

34 Yetta Goodman, "A psycholinguistic description of observed oral reading phenomena in selected young beginning readers". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1967.

35 C.L. Burke, "A psycholinguistic description of grammatical restructurings in the oral reading of a selected group of middle school children". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1969.

36 P.O. Allen, "A psycholinguistic analysis of the substitution miscues of selected oral readers in grades two, four and six, and the relationship of these miscues to the reading process: A descriptive study". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1969.

37 K.L. Carlson, "A psycholinguistic description of selected fourth- grade children reading a variety of contextual material". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1970.

38 W.D. Page, "A psycholinguistic description of patterns of miscu-es generated by a proficient reader in second grade, an average reader in fourth grade, and an average reader in sixth grade encountering ten basal reader selections ranging from pre-primer to sixth grad~~ Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1970.

39 D.M. Menosky, "A psycholinguistic analysis of oral reading miscues generated during the reading of varying portions of text by selected readers from grades two, four, six and eight: A descriptive study". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1971. 121.

40 B.A. Gutknecht, "A psycholinguistic analysis of the oral reading behaviour of selected children identified as perceptually handicapped". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Wayne State University, 1971.

41 Kenneth S. Goodman, "Reading: a psycholinguistic guessing game", in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, ed. by H. Singer and R.B. Ruddell {Newark, Delaware: International Reading Association, 1970), pp.259-271.

42 Brian Cambourne, "Some psycholinguistic Dimensions of the Silent Reading Process - A Pilot Study". Paper presented at the New Zealand/Australian Reading Conferences, Palmerston North and Melbourne, 1977.

43 Kenneth S. Goodman, "Testing in reading", in Accountability and Reading Instruction, ed. by R.B. Ruddell (Illinois: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1973).

------, "Psycholinguistic universals in the reading process", in Psycholinguistics and Reading, ed. by Frank Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).

------, Miscue Analysis (Illinois: ERIC, 1973).

44 D.M. Kemp, "Measuring Reading Performance by Miscue Analysis", Education News, 15 (1975), 82-87.

45 Kenneth S. Goodman, "Analysis of oral reading miscues: applied psycholinguistics", Reading Research Quarterly, 5 (1969), 9-30.

46 Aaron Lipton, "Miscalling while reading aloud: a point of view", Reading Teacher, 28 (1972), 759-762.

47 Kenneth s. Goodman and Carolyn Burke, "When a child reads: A psycholinguistic analysis", Elementary English, 1 (1970), 121-129.

48 M.M. Clay, Reading: The Patterning of Complex Behaviour (Auckland, N.Z.: Heinemann, 1972), p.18.

49 Kenneth S. Goodman, "Do you have to be smart to read? Do you have to read to be smart?", in Accountability and Reading Instruction, ed. by R.B. Ruddell (Illinois: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1973).

50 Apart from clients in my own reading clinics who evidence above average mental prowess (particularly, superior memory powers), there are some famous cases. I believe Honda, the motor vehicle manufacture, experiences severe reading disability. 122.

51 R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968) produced results whose reliability is very open to question. The subject's results on the T.O.G.A. reveal the test was ineffective at lower levels; p values are used as if they measure strength of effect; the regression of post-test on pre-test results was ignored. Perhaps, however, these deficiencies are doubly unfortunate for there would be very few teachers who would deny that the author's hypothesis was most promising. As Hursch remarked, "Teacher expectancy may be a powerful phenomenon which, if understood, could be used to gain much of positive value in education."

52 E.H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (New York: Wiley, 1967).

53 Goodman, lac. cit.

54 Betty Berdiansky, B. Crannell and J. Koehler, "Spelling-sound relations and primary form-class descriptions for speech­ comprehension vocabularies of 6-9-year-olds". Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, Technical Report, No.15, 1969.

55 Reported in Frank Smith, ed. Psycholinguistics and Reading, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p.88.

56 For example, teacher reliance upon Schonell's R1.

57 Kenneth 5. Goodman, Taxonomy of Reading Miscues (Short Form), (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1972). PART 2 123.

CHAPTER 5

IMPLICATIONS FOR CURRICULUM PLANNING

••• most teachers feel insecure ta a substantial degree about the teaching of reading •••• They feel that their principal ••• has the power to help them with their reading program, and that their administrators have an obligation ta exercise their power to perform the following functions:

1. To try ta improve the quality of reading instruction in the classroom. 2. To establish an attitude and an atmosphere which enhances the reading program. 3. To provide optimum conditions to assist each child ta learn ta read. 4. To budget sufficient funds to implement an effective reading program.1

Interpreted in their widest senses, these four functions might be accepted as a relatively adequate description of curriculum planning as far as reading is concerned. It is accepted that curriculum is often conceived in very broad terms:

Basically the curriculum is what happens ta children in school as a result of what teachers do. It includes all of the experiences of children for which the school should accept responsibility. It is the program used by the 2 school as a means of accomplishing its purposes.

Similar definitions state that the curriculum is "the total effort of the school to bring about desired outcomes in school and out-of­

school situations11 ; 3 and "a sequence of potential experiences set

up in school for the purpose of disciplining children and youth in

group ways of thinking and acting. 4 Taba has criticised both these

latter because their "very breadth may make (them) nonfunctional 11 • 5 124.

Thus, on this occasion, "curriculum" will be taken to mean "the plan for learning - the framework, strategies, and materials designed to give direction to the learning transaction". Such a definition does not, of course, exclude the very important beyond-school influences and resources which affect all "plans for learning".

Curriculum planners do not always provide an adequate account of their programmes' bases. Objectives may be formulated at the national, regional, school, or even class-room level. They may be deduced from the subject to be taught, intuited from the pupils' needs, or inferred from learning theory. As far as reading here and now is concerned, curriculum decisions are made and implemented in individual schools. The central authority in New South Wales, the Department of

Education, has indicated, "Many decisions can be made only at the local level by forming judgements in practical situations about a complex 6 of factors". It adheres to views such as Skilbeck's that, "curriculum development at the school level must not start with given objectives, or with objectives drawn up in the abstract, but with a critical appraisal of the situation, the learning situation as it exists and as it is perceived at the school level".7 Thus reading syllabuses are no longer "passed down from above"; rather, the Department restricts itself to the provision of a broad policy statement (which itself is the product of long-term and wide-ranging discussions amongst people involved at several levels in the field). Its links with the schools are via Regional Offices which may take additional initiatives in the light of local circumstances. And it is this report's argument that, within the parameters established by critical appraisals of local learning situations, the research findings of psychologists, linguists and psycholinguists have to be considered. 125.

To begin at the beginning, investigations have revealed the intricate association of all four language-art forms. Listening and talk appear first and success with these is absolutely essential to later mastery of their "paper-and-print" alternatives. Thus curriculum planners have to take account of children's pre-school experience.

Children from homes where there is must family talk and regular attention to print have an inestimable advantage over their less fortunate peers. Those who create reading programmes must be aware that these latter school-entrants require special provision before they are

"ready to read". Language experience (especially that resulting from story-telling, the learning of rhymes and ordinary conversation with adults) is obviously essential but so is a more general background derived from play, visits and children's own investigation. Young readers lacking an adequate experiential and linguistic background bring too few expectations about meaning and syntax to print for them to be able to decode the symbols on the page.

Planners must realise that not all teachers understand the primary importance of pre-school experiences generally, and mastery of oral language in particular. Since "the classroom teacher is the key", 8 an adequate programme of in-service education has to be planned.

Similarly, parents are not always aware of the significance of talk, play and general interaction with their children. Preparations to educate parents in this regard have to be made. And such efforts are likely to be most successful when they are directly involved in the school's reading programme, even to the extent of their participating in the in-service programme mentioned above.

The fact that reading has its foundations in oral language requires 126.

that curriculum planners give at least as much thought to the provision of abundant opportunity for practice in this medium.

The implications here are far-reaching: "Be quiet and listen!" styles of teaching may have to be modified; arrangements of desks and chairs altered; and possible interruption of neighbouring classes foreseen and prevented. Pupils from homes where there's less talk (or ..!l!:!. talk in English) have to be catered for, while reading materials ought to be examined to see whether their content and language styles align adequately with the children's own experience and speech.

Teachers should not only be aware of the nature of children's language acquisition to, and beyond, the age of five but also of the rationale and proper use of various commercially prepared reading schemes. While some are based on modern theories of language acquisition, others typify older "outside-in" approaches.

The findings examined earlier point very clearly to the fact that young children's spectacular success in the oral communication medium stems from their need to understand and be understood - and their constant exposure to talk within and beyond the family circle. Children can find physical and emotional satisfaction via talk and, in the mass of cases, set about uncovering the system which underlies oral language very early indeed. The implications for planners of learning programmes are obvious: a desire to communicate with authors via the graphic symbols on the page has to be inculcated and a variety of appropriate print material supplied so that the beginning-readers can start discovering the system that makes print convey meaning. The most significant variable in this transaction is the presentation of appropriate reading material. Besides the print's being a natural extension of the children's own language, it should be presented in 127.

situations which are relevant and pleasurable to each of them.

If selection of reading materials is of enormous importance, so is the way these integrate with other classroom activities, particularly those cantering on language development.

Such integration with students' classroom and beyond-school experiences should extend throughout a school's reading programme. In fact, any curriculum plan must take account of the need for continuity from home to the infants-primary school, and into the secondary school where difficulties with the special syntax and vocabulary which characterise more technical subjects become most apparent. Whether the pupil is reading a basal primer or sophisticated physical or social science text-book, the same truth holds: "Reading is a process of bringing meaning to and extracting meaning from print."9 Thus, even in the upper levels of a school, and certainly in the specialist subject areas, reading tasks ought to be demonstrably related to other classroom activities, particularly to discussion of vocabulary and key concepts.

Linguists have shown that children generally learn to talk with remarkable rapidity but also at rates that show considerable individual variation. While the order in which they master increasingly complex tasks is fixed, the speed of different speakers' growth towards relative language maturity varies according to a number of factors.

Similarly, differences between learning-readers' rates of progress have to be expected and allowed for in school programmes:

Learning to read, like learning to talk and write, is characterised by exploration. Development in reading is marked by intuitive leaps, by pauses, by periods of consolidation, by regression and by periods of slow or moderate progress. It is a broad continuum, a succession of merging and 128.

overlapping phases, rather than a series of discrete skills which can be isolated and taught in rigid progression to children. Children vary widely in their rate of general progress so, at any one time, the children in any class will range over several broad areas of development.10

And "Aims of Primary Education in N.S.W." includes this more general advice:

The consideration of stages rather than ages will be basic to the provision of appropriate experiences which will necessarily include frequent opportunities for children to investigate, to communicate and to express their individuality.11

The implications for curriculum planners are considerable, both in number and significance. Any idea that the teaching of reading has to be organised according to the age of the children or the grades in which they've been placed has to be discarded. Objectives couched in such pre-specified behavioural terms as, "At age 8 (or in Year 3), all pupils will ••• " can have no place. If pupils' progress towards completely effective reading is characterised by periods of "no growth" or even regression, these have to be accepted in the same way as those of the beginning-talker when he takes time to consolidate recently learned skills.

This "stages rather than ages" view of readers' growth towards maturity is reflected in some more recent attempts to schematise the "steps" to

fluency:

a) Preparatory Development; b) Early Achievement; c) Growth in Reading; 12 d) Widening of Reading Abilities. 129.

a) Reading Readiness; b) The Initial Teaching of Reading: c) The Dependent Reader; 13 d) The Independent Reader.

a) Readiness. b) The Initial Reading Stage. c) The Stage of Rapid Growth in Attainment. d) Independence. e) The Stage of Expansion. 14 f) Refinement of Reading Abilities and Tasks.

And even:

a) Beginning Reading. b) Not Bad. c) Reading with Ease. d) Complex Reading. 15

These efforts to picture typical readers' development in "shades of grey" rather than "black and white" terms well illustrate the new view of reading as a process rather than an accumulation of sub-skills.

The process view implies that the reader is a participant, that he is actively reconstructing authors' meanings, and that he is involved in far more than a "passive taking up" of letters from the page.

Curriculum planners have to acknowledge that, "There is no one method, medium,approach, device or philosophy that holds the key to the process of learning to read.". 16 Psycholinguists, themselves, decry any tendency to produce "psycholinguistic teaching programmes" or "psycholinguistic teaching kits". 17 Similarly, they criticise publishers who advertise "teacher proof" materials. 18 The potential

exists for there to be as many "best"· approaches to reading instruction

as there are pupils to be taught. Certainly instructional arrangements

and methods have to allow maximum flexibility so that most students

can be helped to learn to read. Teachers have to be sensitive to each

child's needs, interests, reading strengths and reading weaknesses - 130.

besides knowing how to employ methods appropriate to these. A concentration upon just one approach (for example, a training in phonics) almost necessarily means that a proportion of children will fail to respond to the instruction. Research has pointed to the existence of three "cueing systems" and pupils who are helped with only one of these are quite as likely "to sink as to swim".

The child who is helped only with the decipherment of print is the one most likely to resort to laborious "sounding-out" and separate word-calling. His consequent inability to tax his senses of syntactic or semantic propriety means that he cannot gain meaning from print.

It has become just as clear, however, that fast, seemingly fluent

"readers" do not necessarily understand the content of passages they can render orally in articulate and expressive ways. Comprehension skills have to be taught - and such teaching ought to involve far more than setting questions to be answered at the conclusion of any piece, set for reading. Children have to be motivated to read texts placed in front of them; they should be provided with a clear purpose that will direct their reading; they have to be guided as to most appropriate manners of examining different materials; and there have to be opportunities for shared consideration of the content before, during and after some reading.

For too long, training in comprehension has consisted of children's answering "what" and "where" questions, on their own, and in a situation which, if it does not appear a penalty for having finished the task, does seem like'~ price" to be paid for having fulfilled an

expectation. Testing for comprehension can be far more enjoyable and

educative when it is properly integrated with the task and other 131.

class-room activities. Instead of completing a set of questions

(which often contain sufficient clues to their answers within their own structures), children can be encouraged to share their discoveries and enjoyment in discussion with the teacher, a group or the whole class. Such discussion can be leavened with many more "how" and "why" questions, becoming educationally valuable in itself and removing any feeling that comprehension is a barrier to be broken down before further enjoyable reading can be attempted.

Even at quite early stages of development, children can be led to understand that we read in different ways for different purposes.

Teachers at all levels are familiar with students who are inwardly convinced that the slower their reading, the better their comprehension will be. But research has shown that readers must maintain sufficient pace for comprehension to be possible. And developing-readers ought to be encouraged to skim, scan or peruse according to the material to be read. This implies that "reading class-rooms" contain a wide variety of textual materials and that teachers in those rooms encourage reading fro a diversity of purposes.

Where reading is a "natural" ingredient of class-room activities, opportunities will abound for books to appear that offer interest, enjoyment, information or simple "escape". Whether the children have been talking, listening, writing, drawing, "making", or reading something else, occasions will occur for reading alone, with a friend, with a group, to the class, to another class, to a younger or older child, to a parent, adult or teacher. Apart from usual commercially­ prepared materials, there will be available children's own books besides directories, atlases, magazines, newspapers, graphs and so on. And 132.

there will be reading spaces; single desks should be complemented with clusters of tables (for group work) and an attractive, quiet corner (for reading alone). Stimulation to read can stem from displays of children's own writing, stocks of children's own books, posters, signs, mobiles, "book trees" and so on.

The curriculum planner's first task might be to cooperate with staff in making a "situational analysis". Through the use of word association tests, simple inventories, surveys and questionnaires,

"a careful preliminary assessment of pupils, parent and teacher attitudes to reading"19 can be derived. Checklists and inventories will remain valuable to teachers who properly adjust their programmes, effectively individualizing instruction. Newly-found knowledge of a child's hobby, for example, often helps a teacher "hook that student on books". Quite as important (when we remember reading's anticipatory aspect) is the way appropriate, recreational reading can boost a youngster's confidence, especially when class-room arrangements provide an opportunity for "special reports". An adequate self-concept seems indispensable to "educated guessing" and effective reading. 20

Curriculum planners might then promote and guide the production of a "statement of goals (to) involve both teacher and pupil actions including a statement of the kinds of learning outcomes which are anticipated". 21

For many teachers, formal consideration of instructional objectives recalls academic exercises of questionable merit, performed outside the context of a read teaching situation. Yet, unless such goals are set, it is highly unlikely that effective teaching leading to meaningful learning will occur.22 133.

Broad goals are relatively easy to determine. The following were established in 1959 but might inspire quite general agreement among professionals and the lay community even today:

1. To stimulate strong motives for, and lasting interests in reading for both enlightenment and entertainment.

2. To help children to understand and appreciate more and more the place and values ofreading in a world where mass media are so prominent.

3. To enrich and extend children's experiences through their reading abundantly materials suited to their maturity, learning capacity and background.

4. To promote interests and tastes that will induce children to become habitual readers of better types of reading material in books, bulletins, and periodicals.

5. To provide measures for determining and building reading readiness at each successive stage in the reading programme.

6. To build habits and skills that will permit efficient reading of all the varieties of reading material that children will meet throughout life.

7. To teach children to use books and other study aids effectively in their independent endeavours.23

Turning to a much more recently produced set of such goals, we note that the tenor is the same although reading is seen much more as another language form. Those who framed this list have been careful to base their rationale upon research findings.

1. to help children grow in awareness of self.

2. to encourage them to enrich their personal relationships through language. 134.

3. to build a language community in which they may -

collaborate through language share a rich, common experience share personal experiences enjoy and approve of each other's efforts provide a variety of audiences needed for language development.

4. to encourage children to explore the world about them, at first hand and through books and other media.

5. to develop their powers of communication and increase their awareness of the kinds of language that are effective in different situations.24

The bases for the authors' new orientation are nicely encapsulated in an explanation entitled "Language for What". Accepting that

"language is functional"25 and that "acquiring skills in language must be secondary to achievement through language", 26 they go on to emphasise that their programme "differs radically from programs whose prime objective is the acquisition of skills":

Implicitly, at least, these programs tell children that using language for their own purposes is not so important as getting it right. Such programs are fragmentary in their approach, isolating skills in order to master them.27

They side with Whitehead who wrote:

Learning to use one's native language is not a matter of words only; it is intimately connected at every stage with the development of thought, feeling and behaviour. Nor is it to be thought of as a combination of a number of separate skills; it is, on the contrary, a single unified process, though an extremely complex one. At worst, the skills approach creates busy work •••• 28 135.

Against this background, the authors go on to provide some specific 29 objectives under heading suggested by Moffett:

Reading (Subjective-Artistic)

Ability to: read along to an oral reading provided by teacher, others or cassette re-read for self a passage first experienced in a read-along situation read further material similar to that read in class •••• initiate a search for further reading material in pursuit of a personal interest, e.g. more poems or stories on a theme read as narrator in a dramatized version of a story of poem demonstrate, comprehension by making diagrams, maps, models, illustrations, enacting an episode, writing a character sketch infer meanings from content empathize with characters in literature make value judgements about characters, issues, situations predict outcomes of events, situations relate outcomes of events, situations relate material in individual, voluntary reading to themes previously treated in class represent a narrative in another form, e.g. by mime, dramatization, puppet play, musical, comic-strip demonstrate a response to new or recently learned words attempt to use some new or recently learned words.

Reading (Objective-Transactional)

Ability to: read further material similar to that read in class initiate a search for further reading material in pursuit of a personal interest read newspapers, magazines, reference books for information infer meanings from context interpret a map, diagram, chart, graph, illustration use a dictionary to check spelling, check pronunciation, select a meaning appropriate to context 136.

demonstrate a response to new or recently learned words demonstrate comprehension by making by enacting ••• writing ••• making inferences ••• predicting outcomes extrapolate from data relate material in individual, voluntary reading to themes previously treated in class 30

The curriculum planner, aware of research findings about the reading process, might well decide these objectives are educationally worthwhile. They acknowledge the primary importance of oral language ("read along . . . . ") .' attention is given to pupils' interests and needs ("initiate a search for further reading in pursuit of a personal interest ••• "); there are several ways in which students can demonstrate their gaining meaning from print so that early success and resulting confidence are assured ("making diagrams, maps, models, illustrations, enacting ••• writing •••• "); and the instructional objectives allow for differing pupil rates of development (they are stated in terms general enough to allow responses at various levels of sophistication).

But each school will have its particular needs and problems: a large immigrant population; an isolated situation that has restricted the students' experiential backgrounds; a staff which is quite

satisfied with older ways, out of step with linguistic, psychological

and psycholinguistic findings; and so on. Thus, even a list of

objectives as acceptable as those above might have to be supplemented

or amended. The curriculum planner will have to analyse the situation

in each class-room quite carefully, noting the teacher-learning

activities; the arrangement of pupils in the space; the organisation

of time; materials, equipment and their use; any provision that is 137.

made for divergent or disabled learners; and any procedure allowing continuing appraisal and improvement of the reading programme. Putting his findings in their institutional setting, he would have a proper basis upon which to plan an in-service education scheme to involve all members of staff and cause individual consideration of approaches and methods.

31 If, "There's nothing so practical as a good theory", the curriculum planner might best begin with an explanation of what we know about how reading works. (This could be provided by an in-school or outside consultant.) Where teachers have long-followed "outside-in" approaches, a demonstration of the existence of the three cueing systems would make an appropriate starting-point. The sort of exercise constituting Appendix 1, where sixty per cent of the print is obliterated but the text is easily read because of the clear line of argument and the strong syntactic flow, would be useful here. (The regular miscuing at the end of paragraph, 2 - where readers almost inevitably substitute "perfectly" for "proficiently" - is an excellent occasion for discussion.) Quite as inevitable is the question as to whether beginning readers rely on similar sources of information.

Appendix 2 consists of the marked records of two, nine-year-old, poor readers. The first boy mixcues often but continues to seek sense and to use his feeling for the flow of language. As revealed in the retelling, he gathers a great deal of information, including just what a poltergeist is! "Reader" two, on the other hand, can answer no question correctly. Obviously distressed at his failure to do anything but "sound out" letters and blends over a long period of time, he has gained no meaning because of the "clutter" in his restricted, short-term 138.

memory. Although as far below the norm as each other according to usual scales of measurement and teacher-judgements, one reader is obviously far closer to "independence" than the other, simply because he taxes all cueing systems. The audio tapes of these reading performances and the marked records might well serve the purpose of demonstrating that mature and beginning readers use just the same means of gaining meaning from print, although the former have much more success in "getting it all together". 32

The programme of in-service education would have to proceed over an extended period of time, cantering on the various strategies and tactics to be detailed in the "teaching practice" section of this report. But parental education is of importance too. Where pre-schoolers' semantic and syntactic senses have been developed and refined through regular exposure to "book language", and where they've shared an atmosphere in which there is a genuine regard for print, the reading teacher's task is made easy. (Perhaps there is truth in the claim of one group of reading-scheme sales-persons, that the child privileged to have been told bedtime-stories regularly throughout infancy will have a nine hundred hour advantage over less fortunate peers as far as reading instruction is concerned. 33 ) Thus work- shops for parents should be part of a school's reading policy. If they can be integrated with the teachers' in-service programme, so much the better. Certainly parents should be involved: in the school book­ buying programme; in guiding children's use of public libraries; and in visiting the school to hear children read (or more!) • Film

Australia34 has produced an excellent documentary for use with parents.

It shows how reading can be encouraged in the young, touching upon 139.

such interesting points as the "talking-like-a-book stage". And

Appendix 3 consists of a letter to parents, informing them of their important role {in a very persuasive way).

If the teacher is the person to arrange learning-experiences for the pupils she knows best, the curriculum planner has a responsibility to be ready with advice and support. "Inside-out" approaches almost seem to demand more "open" class-room arrangements with their emphasis upon facilitating learning rather than teacher-centred activity. Where teachers prefer systematic instruction to incidental learning, teaching all pupils the same things during the same periods of the teaching day, and dependence upon just one reading scheme, friction can develop.

Perhaps Frank Smith 1 s 35 advice is most appropriate here; the teacher should continue to do what she does best but must always emphasise that "reading is for meaning". The curriculum planner can, however, exercise influence through encouraging whole-staff examination of reading materials, continuing staff consultation, and the creation of "a reading school"; it will be an environment that features abundant, attractive and varied textual matter, teachers who demonstrate a regard for reading (perhaps in an across-the-school "reading-time" each day), and carefully-planned displays of books with associated, pupil-made models, mobiles and games.

There are most significant implications in research findings for the assessment aspect of any reading curriculum. A previous concentration upon summative and normative evaluation should give way to a more balanced policy in which diagnostic assessment holds an appropriate place. If coarse assessment of whole class standards has its place, 140.

more refined measurement of children "at risk" is required. Attention has to be paid to both their linguistic potential and their reading performance. And, where the latter is concerned, measures such as

"cloze" which require children to read continuing texts rather than to identify words are to be preferred. Cloze tests and miscue inventories, which provide a valid and reliable guide to the readers' strengths and weaknesses, will be described in the next section.

Here, then, are some implications, derived from linguistic, psychological and psycholinguistic research, for curriculum planning. 141.

References

1 Thorsten R. Carlson, Administrators and Reading (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p.11.

2 Kansas Curriculum Guide for Elementary Schools. Reported by Albert I. Oliver, "What is the meaning of curriculum?", in Contemporary Thought on Public School Curriculum, ed. by Edmund C. Short and George D. Marconnit (Duboque, Iowa: William Brown, 1968), p.19.

3 J. Gaylen Saylor and William M. Alexander, Curriculum Planning for Better Teaching and Learning (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954), p.3.

4 8.0. Smith, W.O. Stanley and H.J. Shores, Fundamentals of Curriculum Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1957), p.3.

5 Hilda Taba, Curriculum Development, Theory and Practice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p.9.

6 N.S.W. Department of Education, Aims of Primary Education in New South Wales (Sydney: N.S.W. Government Publications, 1977), p.43.

7 Malcolm Skilbeck, The Curriculum Development Process: a Model for School Use (England: Open University, Course E), p.203.

8 Carlson, .QE.• cit., p.43.

9 Norman McCulla, "Towards a school reading policy", Primary English Notes, 5 (1977) 3.

10 N.S.W. Department of Education Directorate of Studies, Reading K - 12 - Interim Curriculum Statement on Reading (Sydney: N.S.W. Government Publications, 1977).

11 N.S.W. Department of Education, Aims •••• , .QE.• cit., p.43.

12 N.S.W. Department of Education, Curriculum for Primary Schools - English (Sydney: N.S.W. Government Publications, 1968).

13 D. Drummond and E. Wignell, Reading - A Source Book for Teachers (Melbourne: Primary Education, 1975).

14 Angela Ridsdale, Guidelines for the Effective Use of Developmental Reading Materials (Melbourne, Oldmeadow, 1976). 142.

15 Herbert Kohl, Reading, How to (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Education, 1973).

16 McCulla, .QE.• cit., p.3.

17 Kenneth s. Goodman, "On the psycholinguistic method of teaching reading", in Psycholinguistics and Reading, ed. by Frank Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p.177.

18 Sam Sebesta and Carl J. Wallen, The First R: Readings on Teaching Reading, (Chicago: S.R.A., 1972), p.203 ff.

19 McCulla, .QE.• cit., p.1.

20 D.C. Hamachek, The Self in Growth; Teaching and Learning, (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965).

P. Lecky, Self Consistency: A Theory of Personality (New York: Island Press, 1945).

E. Sylvester and M. Kunet, "Psycho-dynamic aspects of the reading problem", Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 13 (1963), 69-76.

21 Skilbeck, .QE.• cit., p.1.

22 Carlson, .QE.• cit., p.235.

23 M.A. Dawson and H.A. Bamman, Fundamentals of Reading Instruction (New York: David McKay, 1959), pp.6-7.

24 Alec Allinson, Beverly Allinson and John Mcinnes, Nelson Language Stimulus Program - Manual (Ontario: Nelson, 1974), p.6 ff.

25 M.A.K. Halliday, "Relevant models of language", in The State of Language, ed. by A.M. Wilkinson (England: University of Birmingham, School of Education, 1969).

26 James Britton, Language and Learning (Harmondsworth, England: Pelican, 1970), p.17.

27 Allinson et al., .QE.• cit., p.14.

28 Frank Whitehead, "English through exercises", in English Versus Examinations, ed. by Brian Jackson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965). Reported by Allinson et al., ibid.

29 James Moffett, ed., Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). 143.

30 Allinson et al., .2£• cit., p.21 ff.

31 Phillip Hughes, The Teacher's Role in Curriculum Design (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973).

32 A phrase used in the same context by Kenneth S. Goodman in the film, "How do we learn to read?", produced by the B.B.C. as part of its series, Horizon, 1975.

33 This claim is made by sellers of the excellent Read it Again scheme, produced by Scott Foresman, 1977.

34 "Walter and Milly Went to Read", Film Australia, for the Australian Association of Teachers of English, 1976.

35 Smith, .2£• cit., p.6. 144.

CHAPTER 6

IMPLICATIONS FOR CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Psycholinguistic techniques are beginning ta be applied directly to the study of learning to read. They show that the type of information a child requires is not best represented in the form of stereotyped classroom or text book rules and exercises. Rather, a child appears to need to be exposed to a wide range of choices so that he can detect the significant elements of written language.1

Children learn to talk "from the inside out". Via their detection and classification of significant differences in the speech patterns they hear about them, and via their hypothesising and testing (mainly) unique utterances in a supportive situation, they gradually

"internalise" a set of rules that enables them to communicate orally.

Reading is an alternative language form that parallels talk. If children are to learn to read, they must be surrounded with a variety of printed materials so that they can detect differences, categorise these, and gradually "internalise" a set of rules which can be tested in relevant and supportive situations. Learning to read is another

"inside-out" process whereby a youngster's linguistic competence comes to be reflected in reading performance through interaction with information-providing adults. The more effective of these provide materials which are "most compatible with such interaction and those that interfere the least with natural language functioning 11 • 2 If there is a "psycholinguistic approach", 3 it "would be the very antithesis of a set of instructional materials". 4 145.

Children actively pursue knowledge in their learning to talk: learning "is rarely the result of a passive exposure to instruction". 5

They hypothesise and test whole meaning-bearing units of speech, only gradually approximating adult, ideal forms. This participatory, inventive style of behaviour has to be expected and encouraged in beginning-readers:

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time we try to teach them something too quickly we keep them from reinventing it.6

"Teachers must learn as much as possible about linguistic development in children so they can help each child to experinent with, practise and find new uses for this unique talent." 7 And even a cursory examination of the manner of children's linguistic development reveals the variable rate at which it proceeds in different individuals

(even though the actual stages - say, in handling the interrogative, or the negative - are invariable). If the latter lends support to the thesis that "the child is already programmed to learn to read", 8 the former strongly suggests the complexity of the psycholinguistically­ influenced, reading-teacher's task.

The plain fact is that teaching approaches, based on the assumption

"that reading is ••• a process of combining individual letters into words, and strings of words into sentences, from which meanings pring automatically", 9 are comparatively easy for the instructor - if relatively complex for the pupil. Teachers who choose to take more account of "what the child is trying to accomplish and of his superb intellectual equipment", 10 who select and provide "written language that is both interesting and comprehensible1111 to individual learning­ readers, have also chosen a much more difficult "row to hoe". As with 146.

any teacher who chooses to place less emphasis on whole-group instruction and to give more attention to the facilitation of learning, the "modern" reading teacher faces a more complicated situation: individualising instruction has significant implications for the allocation of time and space; attending to the affective side of reading influences all aspects of the teacher's style - and her classroom's atmosphere; understanding that, "Children learn to read by reading"12 necessitates an approach which, if it ought never to mean plain non-interference, does amount to considered and benevolent intervention - when required.

The teacher who is conscious of psycholinguistic recommendations about approaches to reading instruction will think first about assessment, evaluation and diagnoses in terms traceable directly to

Chomsky. Attention is paid not only to performance but also to competence. A significant gap between these two in any individual will indicate a need for attention. Thus measurement is made not only of a pupil's present level of achievement but also of his capacity for achievement and of his specific strengths and weaknesses. Where a pupil's performance is relatively close to his potential, there is little point in implementing a programme of remedial-reading strategies.

Teacher-efforts are better directed towards developing his potential.

These might centre on broadening the pupil's experiential background, developing his conceptual ability, and refining his sense of semantic propriety. Where, however, a significant variation of capacity over performance is revealed, it is time for the teacher to proceed from coarse measurement and classification to "diagnosis proper".

Classroom observation continues and particular attention is paid to 147.

attitudes. But a proper analysis of the "at-risk" pupil's reading strengths and weaknesses will give a clear indication of the appropriate learning experiences to be planned. In many fewer cases than was once claimed, physiologically-based difficulties might be suspected at which time the assistance of professionals trained in clinical diagnosis should be sought.

In all this process of increasingly narrow and careful analysis, the psycholinguistically aware teacher will choose testing instruments that align with what is now known about the reading process. To summarise this knowledge in a rather cryptic way, "There is more to reading than meets the eye". Thus the tests used ought to do more than measure the child's ability to recognise letters and to call words.

But first, how does the reading teacher assess the pupilvs potential performance?

Not so long ago, it was thought that a significant divergence between so-called mental and reading ages provided an indication of a gap between reading capacity and performance. 13 But, in the light of present knowledge about the blurred nature of the correlation between

I ••Q scores an d rea ding. a bii . 1 . t y, 14 more re 1 evan t an d re 1 ia· bl e in. d ica. t ors have to be found. Because reading is a language form, a measure of linguistic competence (in Chomsky's sense of the word) has to be derived. Teachers' own classroom observations and analyses of children's speech remain an effective "screening" device. But where doubt remains, tests of listening effectiveness constitute useful "pointers".

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test15 is an individual, standardised test of "hearing vocabulary". It requires neither reading ability (as many I.Q. tests do) nor pencil and paper. Put simply, the subject is 148.

required to identify one of four pictured items on plates arranged

in an ascending order of difficulty. Its author claims that its

"coefficients of equivalence and temporal stability appear to be

satisfactory for both average children and for those who have one of

a number of disabilities11 ; 16 content validity "is assumed to meet

adequate standards for a picture vocabulary test11 ; 17 it is conceded

"that the P.P.V.T. (does not provide) a comprehensive measure of intellectual functioning. Instead, by means of a short, restricted

sample of behavior, it attempts to provide a useful prediction of

school success, especially in the areas which call more heavily on

verbal intelligence11 • 18 And, to an extent, "verbal intelligence" is what's relevant to the reading-teacher's purpose. Similar guarded

statements are made about the "Peabody's" congruent, concurrent and predictive validity. It is emphasised that closest correlations are obtained from comparisons with similar tests of verbal functioning

and, to the extent that "auding" reflects linguistic competence,

this test is a useful instrument for classroom use.

Another standardised test of verbal efficiency is the Progressive

Achievement Test of Listening Comprehension. 19 It is claimed that this instrument "provides a broad estimate of a child's 'reading expectancy'

or 'potential for reading' with which his attainment in reading

comprehension may then be usefully compared 11 • 20 It is a group test

so that it appeals to busy teachers although its reliability (and

validity) suffer as a result. The author's urging that it be used

"as a supplement to careful daily observation1121 is appropriate. In

such circumstances, it can constitute a valuable "pointer" to pupils'

linguistic competence. 149.

The teacher can prepare her own test of "hearing comprehension".

Provided that she is aware of methods of gauging readability (and their inherent difficulties, given what the psycholinguists have demonstrated about the reading act's complexity), and provided she is familiar with techniques for assessing comprehension, the teacher might collect a set of passages of a known range of reading difficulty.

When a child is found to understand more than 75% of the materials read to him, the teacher gleans an idea of the standard of text the pupil could comprehend if his reading skills were functioning at maximum efficiency.

Most practitioners are far more familiar with instruments that purport to measure reading performance - and their scores, usually expressed in terms of reading age or reading level. Most would agree that these tests can generally be categorised into three groups: word recognition measures, comprehension measures; and measures which are composites of scores on a series of "sub-skill" tests. Again, psycholinguistic findings demand that certain test styles be preferred to others.

Although a child's ability to recognise words in a list is easily and quickly measured, it is doubtful whether word recognition tests adequately reflect the level of reading performance. In a study 22 of fourth-grade children, Goodman found that his subjects were able to read two thirds of the words they had failed to recognise in a list, when those words were put in a sensible context. The Reading Miscue 23 Inventory of Yetta Goodman and Carolyn Burke includes a sample text which features the foreign name, "Sven". Presented in isolation to children, this word often elicits the response "seven". In its context, 150.

where it is clearly a proper noun, the oral rendition is much more often "Sven" - or at least "Steven" or "Steve". Clearly, tests of word recognition only test the reader's ability to identify words on the basis of graphic shape and knowledge of phonics. Just as clearly, they ignore the important information that readers derive from syntactic and semantic cues.

Of much more use are comprehension measures of performance. In one form, the tests consist of a series of increasingly difficult passages which are followed by sets of questions designed to tap the subjects' comprehension of what they have just read. 24 In many cases, the answers are included in multiple-choice ranges of options and the tests have been "normed" on a large number of children of varying ages and abilities. In their other form, these tests require readers to supply words which have been systematically deleted from 25 a series of passages. This testing technique (which is also an excellent teaching strategy and measure of readability) has been thoroughly researched since 1953 when it was introduced by Taylor. 26

Obviously, either form has more validity than word recognition measures since comprehension is recognised as essential in reading and all cue­ systems are brought into play. Their being available as group tests and their ease of marking make them attractive to reading-teachers.

Tests of reading performance which are composed of many sub-tests have an attractive look of completeness about them; measures of letter

recognition, beginning sounds, whole words, words within words, speech

consonants, ending sounds, blending, rhyming, vowels, discriminate

guessing, spelling and sight words are further subdivided into as

many as nine areas. 27 Like the "cloze" comprehension tests described 151.

above, they have usually been "normed" on a large number of children.

But they are based on an assumption disproved by psycholinguistic

research; reading does not consist of a set of sub-skills: it is a process. And the sub-skills most easily measured, "word recognition" and "phonic analysis", contribute far less to successful reading than was ·once thought.

When the teacher discovers an "intolerable" difference between a reader's performance and potential, 28 her next move is to discover the pupil's reading strengths and weaknesses. (Attention to strengths is at least as important as attention to weaknesses since remediation is very much a confidence-building exercise and it is best to begin with what the reader can actually do.) There has been no more valuable "spin-off" from the psycholinguists' contribution to our understanding of the reading process than the consequent development of diagnostic tests based upon the strategies readers actually use when comprehending written language.

29 The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties: A Diagnostic Survey is

a most valuable guide to informal but reliable teacher-procedure

where early reading problems are suspected. Via the "sensitive

observation of reading behaviour", errors and self-correction,

directional movement, concepts about print and other aspects of a

young reader's performance can be analysed.

But where developing readers are concerned, "miscue analysis" provides

the clearest and most detailed picture of a reader's performance.

The aforementioned Reading Miscue Inventory, developed from Goodman's

taxonomy, operates more or less like this: the subject is required to 152.

read a passage he finds slightly difficult, perhaps a grade-level above that matching his present performance. (This ensures his producing an adequate number of "errors", "miscues" or "miscallings".)

Deviations from the text are then tabulated, examined and analysed to see whether they destroyed the meaning of the whole passage; whether any miscue was corrected; whether each miscue made sense in its immediate context; whether each miscue was of the same syntactic category as the word in the text; whether each miscue looked like the word on the page; and whether each miscue sounded like the word on the page. The distribution of errors is mapped onto a profile and appropriate remedial strategies can be planned.

(The manual helps in this regard.) This procedure can take up to an hour and many teachers will choose to use a local adaptation30 which provides less detail but yields the central information in a third of the time.

In spite of the attention given to measuring children's cognitive attainments in reading and the development of such sophisticated instruments of measurement as those described above, the area of attitudes and means of assessing these have been relatively neglected:

"··· little work has been aimed at the vast area of testing attitudes"; 31

"We have been so preoccupied with reading attainment we have neglected the area of attitude to reading". 32 And yet "reluctant readers" constitute one of the reading-teacher's most serious problems. Then, without reading practice, reluctant readers soon become disabled readers.

33 The problem of poor self-concept is an often-related problem. Berretta considers that the system of beliefs about himself which an individual 153.

holds true, ought to be considered as of quite as much importance to success in reading as basic skills and word attack techniques.

And Athey has commented:

If we want our children to be intellectually literate, perhaps we should concentrate on making them emotionally sound as the most efficient route to our dual objective. Perhaps we should worry less about Johnny's reading ability and more about Johnny.34

But work has begun in these complementary areas. Apart from invitations to write informal, autobiographical sketches; to draw graphs of their lives and to colour them according to "a happiness scale"; to respond personally to sets of pictures; to write advertisements for themselves, pupils can be helped to complete attitudinal scales. An Attitude to Reading35scale and An Attitude towards Self (or Self Concept scale)36 besides An Attitude to School37 scale are available. These were constructed using the technique of 38 equal appearing intervals explained by Thurstone. The inventories consist of statements representing highly favourable attitudes ranging down to statements reflecting negative attitudes. They are administered verbally while the children follow the text and register their reactions. If teachers know their pupils' attitudes, considered 39 help can be provided to gradually wring changes. It is to the credit of the psycholinguists and their argument that reading is, to an extent, a guessing game that we now understand the particular importance of confidence to successful reading.

As indicated, the actual learning experiences planned for the children will depend upon the situational and diagnostic analyses conducted by the teacher where psycholinguistically-influenced instruction is 154.

concerned. But several, general trends will probably characterise that instruction. Since proper acknowledgement will have been paid to the significance of pre-school experiences, early reading instruction might well be characterised by "extended bed-time story situations". Pre-eminent among the activity's purposes will be honest enjoyment of books. Thus "favourites" will be repeated in school, urged upon parents, and later read independently by the children for self-satisfaction. As far as possible, the class-room atmosphere will reflect that in the (ideal) home, being secure, non­ threatening and non-competetive. A regard for print will be inculcated and the selection of books that have interesting plots and are linguistically interesting {if often repetetive) will be viewed as of great importance.

"Co-operative reading" will be a key, early activity. The whole class {or groups) can read with the teacher who, understanding that reading is another language form, will enliven the sessions with discussion, mime, repetition and much prediction - of outcomes,

vocabulary and meaningful, phrase units. Together the children can

repeat recurrent phrases; decipher the text through the use of

contextual cues and the graphic symbols; translate new language in

terms of their own language and experience; learn high-frequency

and vivid words as sight vocabulary; follow the text by pointing, to

develop appropriate directional habits and symbol-meaning links.

Most important will be the abundant supply of a variety of reading

materials. If popular favourites are supplied upon request, new books,

songs and poems will be provided every day so that rote learning will

not suffice and reading skills to recreate the experience independently

will be taxed. 155.

At this stage and later, the emphasis will be upon the extraction of meaning. If "acceptable" miscues are ignored, responses that are nonsensical or ungrammatical will be challenged with such questions as "What makes you think that?", "How can we check that?" and "How can you be sure?". Such questions indicate that much instruction will be individualised. And psycholinguistic findings imply that this should be so. Where possible, children should choose their own reading matter; proceed at their own pace, while concentrating on their own skills' improvement; and judge their own performances with honesty. The teacher's role becomes one of enthusing the children to read, guiding the pupils towards more and better reading, recording progress, and organising shared activities.

A significant part of her time will be given over to individual interviews, and other "benevolent intervention" will consist of providing relevant tuition to groups with special needs.

Severe cases of retardation often benefit from use of the

Neurological-Impress-Method. 40 This multisensory approach, where the teacher and pupil face the page and read rapidly together while following the print with a finger, is really a kind of conditioning.

There is no correction nor any attention given to comprehension.

Yet this training in synchronisation does align with psycholinguistic thinking in that the pupil is assisted to take in whole meaning­ bearing units of print and to ignore temporary and less important difficulties with individual letters and words.

41 Similarly "read-along", where a group of pupils can follow the text while listening to a lively, oral rendition, encourages attention to

all the print and fosters a familiarity with usual syntactic and 156.

intonation patterns. Complementary question-answer and discussion sessions can encourage attention to meaning.

The "cloze" technique is possibly the most potent weapon in the reading teacher's armoury. Aligning perfectly with the psycholinguists' insistence that all cueing systems are important, the children's having to provide every fifth (or so) word demands that they use their syntactic and semantic senses. Whole groups or whole classes can be involved in this activity which can be refined to extend the children's ability in the semantic, syntactic or grapho-phonic areas.

So often, miscue analyses reveal that this last, awareness of sound-symbol correspondences, is the learning-reader's strong point.

While producing words that look and sound like those on the page, they fail to comprehend to any acceptable extent. Thus "Structured

Comprehension"42 and "Directed Reading and Thinking Activities"43 are most useful techniques for individuals and groups. If they are managed well, comprehension can be taught most effectively.

Obviously the division of classes into groups is a pre-requisite to some of these activities. The reading teacher has to give considerable thought to the way the children are to be grouped and organised to be properly active. If the readers making adequate progress are quite profitably occupied in more reading, illustrating, copying captions and so on, others have to be positioned around the listening post, and some placed with older and better readers (including visiting adults) to free the teacher to provide specialist attention.

The organisation of time so that activities are appropriately paced is just as vital. 157.

This discussion has centred on young and developing readers.

But it would be remiss not to repeat that the same strategies, adapted to suit different groups, are appropriate right up into the secondary school. Many older pupils who read fiction with facility, have great difficulty managing the book language in specialist subject areas. They can benefit from the teacher's reading aloud, from "cloze exercises", and from training in comprehension.

The influence of psycholinguistic research findings is only beginning to have its effect in New South Wales classrooms but the approaches and practices described here are becoming more common­ place. Where properly implemented, these should have their own influence, convincing teachers that practice based on sound theory is worth consideration and trial. "The proof of the pudding will be in the eating." 158.

References

1 Frank Smith and Kenneth S. Goodman, "On the psycholinguistic method of teaching reading", in Psycholinguistics and Reading, ed. by Frank Smith (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), p.178.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. (The context makes it apparent that Smith and Goodman use even this term with considerable reluctance.)

4 Ibid., p.179.

5 Ibid.

6 Jean Piaget. Reported by Carol Chomsky, "Write now, read later", Childhood Education, 47 (1971), 299.

7 Smith, .QE.• cit., p.180.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p.181.

11 Ibid., p.180.

12 Ibi"d., p.VJ.l....

13 R.L. Wilson, Diagnostic and Remedial Reading for Classroom and Clinic (New York: Merrill, 1972), pp.50-54.

14 Kenneth S. Goodman, "Do you have to be smart to read? Do you have to read to be smart?", in Accountability and Reading Instruction, ed. by R.8. Ruddell (Illinois: National Council of the Teachers of English, 1973).

15 Lloyd M. Dunn, The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Minnesota: American Guidance Service, 1965).

16 Ibid., p.32.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p.33. 159.

19 Warwick B. Elley, Progressive Achievement Test of Listening Comprehension (Wellington: New Zealand Council of Educational Research, 1969).

20 Ibid., p.6.

21 Ibid., p.3.

22 Kennsth S. Goodman, "A linguistic study of cues and miscues in reading", Elementary English Journal, 42 (1965), 39-44.

23 Yetta Goodman and Carolyn Burke, Reading Miscue Inventory (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

24 G.T. Buswell, S.R.A. Reading Record, rev.ad. (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1964).

25 The so-called "cloze procedure" (whose own spelling reveals its Gestalten origins) takes various forms but, at its most usual, consists of three hundred words about a single topic, or aspect of a topic, with every fifth word deleted. The first and last sentences remain whole and the reader is invited to "fill-the­ blanks" to the best of his ability. Clearly, all cueing systems have to be utilised if acceptable substitutions are to be provided.

26 Wilson L. Taylor developed the technique following earlier experiments conducted by Dearborn, Johnston and Carmichael (see G.R. Klare, The Measurement of Readability, Iowa State University Press, 1963). Rankin, 1959; Weaver, 1965; Bormuth, 1967, 1968; Rankin and Culhane, 1969; Rankin, 1970; Froese, 1971; and Hittleman, 1973, have all conducted research cantering on the "cloze" strategy.

27 See, for example, M. Batel, C.L. Holsclaw and G.C. Cammarata, Batel Reading Inventory (Chicago: Follett, 1966).

28 Wilson, .9.P..• cit., p.53.

29 Marie M. Clay, A Diagnostic Survey (Auckland: Heinemann, 1972). (The "Survey" comes with the test-instrument, Sand and the book, Reading: The Patterning of Complex Behaviour.-)-

30 Mark Brenna, The Brennan Record for the Inter retation of Miscues (Wagga Wagga: Riverina College of Advanced Education, 1976.

31 L.F. Lowery and W. Grafft, "Paperback books and reading attitudes", The Reading Teacher, 21 (1968).

32 A. Melnick and J. Merritt, The Reading Curriculum (England: University of London Press, 1972). 160.

33 s. Berretta, "Self concept development in the reading program", The Reading Teacher, 24 (1970), 232.

34 Irene Athey, "Affective factors in reading", in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, ed. by Harry Singer and Robert Ruddell (Newark: International Reading Association, 1970), p.98.

35 Gary C. Carter, Senior Lecturer in Reading at the Auckland Teachers' College, developed this instrument in 1973. It is available from the Riverina College of Advanced Education.

36 This inventory was framed by the same researcher in the same year. It is also available from the Riverina College of Advanced Education.

37 A.G. Fitt, "An experimental study of children's attitude to school in Auckland, New Zealand", British Journal of Educational Psychology, 26 (1956), Part I.

38 L.L. Thurstone. Comment. American Journal of Sociology, 52 (1946), 39-50.

39 Isabel Gillham, "Self-Concept and Reading", in Psychological Factors in the Teaching of Reading, ed. by Eldon E. Ekwall (Ohio: Merrill, 1973), pp.80~84.

40 R.G. Heckleman, "Using the neurological-impress remedial-reading technique", in Ekwall,~- cit., p.394-399.

41 Carol Chomsky, "When you still can't read in third grade; after decoding: what?", (Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Education, May, 1974). (Mimeographed.)

42 M.L. Cohn, "Structured Comprehension", Reading Teacher, 22 (1969), 440-444.

43 A.T. Burrows, et al., New Horizons in the Language Arts (New York: Harper &Ra";;;', 1972), pp.107-117. 161 •

Conclusion

This report was written in an educational context where increasing responsibility for curriculum development lies with individual schools. Following a century in which syllabuses were issued to schools by the central authority, local teachers have

(quite suddenly) to create their own learning programmes which need to be appropriate to conditions within and beyond their particular educational institutions. Professionals' observations and teachers' own comments have revealed a certain anxiety amongst practitioners who face new challenges of considerable magnitude. If there is one area in which the challenge and consequent anxiety are greatest, it is in the teaching of reading where recent psychological, linguistic and psycholinguistic research findings have caused a significant reconsideration of traditional approaches.

It may be that much of the recent furore about standards of literacy and their supposed decline is based more upon emotion rather than empirical findings. But the fact remains that society demands ever-increasing reading skills of its members, and citizens who could once cope quite well with day-to-day reading tasks having only minimal print-processing abilities, now face enormous difficulties

because of general, higher expectations, reflecting the growing

complexity of ordinary life.

Teachers are only too aware of this fact but often claim that they

have been inadequately prepared to meet the increasing demands placed

upon them. The time set aside for instruction in the teaching of 162.

reading during pre-service training in Australian teacher education institutions has recently been calculated as averaging twenty-six hours. In some places, it was found to be as low as two hours - a stark contrast with the Bullock Report recommendation that it total one hundred, but preferably one hundred and fifty, hours.

Thus teachers' professional organisations and the employing authority itself have taken significant measures "to bridge the gap".

Perhaps this report could be seen as another effort in this regard?

Part 1 consisted of a critical examination of research findings which have caused new analyses of the theory underlying various approaches to the teaching of reading. Since reading is much more than a simple visual act, more a process in which the seeker-after­ meaning has ta be actively involved, it is important that the information and skills a reader brings to the page be identified and examined.

The stimulus to, and direction of, the enquiry into ways that readers decode print was provided by Noam Chomsky. In his

Syntactic Structures and later works, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm within which different psychological and linguistic investigations could proceed. He was pre-eminently concerned with oral communication but the implications for other productive and receptive language forms were clear. Foremost, there was a new concern with meaning which underlies all whole-utterances, even children's first words. Chomsky showed that language is characterised by a duality of structure; beneath the secondary, phonological level there lies a primary semantic and syntactic level where the arbitrary symbols are so ordered that they carry meaning. That ordering depends 163.

upon a set of recursive rules which successful young speakers learn so as to be able to compose their (mostly) unique utterances.

Psychologists, "freed to consider what goes on inside the head", took a new look at old research findings and investigated the processes by which readers defied their physiological limitations to read at many more than three hundred words per minute. It became clear that readers' visual perceptions are selective and that they "fill the gaps" by drawing upon their experience and accumulated language skills. If there is a very brief period in which the individual can keep information for retrieval, there are strict limits upon what he can hold in short-term memory. Only by exercising senses of semantic and syntactic propriety can the reader

"chunk" the print-information to take in larger meaning-bearing units and make sense of the text facing him. The implication for reading-teachers is clear; although beginners place greater reliance upon the information conveyed by the graphic symbols, they have to be assisted towards that stage where they can use only those parts of the surface structure which they need to get through to deep­ structure and meaning.

And the linguists examined children's progress towards language maturity in a new light. Rather than analysing their corpera in terms of what constituted usual adult utterances, they chose to take note of variations amongst different children's speech over time, and to regard them as authentic expressions within themselves. It became clear that all learning-speakers go through similar stages as they progress to linguistic sophistication. Noting similarities and differences in the talk about them, they (unconsciously) develop a 164.

sense of the regularities which undergird our speech system. Only gradually, through a process of generalising, hypothesising and testing, they come to an understanding of the rules that underpin our language. As another language form, reading is best learned through similar "discovery" behaviour.

The psycholinguists "tied these findings together" and determined that readers have to draw upon their language knowledge and experience when applying constructive perceptions during their decoding of visual, symbolic displays. They arrived at their conclusions after studying readers' error behaviour which revealed that people, faced with the task of decoding print, gain most meaning when they disregard redundant language features and make optimum use of their syntactic and semantic senses of propriety. This they can do when encouraged to approach the task with a confidence, properly based on an adequate experiential and linguistic foundation.

Part 2 deals with the implications of these findings for curriculum planners and classroom practitioners. Both groups have to acknowledge the importance of pupils' life and language backgrounds and to develop programmes which promote development in these closely interrelated areas. Similarly, they have to provide abundant opportunity for practice in the print medium, another language form.

They have to ensure a continuity in their modes of instruction which allows for individual variations in rates of progress and sensitivity to different approaches to learning to read. Particular attention has to be paid to the teaching of comprehension skills and reading styles appropriate to different materials. These 165.

implications have relevance at every stage of curriculum development: in the goals, aims and objectives area; when planning learning experiences; when deciding upon methods of assessment; and when referring again to the situation whose characteristics influenced the choice of aims.

It has been admitted that such considerations make the teacher's task much more complicated at every point: in testing, in teaching and in remediating. But, at long last, theoreticians have provided some idea of how reading works so that properly aligned methods will lead to success, not only with the vast majority of students who were going to learn to read whatever the teacher chose to do, but with the other youngsters as well. It only remains for teachers to translate the empirical research findings into practice. Perhaps it would be as well that they remember:

No printed word nor spoken plea

Can teach young minds what men should be

Not all the books on all the shelves

But what the teachers are themselves.

Anon. 166.

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Appendix 1

When Is a Word Not a Word H.R. Hopkins, R.C.A.E.

That's an interesting question, isn't it?

Maybe the answer lies in an understanding of what t~e word

"word" means. But that's a pretty interesting idea too.

rlo.P; no ; + u::;t::l .LI, UIIU 1,11011,

JUt;I, Ut::lL..i:1Ut;t::, ..... ::; a IUII <,II.Lll!::j .. u uu U,d l..CII change its m•• n.ng by

.s.ng .t w.th. d.ff.r.nt s.t .f .th.r sp •• ch .t.ms. By m.n.p.l.t.ng th. c.nt.xt w. c.n c.ntr.l th. m•• n.ng. P.rh.ps th.ts h.w w. h.v. d.v.l.p.d control over speech and perh--­ ch---n c-n un---st--d th- pr----ple if we g-v- th-m m-ny op---t,-nit--s to do j-- th-t.

Wh-- th-- are 1---n--g to b---me r--d--s, p-rh--- they need to be allowed to play with the graphic patterns representing the spoken forms 1-ng--g- wh-ch th-- al••• dy use pr-f-c--nt-.

Maybe they sh__ 1~ to r_·_ with a p__ of sc. ss. r s in • n •. h •• d so th-- can c.t up ;~.ph.c p.tt •• ns and re-.ss.mbl. th.m in as m- y m-- ngfl. s-=--nc-s as th-y c-n im-g-ne. Th.n p--h-ps th-y c--ld d.sc-i:.r ans r to f--st qu--- n j.st as y_ h-v- d-n- by n 17 5.

Appendix 2

MY POLTERGEIST ~ --fo l'-eMe.M be.r-e.ol 0201 I was be~inning to feel uneasQ_: remember having a re.s,vl+re...ser,-t q-r'~r-_ n w~ I\{,~ ~+o 0202 restless night, often waking up and listening for music, no,ses. 0203 or any strange noise(:) But for the next two nights and

0204 days, nothing happened. The~~onday afternoon,

N\02.·n.ar-t ~F"\1- 0205 the Mozart began again - 1~66. I rushed into the loungE(u - vc r-ec..c;;:.q a "d +h0:f r-e..c.. D N::,f er- p\o..~ 1 t"\ .fh, S 0206 There was the record playe, with the lid down, the

~sl-eeve -t-1-)e, 0207 reco;d~ onAtop of it.

0208 It was then that I noticed for the first time how neat the $1-ro~r-e.d 0209 room was. Usually I cam home, tossed my jacket on the

0210 cane chai~ left my tie, shirt and trousers where they fell

0211 and went into-the bedroom to p~:ld clothes.

0212 But my jacket was spread across the back of the chair ©+h~ - 0213 and~re was no sign of my shirt, trousers or tie. I

plrl c.e,r--ta_ If\ a ~ 0214 went to my wardrobe and pulled the curtain asidE(!) There

0215 was TJIY tie o~:~ie ©."':!.7" had given me last

0216 ChristmaS(uand&y shirt~ trousers were on the one

cJ orl-)e..s.'-'a "~~ r- 0217 spare coathanger. I could not remember putting them

0218 there. 176.

0219 Now time I had lived alone, and I

0220 began to wonder if I was _going pott~ as my grandmother ©!-- +o 0221 used to put it. But I felt normal l!:.noughc:? I pla:Y@tennis -t-1-)e.- 0222 and swam inl\summer, I played rugby in winter and a- ~1,.,/aM 0223 walked along the beach. re qu~re a 1ot of friends

0224 nearby and in Wellington. I had not turned into~~ ""~ @Kd 0225 ~ of a he:rmi t who disliked the company of othero t ~e ~aue,1 f'\9 c.e-,++~ '" ~­ pa--e - 'J 0226 Certainly, nobody at school had said that was behaving

0227 strangely.

.L 177.

Appendix 2

.,/ L+OtSt"'II THE LITI1LE LOST BEAR

1. a I ~-t+le f+ 01-w_~r, Far far away is a little town. 0101 ~- q 1·, ++le -towt"\ 1s c.. l(t-~-t-hd \J 0102 @~called~~ I. ""f + O+'/_ !l.. i+l:S-'ty -- ! 0~ l1+He, t":t-f'h.te.+r-

Qre Or'\d <. p-t~ +t 0107 There aren't any ets. O"' httle ~"-lol'lt\ c. - -l-owl")s. 0108 No one lives~ Toy Town but toys '"''~ "'"e. .Po""d 0109 ~that were lost ¥,ld never found. Ot'\e. ..1. el .,_ <1 t ,.. ______~ D"e 1. el_ + e 1"\-\e 0110 Once a toy bear came to Toy Town. ~ b~ve 0111 ~ /was little and b~:wn_ and 1-\e-l \ .., \ l'\e.a r- "~ not very new. bpJ ~~v- b-+ Cui- bol '. ~It~ (s) Ii - b+ e so b-t o + l \ ~ello, · ttle bear," said a doll POJ '-~ dole~+ i-e.~-r dress. 0114 !!! a blue -===:. Yo"r 1--\e.-l p 0115 happy. Pind ld---rle.- 0116 Are you lost?"