Dale C. Farran was one of the lead researchers in a study of the effects of an academic pre-kindergarten program in Tennessee. The study concluded that the children who participated in the program eventually fell behind those in the control group who were not in the program.
In an article on the blog of DEY (Defending the Early Years), Farran expressed her views about child development. She used the metaphor of an iceberg.
She wrote:
Years ago, few teachers believed that children should be taught to read in kindergarten; a more recent survey shows that 80% of kindergarten teachers now think children should know how to read before leaving the grade.
As recently as 1993 the great majority of kindergarten teachers did not believe an academic focus in preschool was important for children’s school success.
However, concern for the “fade out” of pre-kindergarten effects has led several researchers and policy makers to argue for a stronger academic focus in those classrooms, including the use of an intentional scripted, academically focused curriculum.
Not only do effects from pre-k classrooms fade, but also results from one study of the longitudinal effects of pre-k attendance conducted by my colleagues and me demonstrated that in the long run the effects turned negative.
A greater focus on academics for three- and four- year-olds is not the solution.
As an author of the recent paper on long term effects and as a primary investigator on the only randomized control trial of a statewide pre-k program with longitudinal data, and, finally, as a developmental psychologist whose career focused on young children’s development, I have thought extensively about what the causes of these unexpected effects might be.
I AM PROPOSING AN “ICEBERG MODEL OF EARLY DEVELOPMENTAL COMPETENCIES.”
The tip of the iceberg, the section floating above the surface, is composed of things that are easily measured.
These types of skills have recently been characterized as “constrained” skills meaning they are finite and definable.
All standard school readiness assessments focus on these types of skills.
But they do so because assessors believe that the skills represent deeper competencies.
They measure these skills somewhat like taking a finger-prick for evidence of the information the assessments provide into other more important characteristics of children.
BOTH THE FOCUS OF CURRENT PRE-K PROGRAMS AND THE PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGIES EMPLOYED FOCUS ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY ON THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG SKILLS.
Many who have been in early childhood for a long time testify to the changes in classrooms.
I believe these changes are accelerated by the process of subsuming preschool into the K-12 system.
In many states the department of education administers the pre-kindergarten program, and the program behaves like an additional grade level below kindergarten – the classrooms are open for the school day (5-6 hours a day) and the school calendar (9 months a year).
The classrooms are most often in elementary schools, where the push down from the K- 12 system is almost impossible to avoid.
Many of the elementary schools are older and unsuitable for younger children – no bathroom connected to the classroom, the requirement to have meals in the large cafeteria, and no appropriate playground.
These physical features mean that children spend a lot of time transitioning from the classroom, necessitating a high level of teacher control as children walk through the halls and endure long wait times.
Descriptions from a number of large studies of the instructional strategies used in current pre-k classrooms show them to be dominated by whole group instruction focused on basic skills (the tip of the iceberg).
TEACHERS TALK AT CHILDREN A MAJORITY OF THE TIME, SELDOM LISTENING TO CHILDREN, AND MULTI-TURN CONVERSATIONS ARE A RARE OCCURRENCE.
Learning opportunities that involve other than right-answer questions are almost never observed, and a high level of negative control from teachers characterizes many classrooms.
This content focus and the teaching strategies, I argue result in a detachment of the tip of the iceberg from the deeper skills under the surface.
Thus, children can score well on school readiness skills at the end of pre-k – especially on those related to literacy – but not maintain any advantage by the end of kindergarten when all children attain these skills with or without pre-k experience.
The tip of the iceberg skills no longer symbolizes those under the surface.
They are no longer the visible and measurable aspects of more important competencies.
Only when the deeper skills are enhanced should we expect continued progress based on early experiences.
A very different set of experiences likely facilitates the development of those deeper skills.
We have known for many years that the developmental period between four and six years is a critical one.
Neuroscience confirmed the importance of this period for the development of the pre-frontal cortex.
The pre-frontal cortex is involved in many of the skills described in the model as being below the surface.
Research does not provide good evidence for which experiences facilitate the development of important skills like curiosity, persistence, or working memory.
But research has demonstrated the importance of these kinds of skills for long term development.
For instance, some argue that early attention skills are more important than early academic skills as predictors of long-term school success including the likelihood of attending college.
In a large longitudinal study, researchers identified the importance of the development of internal self-control during the ages of four to six.
Some children with initially low self- control developed self-control during early childhood and had subsequent better outcomes via what the researchers called a “natural history change.”
Whether an intervention-induced change would yield the same positive outcomes is an open question.
So far, no early childhood curriculum has been able to bring about sustained changes in self-control or any of the below- the-surface skills listed above.
WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT CHILDREN FROM MORE AFFLUENT HOMES ENTER KINDERGARTEN SCORING HIGHER ON SCHOOL READINESS SKILLS.
Moreover, they maintain that advantage across the school years.
But they did not learn those “readiness” skills from a didactic pre-k experience.
While these children may have had magnetic alphabet letters to play with, for example, parents did not sit them down in front of the refrigerator and force them to learn the letters.
Most of those tip-of-the-iceberg skills were learned through a variety of experiences and the opportunity to learn through interactions with adults and friends.
For these children, measuring the tip does provide information about the beneath the surface competencies that are so important.
Guidance may come from comparing the developmental contexts of families who are economically secure to the pre-k classroom context.
Children of economically secure families are more likely to succeed in school, more likely to matriculate in a two or four year college and more likely to graduate when they enter….
GOVERNMENTS IN MOST HIGHLY DEVELOPED COUNTRIES HEAVILY SUBSIDIZE THE CARE FOR YOUNG CHILDREN PRIOR TO SCHOOL AGE.
Nordic countries all provide a child supplement to parents, which most parents use to offset the modest cost of the government-subsidized group care, care that looks nothing like U.S. pre-k programs.
These programs stress different sorts of competencies in young children, capabilities like “participation” or the ability to be a functioning member of a group (not sitting “criss-cross applesauce” for 20-40 minutes during large group instruction).
The programs stress self-reliance and independence, the ability to make good decisions and to be responsible for one’s actions.
Most of these countries delay formal instruction in academic skills until children are six or seven. Their children do quite well in international comparisons in the later grades.
Concerns about the accelerating academic focus in early childcare education are being voiced by many.
I hope this “iceberg” model will provide a useful visual depiction of the danger of concentrating on basic skills instruction in pre-k.
I hope also that it will help people understand why getting early childhood right is so important and the imperative need to fix the childcare situation in the U.S. for families of poor children – in fact for all our children.
Pre-k is not the magic bullet policy makers hoped it would be. Quite the contrary. The reason it is not may lie with the unavoidable focus of the program when it becomes part of the K-12 system.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am reminded of a study I read about a long time ago. I think it was based in Sweden. They compared two groups: students who received a normal introduction to a foreign language (English) which occurred beginning in the third grade or so, with another group who received instruction starting in first grade. By the sixth grade, the late starters were pulling away from the early starters and the early starters never caught up.
Starting earlier is almost never the solution to a perceive weakness in an educational system. Investigation when to start, how to start, and how to continue are.
I believe this mistake is promoted by our perceptions of prodigies, e.g. Tiger Woods in golf. They all seemed to start at a very early age. I suggest this is because with regard to that activity that were order than their chronological age and could benefit from early instruction. But most kids are not prodigies!
Kids are on differing developmental schedules, and they come to the classroom with vastly differing backgrounds, depending primarily on their socioeconomic level in our profoundly inequitable system.
That’s a great list. I would specify passive and active vocabulary and add to it passive and active command of automatically acquired syntactic structures from spoken language. After all, writing is an encoding of speech, and in all four of these cases, kids come to schooling with vastly differing life experiences and developmental levels.
It astonishes me that even professional reading “experts” always leave out the automatically acquired spoken language syntactic (grammatical and morphological) stuff. It’s like saying that a tree contains two parts, leaves and roots.
correction:
It astonishes me that even professional reading “experts” always leave out the automatically acquired spoken language grammatical stuff (both syntax and morphology) stuff. It’s like saying that a tree contains two parts, leaves and roots.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say they “leave out” the automatically acquired spoken language.
I have been wondering if this fascination with the “science” of reading is being fed by the testing mania ( and of course the chance to make money off of products). I also wonder if it has driven the push to teach reading earlier with direct instruction.
I really am not impressed by the fMRI stuff either, showing the reading brain light up. So now there seems to be a push to teach discrete skills to struggling readers to get their brains to light up the same way accomplished readers brains do. I wonder if anyone is trying to get preschoolers’ and kindergarteners’ brains to light up according to some set pattern associated with certain “skills.” There must be a slew of potentially marketable products.
I really do like the iceberg analogy and think it should be extended beyond the early years although it is especially pertinent to the current academic emphasis being forced into early childhood programs. I hate to say it because they could ruin play too, but maybe some of these yahoos should be studying the “science” of play.
OK. Let me explain what I mean. By the age of six, the speaker of a language typically has acquired, unconsciously, many thousands of grammatical forms–ones that he or she recognizes and understands and some part of which he or she uses. This is an extremely important part of acquiring a language, and it’s an automatic process. It doesn’t happen via instruction. It happens via an inborn language acquisition device operating upon an ambient linguistic environment. Those environments differ from kid to kid, very dramatically, and so kids come to school with vastly differing command of spoken language grammar, and since written texts are encodings of speech, they bring differing levels of unconscious control of syntactic structures to the act of reading. That’s the short answer. I’ve posted, below, a more detailed explanation.
Hello Diane: The iceberg model (and the picture) is excellent for conveying the distinction between interior development and learning “stuff,” especially stuff that can be tested for . . . in the overly direct way that we do . . . while we leave to the family and the culture (adult absence, TV, computer games, etc.) the deeper developments that foster what most of us want our children and students to become. I especially like the nuance of dividing away from the informal kinds of education that occur quietly in wealthier families and seem to go missing in so many others.
NOT evident in the iceberg model, however, is the implication of a learning theory that would convey the ORGANIC nature of learning, like the development of an acorn into an oak tree . . . rather than the pervasive idea that learning is like adding more and more marbles to a jar.
Regardless, I think it works. Also, Steve’s comment is informing; and Bob’s comment (just now) is correct; and more, its implication speaks (AGAIN) to the need for smaller classrooms where teachers can be more cognizant of each child’s different and distinct needs.
Unfortunately, the failures of U.S. capitalism (with its cheapening of children, teachers, and the treasure of education as a national concern), coupled with the philosophical failures that underpin the “more marbles in the jar” model, have done their best to keep us and our thinking far above the water line and ignorant of what’s melting below.
Basically, the philosophical problem is couched in the idea that, if you cannot see it, it doesn’t exist (capitalist policy makers and shallow minded oligarchs love that idea–if it’s not real, then they don’t have to fund it). But as the iceberg model suggests, the interior life exists and is really quite functional and, more, it is organic and unfolds like a butterfly from a moth. It’s not a receptacle for “marble knowledge.” CBK
This is brilliant.
Think of child development as the tip of the (Pasi) Sahlberg.
haaaaa!!! yes!!!!
Hello Diane and everyone,
I have almost finished reading the first volume of Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s 2 volume (approximately 2,000 page) book called The Matter With Things. If you’re interested in brain hemisphere research, philosophy, sociology, education, literature, science, and gaining an understanding of our world today, this book presents a fascinating, shocking, and illuminating portrait of our Western culture right now. Don’t let the size of the book or the price ($140-$160) deter you from reading this insightful, exciting and even frightening book. He deals with some very complex issues in a readable way. It’s been so thought-provoking that I haven’t put it down for 3 days. My husband and I have discussed such a wide range of topics – science, psychology, philosophy, Buddhism and Zen, (my husband reads a lot on that), Jungian and consciousness studies (my passion), current events and on and on. This book has led to a deeper understanding of ourselves and what is happening in our world now. I would also recommend another book of his – The Master and His Emissary. Many of his ideas relate directly to our educational system in the context of the greater world view. If you want to see what is going on in our world from a scientific and human perspective, it is truly one to read.
Thanks for pointing me to this, Mamie. I just started reading it (in the sample available on Amazon), and it’s wonderful. He’s a superb writer, and the topic he is dealing with is one of my major preoccupations. Now I have to think about whether I am willing to spring for the $159. (I don’t like to read such books on my kindle or phone.) Here, you will be interested in this:
I am also inclined to the speculative philosophical view that consciousness is fundamental and that the brain and body are transducers in some sense not understood by us. This inclination comes from the simple observation that consciousness is different in kind, not degree of complexity or quality or anything else, from the “stuff” perceived by us in a kind of simplified graphical user interface to a largely unknown reality (or realities) created by our particular operating system (which differs in significant ways from those of other organisms). I suspect that McGilchrist has come to much the same conclusion, but by a different path.
cx: consciousness is different in kind, not degree of complexity or quality or anything else, from the “stuff” perceived by us in a kind of simplified graphical user interface to a largely unknown reality (or realities), an interface created by our particular operating system (i.e., our perceptual and conceptual mechanisms, which differ in significant ways from those of other organisms, who thus live in different worlds, or Umwelten).
Thank you, Mamie.
Thank you, Dr. Farran, for this wonderful piece!!!
As lifelong educators specializing in early childhood (my wife has an MEd in Early Childhood) my wife and I continuously had to argue against the misguided notion that academics were the single purview of a learning environment. It’s nice to get some substantiation for our position after a decades long battle.
It’s as I always used to say, “You can teach a three-year-old to read but why would you want to? They have much important things to do!”
🙂
This post reminded me of the famous book by Robert Fulghum, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” The basic message of the book is that the world would be improved if adults adhered to the same basic rules as children, i.e. sharing, being kind to one another, cleaning up after themselves, and living “a balanced life” of work, play, and learning.
The first step is to instill a love of learning and reading in preschool children while developing emotional intelligence/skills.
That doesn’t happen in academic style boot camp schools where the children are drilled, abused, and terrorized by brutal teach-to-the-test tactics to grow up fearing test results that divide them into losers and winners.
What Learning to Read Involves: Grammatical Fluency
In the last decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Department of Education committed billions of dollars to an initiative called Reading First, with the aim of improving reading among schoolchildren nationwide. It’s a mark of how scientifically backward and benighted some of our professional reading establishment is that when the directors of this program consulted “experts” and asked them to outline the areas of focus to be addressed by Reading First (and assessed by reading examinations), those “experts” included among items to be addressed by the program
students’ decoding skills (phonemic awareness and phonics),
vocabulary, and
comprehension
but completely ignored grammatical fluency. However, and this ought to be obvious, written texts consist of sentences that have particular syntactic patterns. If students cannot automatically—that is, fluently and unconsciously—parse the syntactic patterns being used, then they might have some idea what the subject of the text is, but they won’t have a ghost of a chance of understanding what the text is saying.
Syntactic complexity is, of course, a significant determinant of complexity and readability. Consider the opening two sentences of the Declaration of Independence:
Sentence One:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with one another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare which impel them to the separation.
Sentence Two:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
These sentences contain a few vocabulary items that might be challenging to young people—impel, endowed, and unalienable—but for the most part, the words used have high frequency and present no great challenge. The most significant stumbling block for comprehension of these sentences is their syntactic complexity. The first sentence consists of a long adverbial clause, beginning with When in the Course and ending with entitle them, that specifies the conditions under which it is necessary to take the action described in a main clause that follows it (a decent respect . . . requires). The second sentence consists of a main clause that introduces a list in the form of five clauses, each specifying a truth held to be self evident. (Note that current readability formulas use sentence length as an extremely rough stand-in for syntactic complexity. This sort of works, but only sort of. Sentences can be short and syntactically complex or complex in many other ways, in their references, their use of figures, their challenge to conventional thinking, and so on. That’s one reason why readability calculations should be taken with a big grain of salt.) Here’s the point: the student who can’t follow the basic syntactic form of these sentences from the Declaration will be completely lost. He or she won’t understand how a given idea in one of these sentences relates to another idea in them (for that is what syntax does; it relates ideas in particular ways). An automatic, fluid grasp of the syntax of a sentence is critical to comprehending what it means. What’s true of complicated sentences like these from the Declaration of Independence is true of sentences in general. One can’t comprehend them if one cannot parse their syntax automatically (quickly and unconsciously). Grammatical competence is one of the keys to decoding, and decoding is a prerequisite for comprehension.
So, are schools today ensuring via their instructional methods and assessments that students are gaining the automatic syntactic fluency necessary for decoding? Well, no. In fact, they are implementing materials based on a folk theory of grammar that predates the current scientific model of language acquisition. Consider, for example, this gem from the backward, puerile Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English Language Arts, which provide the current goals and, disastrously, the de facto outline for instruction in English and reading. According to the CCSS, an eighth-grade student should be able to
Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in particular sentences. (CCSS.ELA-Literacy-L.8.1a).
The other grammar-related “standards” in the CC$$ are similar. They all show that at the highest levels in our educational establishment, there is a complete lack of understanding of what science now tells us about how the grammar of a language is acquired. The standard instantiates a prescientific, folk theory of grammar that assumes that grammatical competence is explicitly acquired and is available for explicit description by someone who consciously “knows” it (“Explain the function”).
This standard tells us that students are to be instructed in and assessed on the ability a) to explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, and infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular sentences. In order for students to be able to do this, they will have to be taught how to identify gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular sentences. In order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit explanations. Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the standard seem not to have understood this fundamental principle from contemporary linguistics.
Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the functions of verbals in sentences would require students to be able to do, among other things, something like this:
Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.
That’s what’s entailed by just PART of the “standard.” And since the “standard” just mentions verbals generally and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example, infinitives used without the infinitive marker to, so-called “bare infinitives,” as in “Let there be peace.” (Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Obviously, just meeting this ONE “standard” would require YEARS of explicit, formal instruction in syntax, and what contemporary linguistic science teaches us is that all of that instruction would be completely irrelevant to students being able to formulate and comprehend sentences. The authors of the new “standards,” paid for by Bill Gates and foisted upon the country with almost no vetting, clearly, sadly, tragically, understood nothing of this.
Contemporary linguistic science teaches that grammatical competence is acquired not through explicit instruction in grammatical forms but, rather, automatically (fluently and unconsciously) via the operation of an internal mechanism dedicated to such learning. A specific example will make the general point clear:
If you are a native speaker of English, you know that
the green, great dragon
“sounds weird” (e.g., is ungrammatical) and that
the great, green dragon
“sounds fine” (e.g., is grammatical).
That’s because, based on the ambient linguistic environment in which you came of age, you intuited, automatically, without your being aware that you were doing so, a complex set of rules governing the proper ordering of adjectives in a series. No one taught you, explicitly, these rules governing the order of precedence of adjectives in English, and the chances are good that you cannot even state the rules that you nonetheless “know,” but in the sense that you have acquired those rules unconsciously and automatically and apply them unconsciously and automatically. And what’s true of this set of rules is true of all but a minuscule portion of the grammar of a language that a speaker “knows”—that he or she can use. Knowledge of grammar is like knowledge of how to walk. It is not conscious knowledge. The walker did not learn to do so by studying the physics of motion and the operation of motor neurons, bones, and muscles. The brain and body are designed in such a way as to do these things automatically. The same is true, contemporary linguistic science teaches us, of the learning of the grammar of a language. Speakers and writers of English follow hundreds of thousands of rules, such as the C-command condition on the binding of anaphors (a key component of the syntax of languages worldwide), that they know nothing about explicitly. Following this rule, they will say that “The president may blame himself” but will never say “Supporters of the president may blame himself,”[3] which violates the rule, even though they were never taught the rule explicitly and could not explain, unless they have had an introductory Syntax course, what the rule is that they have been following all their lives. Since the ground-breaking work by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, we have over the past sixty years developed a robust scientific model of how the grammar of a language is acquired. It is acquired unconsciously and automatically by an internal language acquisition mechanism.
Like many great thinkers, Chomsky started with a simple question, asking himself how it is possible that most children gain a reasonable degree of mastery over something as complicated as a spoken language. With almost no direct instruction, almost every child learns, within a few years’ time, enough of his or her language to be able to communicate with ease most of what he or she wishes to communicate. This learning seems not to be correlated with the child’s general intelligence and fails to occur only when there is a physical problem with the child’s brain or in conditions of deprivation in which the child has limited exposure to language. If one looks scientifically at what a child knows of his or her language at the age of, say, six or seven, it turns out that that knowledge is extraordinarily complex. Furthermore, almost all of what the child “knows” has not been directly and explicitly taught. For example, long before going to school and without being taught what direct objects and objects of prepositions are, an English- speaking child understands that the first sentence, below, “sounds right” and that the second sentence does not.
Tokyo is Japan’s capital.
Tokyo Japan’s capital is.
In other words, on some level, the English-speaking child “knows” that direct objects follow (and do not precede) the verbs that govern them, even though he or she has no clue what objects and verbs are. The Japanese child, in contrast, “knows” just as well that in Japanese objects precede (and do not follow) the verbs that govern them. (The sentence, in Japanese, is “Tookyoo wa Nihon no shuto desu,” i.e., Tokyo SUBJECT PARTICLE Japan POSSESSIVE PARTICLE capital is.) So, imagine that the sentences, above, were translated word-by-word into Japanese and that the word order were retained. To a Japanese child, the word order of the first of these sentences would sound quite strange, while the word order of the second would be unexceptional—just the opposite from English. English is a head-first language, in which the head of a grammatical phrase precedes its objects and complements (so, in the verb phrase is Japan’s capital, the verb is comes first). Japanese is a head-last language, in which the head of a grammatical phrase follows its objects and complements (so, in the Japanese phrase, the verb comes last). Kids are not taught this. They are born with part of the grammar (the fact that there are heads, objects, and complements, for example) already hard wired into their heads. Then, based on their ambient linguistic environments, they automatically set certain parameters of the hard-wired internal grammar, such as head position. Children do not learn such rules by being taught them any more than a whale learns to echolocate by attending echolocation classes.
Chomsky’s central insight was that in order for a child to be able to learn a spoken language with such rapidity and thoroughness, that child must be born with large portions of a universal grammar of language already hardwired into his or her head. So, for example, the neural mechanisms that provide for classification of items from the stream of speech into verbs and prepositions and objects, and those mechanisms that allow verbs and prepositions to govern their objects, are inborn. They are part of the equipment, developed over millennia of evolution, with which human children come into the world. Then, when a child hears a particular language, English or Japanese, for example, certain parameters of the inborn language mechanism, such as the position of objects with respect to their governors, are set by a completely unconscious, autonomic process that is itself part of the innate neural machinery for language learning.
Because the learning of a grammar is done automatically and unconsciously by the brain, explicit instruction in grammatical forms of the kind called for by the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standard [sic] quoted above is largely irrelevant to learning to speak and read. And, in fact, such instruction is most likely going to get in the way, much as if one tried to teach a child to walk by making him or her memorize the names of the relevant muscles, nerves, and skeletal structures or tried to teach a baseball player how to hit by teaching him or her calculus to describe the aerodynamics of baseballs in motion. In other words, the national “standard” is based on a prescientific understanding of how grammar is acquired. This should be a national scandal. It’s as though we had new standards for tactics for the U.S. Navy that warned against the possibility of sailing off the edge of the Earth.
To return to the main topic, we have seen, above, that grammatical fluency and automaticity is an essential prerequisite to reading comprehension. So, if such fluency and automaticity is not gained via explicit instruction, how is it to be acquired? The answer is quite simple: The child has to be exposed to an ambient linguistic environment containing increasingly complex syntactic structures so that the language acquisition device in the brain has the material on which to work to put together a model of the language.
So, why do some kids have, early on, a great deal of syntactic competence while other kids do not? The answer should be obvious from the foregoing. Some were raised in syntactically rich linguistic environments, and some were not. In 2003, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley of the University of Kansas published a study showing that students from low-income families were exposed, before the age of three, to 30 million fewer words (to a lot less language) than were students from high-income families. A later, much larger attempted replication found a 4 million-word gap. Unfortunately, these studies did not report disparities in total number and frequency of lexemes and in the syntactic complexity of the ambient linguistic environment.[4] Grad students: Hart and Risley focused on vocabulary, but note that some superb doctoral theses could be written on the differences in the syntactic and morphological completeness of the grammars internalized by kids raised in poverty and wealth. Kids living in extreme poverty often aren’t talked to much. They are talked at. An impoverished diet of imperatives (“Shut up!” “Go play outside!”) does not make for linguistic nutritional adequacy.
Shockingly, however, what reading comprehension “specialists” commonly do in their classrooms mirrors what happens to kids from impoverished families and is precisely the opposite of what is required by the language acquisition device, or LAD. Instead of providing syntactically complex materials as part of the child’s ambient linguistic environment so that the LAD can “learn” those forms automatically and incorporate them into the child’s working syntax, these reading “professionals” intentionally use with children what are known as leveled readers. These intentionally contain short (and thus, usually, syntactically impoverished) sentences that will come out “at grade level” according to simplistic (and simple-minded) “readability formulas” like Lexile and Flesch-Kincaid. The readability formulas used to “level” the texts put before children vary in minor details, but almost all are based on sentence length and word frequency (how frequently the words used in the text occur in some language collection known as a corpus). Shorter sentences are, of course, statistically likely to be syntactically simple. So, as a direct result of the method of text selection, complex syntactic forms are, de facto, banished from textbooks and other reading materials used in reading classes. Teachers go off to education schools to take their master’s degrees and doctorates in reading, where they learn to use such formulas to ensure that reading is “on grade level,” and by using such formulas, they inadvertently deprive kids of precisely the material that they need to be exposed to in order for their LADs to do their work. After years of exposure to nothing but texts that have been intentionally syntactically impoverished, the students have not developed the necessary syntactic fluency for adult reading. When confronted with real-world texts, with their embedded relative and subordinate clauses, verbal phrases, appositives, absolute constructions, correlative constructions, and so on, they can’t make heads or tails of what is being said because the sentences are syntactically opaque. A sentence from the Declaration of Independence, The Scarlet Letter, a legal document, or a technical manual might as well be written in Swahili or Klingon or Linear B.
What can be done to ensure that students develop syntactic fluency? I am not suggesting that students be given texts too difficult for them to comprehend, obviously. I am saying that they must be given texts that are challenging syntactically—that present them with syntactic forms that they cannot, at their stage of development, completely parse automatically (that is, in the argot of Education professors, after Vygotsky, texts that are syntactically at kids’ “Zone of Proximal Development”), for it is only by this means that the innate grammar-learning mechanism can operate to expand the student’s syntactic range. But even before that, kids who come from linguistically impoverished environments–the ones who have almost never had the experience of having conversations with adults and arrive in school barely articulate in their spoken language–need remedial exposure to spoken language rich in morphological and syntactic forms (and in related, domain-specific vocabulary–more about that later). The second of these is almost never done. Here are a few techniques: Identify, via diagnostic testing, the common SPOKEN morphological and syntactic forms that the student has not acquired and does not use. In conversation with students, use increasingly morphological and syntactically complex language to which the child has not been exposed. (This is not done systematically now, but it needs to be.) Present students with texts that are routinely just above their current level of syntactic decoding ability. Have them listen to syntactically complex texts (because syntactic decoding of spoken language outpaces syntactic decoding of written language). Have them memorize passages containing complex syntactic constructions. Have them do sentence combining and sentence expansion exercises. And most of all, as soon as they can begin to do so, with difficulty, have them read real-world materials—novels and essays and nonfiction books that have NOT been leveled but that are high interest enough to repay their effort. That such materials will contain difficult-to-parse constructions is precisely the point. Those are the materials on which the LAD works to acquire internal grammatical competence.
NB: It is valuable to teach kids some very basic traditional grammar–the names of the parts of speech and terms like sentence and phrase and clause. These provide useful terminology for referring to parts of writing by students and others. Some sentence diagramming using tree diagrams can be useful for teaching students to write more complex sentences, and sentence combining, expansion, and rearrangement exercises (in which kids are encouraged to create new sentences from old) are invaluable for teaching sentence variety. In addition, study of the grammar of a language is interesting in and of itself, and I recommend this for older students. What cannot be stressed enough, however, is that teaching an explicit formal model of a grammar to kids will have almost no effect on either their grammatical competence (on their internalized grammar of their language) or on the frequency of errors in their speech and writing. Unfortunately, many English teachers, having themselves learned the older, prescientific, folk theory of traditional grammar, as opposed to contemporary generative syntax, think that when they choose a standard usage over a nonstandard one, they are applying their knowledge of traditional grammar rather than their internalized grammatical competence. They aren’t, and they are confused about this. Equally unfortunately, many others, on the opposite side of the grammar wars, don’t recognize the value of learning some of the traditional model for the purpose of having a rough-and-ready language for discussing language. That’s also a problem. So, some advice: yes, teach BASIC traditional grammar to provide a rough language for talking about language, but know why you are doing this teaching–not to instill grammatical competence, which is acquired automatically, unconsciously, from exposure to the right linguistic environment, but to provide that basic language for talking about language.
Dude… I’m speechless. This, all that you said here, this! I am a language-loving SLP, and you have just pulled it all together here for me. Thank you!
This is a fantastic article , thanks for sharing.