Last Friday the Elite Eight talked with Claiborne Barksdale about the work done by the Barksdale Reading Institute in Mississippi. It’s a not-for-profit organization dedicated to tackling the literacy problems by means of program implementation and teacher training for students of all ages, but especially the youngest students entering the school system.
Mr. Barksdale was very good at presenting statistical and quantitative information. One of the big bones to bite on came in a neat little package (perhaps a common one, but I’d never heard it before): “Before third grade students learn to read, and then they’re expected to read to learn.”* There is a sharp drop-off near third-grade where students who haven’t learned to read fluently are often not likely to gain that fluency ever. Mr. Barksdale and many others attribute the projected percentage of illiteracy that so haunts Mississippi largely to the failure of the State to require and provide Pre-K school. He admits that factors at home like the mother’s (il)literacy, and whether the father is present, and poverty in general cannot be ignored in the statistical data, but that these factors can be off-set some if the children are exposed at a very young ages to learning how to read.
All of this makes me intrigued again at the study of language acquisition, linguistics, and cognition sciences. For those of you not privy to my past, I’ve had an ongoing struggle about what I’d like to tackle in grad school (or whether I want to go to grad school at all), and cognition sciences has always been an enticing field. The excessive flexibility of my undergraduate education allows this vacillation. I’m fascinated by Mr. Barksdale’s information about how young children acquire the skills and vocabulary needed to begin decoding and then understanding scripts. Freshman year my mathematics tutor allowed me to muse in class about whether thought or language was prior; then I had posited, for the sake of discussion, that thought was only possible in the framework of something like grammar. I don’t hold that position to be true now, but Mr. Barksdale has re-inspired the same questions around it. Since decoding letters and reading with comprehension are different, how necessary is vocabulary acquired verbally in the process of learning to decode? Is the verbal acquisition of vocabulary, which itself holds the potential to gain anything from decoding, necessary to prepare the mind for association of sound and symbol? Or is it the verbal memory of grammar structure that’s more important, whereas vocabulary can be gained from reading later? Does the intonation we use in our speech affect the way children learn how to read? More importantly, do all these things affect the way a child really formulates thoughts, compiles ideas? Even people in the MTC have said more than once that “if it isn’t written down, it hasn’t happened.” Does that statement apply to thought? Must a thought be expressed in intelligible language before it has really come to be? How is deprivation of vocabulary and consistent grammar structure affecting the way a child thinks, let along how he reads? Blah, blah. Johnnie-questions.
A bit of this meeting with Mr. Barksdale has encouraged me to go forward with what may become my summer project with the Teacher Corps: exploring the incorporation of national and international news (in written media) into the high school English classroom. Often the greatest task of the English teacher is not only to equip students with new skills associated with reading and writing, but also to expose them to new ideas and ways of thinking that go into the things they will eventually read and write. In the same way that little kids who are not exposed to dynamic vocabularies have more difficulty learning to read, it seems likely that students who are not exposed to a broader picture of the “outside world” will have great difficulty when that very large and startlingly invasive world begins making demands of them. That’s not a completely true statement in my mind, but something I’m munching on. At this point, I don’t really think it’s a “bad” thing to be a country-bumpkin who has no exposure to the outside; I only see it as a great risk to take in this world whose parts are rapidly and fiercely encroaching on each other. Blah, blah.
I’m off to read some more Don Quixote.
*In jest, I must disagree only a bit. I would add: “And then he goes to college and learns how to read well and get more from the text than what can be found in any quotation of it.”
Mr. Barksdale was very good at presenting statistical and quantitative information. One of the big bones to bite on came in a neat little package (perhaps a common one, but I’d never heard it before): “Before third grade students learn to read, and then they’re expected to read to learn.”* There is a sharp drop-off near third-grade where students who haven’t learned to read fluently are often not likely to gain that fluency ever. Mr. Barksdale and many others attribute the projected percentage of illiteracy that so haunts Mississippi largely to the failure of the State to require and provide Pre-K school. He admits that factors at home like the mother’s (il)literacy, and whether the father is present, and poverty in general cannot be ignored in the statistical data, but that these factors can be off-set some if the children are exposed at a very young ages to learning how to read.
All of this makes me intrigued again at the study of language acquisition, linguistics, and cognition sciences. For those of you not privy to my past, I’ve had an ongoing struggle about what I’d like to tackle in grad school (or whether I want to go to grad school at all), and cognition sciences has always been an enticing field. The excessive flexibility of my undergraduate education allows this vacillation. I’m fascinated by Mr. Barksdale’s information about how young children acquire the skills and vocabulary needed to begin decoding and then understanding scripts. Freshman year my mathematics tutor allowed me to muse in class about whether thought or language was prior; then I had posited, for the sake of discussion, that thought was only possible in the framework of something like grammar. I don’t hold that position to be true now, but Mr. Barksdale has re-inspired the same questions around it. Since decoding letters and reading with comprehension are different, how necessary is vocabulary acquired verbally in the process of learning to decode? Is the verbal acquisition of vocabulary, which itself holds the potential to gain anything from decoding, necessary to prepare the mind for association of sound and symbol? Or is it the verbal memory of grammar structure that’s more important, whereas vocabulary can be gained from reading later? Does the intonation we use in our speech affect the way children learn how to read? More importantly, do all these things affect the way a child really formulates thoughts, compiles ideas? Even people in the MTC have said more than once that “if it isn’t written down, it hasn’t happened.” Does that statement apply to thought? Must a thought be expressed in intelligible language before it has really come to be? How is deprivation of vocabulary and consistent grammar structure affecting the way a child thinks, let along how he reads? Blah, blah. Johnnie-questions.
A bit of this meeting with Mr. Barksdale has encouraged me to go forward with what may become my summer project with the Teacher Corps: exploring the incorporation of national and international news (in written media) into the high school English classroom. Often the greatest task of the English teacher is not only to equip students with new skills associated with reading and writing, but also to expose them to new ideas and ways of thinking that go into the things they will eventually read and write. In the same way that little kids who are not exposed to dynamic vocabularies have more difficulty learning to read, it seems likely that students who are not exposed to a broader picture of the “outside world” will have great difficulty when that very large and startlingly invasive world begins making demands of them. That’s not a completely true statement in my mind, but something I’m munching on. At this point, I don’t really think it’s a “bad” thing to be a country-bumpkin who has no exposure to the outside; I only see it as a great risk to take in this world whose parts are rapidly and fiercely encroaching on each other. Blah, blah.
I’m off to read some more Don Quixote.
*In jest, I must disagree only a bit. I would add: “And then he goes to college and learns how to read well and get more from the text than what can be found in any quotation of it.”
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