Re: English like wot she is spoke.

Guy King wrote:
I've been at fpubby listening to kids read. Some of them are struggling
somewhat, so I stay a bit late after dropping my two off, and turn up a
bit early when collecting them and do some one-to-one reading practice.

A lot of the problem seems to stem from not being able to speak English
in the first place. These aren't immigrants or foreigners, but local
"English" kids who just have such a poor grasp of the language.

For example, if the book says "You did that really well", the child
simply isn't expecting those words in that order. If it'd said "You done
that real good" they'd see the word they're expecting next and not keep
grinding to a halt. If they didn't keep running into roadblocks like
that their confidence would be much better and they'd progress a lot
faster. As it stands, some seem to find the whole experience utterly
frustrating simply because the books don't fit their world.

Not just the fine scale within a sentence, either. Some seem to have
little idea of narrative flow, so missing a page in a book just doesn't
trouble them, since the whole thing seems to be a bit opaque in the
first place.

OK, so it's probably only a transient problem, once they're past the
stage of having to guess at quite so many words from context and can
read them "cold" it won't matter so much. What does matter though is
that they're at least a year adrift in their reading ability, some even
more, and this has knock on effects on the rest of their learning. It's
much harder to involve them in a subject like history or another
language if they can't really communicate effectively in their own
language.

It's difficult to say they should speak the same way as the rest of us,
because round here so many people /do/ speak like that.

Any ideas?

As a teacher I have been observing this phenomenon for almost 30 years. Some areas of the country seem to manage better than others. As far as I am concerned, I think of the kids as almost bi-lingual: they speak the local dialect in the playground and at home, and School English in the classroom. Learning the differences and the appropriate times to use each used to be a well recognised part of the process of education. Sadly, it seems to be neglected or forgotten these days.

Many kids do not understand narrative context as they never experience narrative language use before they start learning to read. They don't get read to at home (parents are less than fully literate themselves), they don't sit round the table taking turns during meals to relate their day, and then they get parked in front of the telly showing bite-sized snippets or channel hopping rather than interacting with each other. And, as you say, many parents don't actually hold conversations with their kids: they yell at them and they order them about, but they don't just have a good old natter with them. As a result, children grow up without the the oral narrative tradition that used to make the narrative aspect of reading a recognized characteristic of language use.

School reading programs these days start with word-free books that have several pages of pictures with a narrative thread: the kids are taught to follow the narrative thread BEFORE being confronted with real live words on a page. When they get to the written word, they then do expect things like the words to follow a recognizable path of narrative. Some kids start with no idea that you begin at one end of the book and turn the pages in a particular order, as their experience of literature in any form is limited or non-existent.

At this point in his school career, James was heard to ask: When are we going to get REAL books with WRITING in them? His teacher confessed that she had a hard time convincing him that this was a proper way to start learning to read. I explained that his dad had been reading him bedtime stories with LOTS of words for several years: by the age of five, they were having things like the Narnia series, The Hobbit, Swallows and Amazons, and other solid books, and had long grown out of things like Thomas the Tank Engine! But I still did the Good Mum and Worthy Teacher thing and sat down with him and his writing-free reading homework! Sometimes he got a whole 10 minute story out of one picture.
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