This article first appeared in NALDIC Quarterly 2.2. p 30-32
The school, uniquely in its inner-London Borough, has a specialised Speech and Language Unit, organised vertically into three classes for Foundation, Key Stage One and Key Stage Two. The children who attend these classes are drawn from a large geographic area, with some children arriving from out-of-Borough. The school is situated on the outskirts of the largest public housing area in the Borough and has attendant problems, such as racial tension, poverty and social deprivation. In excess of 50% of the children qualify for free school meals and children with English as an Additional Language amount to 76% of those on roll. The number of children with Statements of Special Educational Needs is 33, and of these 48.48% are bilingual. Sixty-nine pupils in Years 1-6 are currently on the SEN Register; 62.3% of these pupils have English as an Additional Language.
A recent OFSTED inspection found overall provision for SEN in the school to be “very good”. It praised the inclusion ethos of the Speech and Language Units and of the school as a whole.
Below I trace the route of a child from enrolment in the school through to his current position on the SEN register at ‘School Action Plus’.
Fabio arrived from Portugal in September 2002, but did not enrol in the school until the November of that year. The family spoke only Portuguese prior to their arrival in England but Fabio did have a smattering of basic English which he used to good effect in his early days at the school. Fabio had received no prior education and was placed in a very high-achieving Year 2 class. Coincidentally, a second Portuguese child enrolled on the same day whose education was similarly limited. From the start, the response of these two boys to their experience in school contrasted sharply. Fabio went willingly to school, while Luis was initially a violent school refuser so initially our concerns centered on him. Yet once Luis began to attend school willingly, we noticed other contrasts in behaviour. Fabio presented as a languourous child who had some difficulty forming friendships while Luis was gregarious and popular with other members of the class. The children embarked on a very protracted programme of phonics instruction and were presented with daily opportunities for writing. Luis soon learnt to write CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and began blending letters appropriately to develop his spelling further. Fabio was unable to recall even one letter sound, despite having received identical instruction. This accords with Cummins’ assertion that
Educational outcomes are a function of the interaction between child input and educational treatment factors; in other words, the same educational treatment can have very different effects on children who enter with different input characteristics (1984:94)
It was at this point that the class teacher put Fabio on the SEN register, some seven months after his arrival at school. We hoped that this would be a temporary measure, but felt that it registered our concern. It was clear that Fabio was experiencing great difficulties with literacy. Indeed, Alpren and McCall have written that:
Phonological difficulties are an important early indicator, since bilingual pupils often have heightened phonological awareness and develop good decoding skills at an early age of learning to read in English (2003:26).
This suggested to us that Fabio might have specific learning difficulties, or dyslexia. Soon after, we began to be concerned about Fabio’s pronunciation and grammar. This was extremely problematic as he was still at Stage 1 of the Borough’s descriptors of English Language Development. Yet we did have Luis as a comparison. In November 2003, I wrote a case study of the two boys for a working group I was involved with in the Borough. I asked the boys about aspects of the curriculum that they found difficult.
Fabio says, ‘Easy is the numbers, hard is the handwriting and reading’; and he claims ‘Science is easy. I can do science very well – I like science’. He wants to learn how to read ‘…so I can read Big Books’ in the literacy hour. Luis would like to do more ‘speaking with the teacher’, and would like additional help with maths and silent reading. Literacy skills are a shared concern and this is the key to accessing so much of the curriculum (Taped interview with pupils, November 2003).
This shows that both boys were experiencing some difficulties at school, as would all children at Stage 1 of ELD. Yet Fabio was becoming a real concern. His speech was of a low intelligibility and this was becoming a barrier to everyday communication. His pragmatic use of English was also very limited, and he had extremely poor topic maintenance. In addition to this, we were concerned about the frequency of inappropriate responses that Fabio made in class. We used the Hypothesis Testing approach (Hall, 2001; Alpren and McCall, 2003; Frederickson and Cline, 2002) and we discounted the possibility that Fabio’s difficulties might have been due to his need to learn more English (by this point his vocabulary was much larger than Luis’s was). We considered if Fabio’s lack of progress might have been due to issues with school, home or community, as suggested by Alpren and McCall (2003:20). We were left with the possibility that there may have been some additional form of SEN that we had not previously considered. We carried out a first language assessment, using the Borough’s format and a suitably trained bilingual assistant.
Fabio’s first language assessment did not, however, tell us anything new:
Fabio is enthusiastic but lacks concentration. Although he knew the book well, he went through it too fast to remember. Fabio turns around all the time. Forgets easily. He’s always interrupting, and knocking things over (Extract from first language assessment, September 2003).
I feel that the test would be greatly improved if it included a section on cognitive ability. The greater part of the test format is formed of closed questions that test basic understanding but little else. There is, moreover, no specific requirement for the bilingual assistant to comment on the clarity of the child’s speech.
We used a checklist for recognition of comprehension problems outlined in Morgan and Wright (1993:44) and we found that Fabio presented with four of the five triggers. Strengthened in our conviction that Fabio had some form of speech and language disorder, we referred him to the ‘Speech and Language Therapy Service to Mainstream Schools’ in October 2003. Following a six-month wait, Fabio received an initial assessment of his language skills. This stage involved an interview with Fabio’s parents, whose views were reported in the final report. The speech therapist noted:
He is reported to speak ‘broken’ Portuguese at home and his mother feels that he is experiencing the same difficulties in Portuguese as in English. Fabio is reported to have difficulties with concentration and attention unless he is interested in the task at hand. He is able to follow simple routine instructions in Portuguese (Speech and language therapist’s Initial Assessment Report, 14/4/04).
We were concerned that this element of ‘broken Portuguese’ was very significant. Research has shown that competence in a first language aids the development of a second language. This is what Cummins calls the ‘common underlying proficiency theory’:
The interdependence or common underlying proficiency theory implies that experience with either language can promote development of the proficiency underlying both languages, given adequate motivation and exposure to both either in school or in the wider environment (1984:143).
It appeared now that Fabio could be assigned any number of labels, but none of these appeared sufficient to ‘sum up’ Fabio and his specific needs. He might be dyslexic, have speech and language difficulties and have an under-developed first language. Yet it was by now the spring term of 2003, and Fabio was still unable to read a single word unaided and did not know his alphabet; labels were not going to help. We also found that research has shown poor reading and a lack of oral skills to be related:
Our results indicate that most poor readers have deficits in oral language and suggests that these deficits contribute to their reading problems. At the very least, these children lack the oral language skills to compensate for their deficits in phonological processing, word recognition deficits, or both (Catts et al., 1999: 356).
While it was agreed that Fabio required further speech and language support, we were informed that there was a wait of at least five months. We were, I admit, rather anxious about what to do next.
Cummins suggested that the act of writing itself would be helpful to children who are learning to read:
In other words, if children are exposed to a wide variety of written language and if they are allowed to continue to express themselves in writing, then errors will gradually approximate adult usage without explicit correction (1984:243).
Yet this approach had been taken since his arrival at the school with no apparent benefit. I decided to look closely at Fabio’s learning styles. Clay has written:
Perceptual, motor, cognitive language, affective and cultural factors contribute to literacy learning, and individuals differ in their profiles of these psychological functions. Children falling towards the low end of any measurement scale of such functions can be at risk in literacy learning because of a low in one type of responding (1992:72).
Using O’Malley and Chamot’s definitions (1990:46) I deduced that Fabio used predominantly cognitive learning strategies, notably imagery and inferencing. His social/ affective and metacognitive strategies were very weak, as he was easily distracted and he found it very difficult to work collaboratively. It was decided that Fabio would benefit from a structured whole-word approach that would ‘tap into’ his visual learning style and his favoured independence. The school invested heavily in the very old and often-derided ‘Fuzzbuzz’ reading scheme (1979), designed for children who have exhausted other avenues for learning to read. Words are taught by sight and they have an accompanying visual image, also available on CD-ROM. I was delighted by the overnight transformation that I witnessed in Fabio. He learnt to ‘read’ eighty words in four months, although some days he was more accurate than others. When Fabio acquired his first book, he read it to anyone who would listen. His self-confidence improved, he completed homework on a daily basis and the quality of presentation of his work was outstanding. Harris and Coltheart have criticised this approach to reading:
The major difficulty for the direct procedure is that the knowledge of reading that a child accumulates using this procedure is not general knowledge, and is of no use when the child is trying to read a new word. A child who has learned to read cat and hot using the direct procedure will not thereby be assisted when he tries to learn hat: the fact that hat has some sounds and some letters in common with cat and hot will not be relevant, because the child is not learning about the relationships of letters to sounds (1986: 84-85).
While I would not argue that this is the whole answer to Fabio’s reading difficulties, it has given him a start when every other approach to reading failed. He is still highly motivated and is recognising letters from the context of whole words that he knows and applying the sounds elsewhere. Recently, he read the word ‘tin’ without learning it first. Fabio explained that he knew the word ‘in’ (it was a previously learnt word) and he also knew ‘T’ because his father’s name began with the letter. He is beginning to apply the sounds of known letters and words to other contexts. This would have been unimaginable even four months ago. His Individual Education Plan (IEP) ensures that this work on the Fuzzbuzz scheme will continue. One other target provides him with the meaningful opportunity to practise taking oral messages to other staff in the building. He rehearses what he has to say, receives a reply and then delivers this reply to his classteacher. His classteacher reports that he is improving in such tasks as his exposure to them increases.
I conducted a taped interview with Fabio about his attitude to his work in July 2004. He decided that he had ‘quite a lot’ of help in his lessons at school, and highlighted an area where he required more assistance: ‘Help me sound out the letters; sometimes I don’t know them.’ (taped interview, July 2004).
We are awaiting a meeting with an educational psychologist. We know the extent of Fabio’s needs, but we will have to wait for the decision of a person whom Cummins describes as having ‘…considerable power and prestige, generated by the mystique of specialized knowledge and diagnostic insight.’ (1984:6).
This is our current stage of development with Fabio. He can’t learn from the Fuzzbuzz scheme forever, he is awaiting speech therapy and he is not accessing large portions of the curriculum satisfactorily. Yet he is a priority.
Alpren, R and McCall, J. (2003) Bilingual Pupils with Special Educational Needs: assessment and intervention. Wheathampstead : Hertfordshire County Council
Catts, H., Fey, M., Zhang, X.. and Tomblin, B (1999) ‘Language Basis of Reading and Reading Disabilities: evidence from a longitudinal investigation.’ Scientific Studies of Reading, 3(4), pp. 331-361
Clay, M. (1992) ‘A Second Chance to Learn Literacy: by different routes to common outcomes (The Reading Recovery Programme)' in Cline, T. (Ed.) The Assessment of Special Educational Needs: international perspectives. London : Routledge.
Cummins, J. (1984) Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy. Clevedon : Multilingual Matters.
Frederickson, N. and Cline, T. (2002) Special Educational Needs, Inclusion and Diversity. Maidenhead : Open University Press
Fuzzbuzz Reading Scheme (1979) Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Hall, D. (2001) Assessing the Needs of Bilingual Pupils: living in two languages. London : David Fulton Publishers
Harris, M. and Coltheart, M. (1986) Language Processing in Children and Adults : An introduction. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Morgan Barry, R. and Wright, J. A. (1993) ‘How to Recognise Speech and Language Problems’ in Kersner, M. and Wright, J. A. (Eds.) How to manage Communication Problems in Young Children. Bicester : Winslow Press
O’Malley, J. M. and Chamot, A. U. (1990) Learning Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press