Vocabulary in Adult Literacy

We know that one of the key elements of success in learning to be a literate child is the size and scope of your vocabulary when you enter and navigate school.

We know that a smaller vocabulary than your peers can hold you back throughout primary and secondary school.

But little attention is placed on vocabulary when it comes to teaching literacy in adulthood, although logic dictates that it’s an issue that won’t magically disappear.

Is the vocabulary gap an issue for adult learners?

There’s danger in equating the size and scope of a vocabulary with intelligence, and I don’t believe there is any relationship between the two, except in that the measurement of both is fraught with fallacies.

Intelligence, like vocabulary, tends to provide a means of navigation and support for a particular environment. Because we are social and require individuals to take up different roles in order to survive as a group, our strengths of sense and mind vary in order for a whole community to survive and prosper. Any measure of intelligence can only be a measure of how well an individual reacts to a particular subset of circumstances, patterns, environments or challenges. We can’t possibly measure all the strengths we require as a group to prosper in one individual. We have cherry picked the facets of intelligence that we’ve deemed elite at various points in history and used these to measure and reward our “best” and “brightest”.

Similarly, the true size and scope of an adult’s vocabulary can only be measured in relation to the environment they find themselves in. Unlike a child learning to label brand new experiences, things and feelings, and linking and categorising the world for the first time, an adult has a lifetime of experiences and elements that they will by now be able to name. Living my life gives me a very different vocabulary to someone living in distinctly other circumstances, and we could not measure the size of our lexis against each other’s.

There isn’t really any point to measuring either intelligence or vocabulary in adults, anyway. Even if we could do it successfully, what would we do with the results?

So if we can’t measure a vocabulary gap, what relevance does it have to adult learning?

I think the vocabulary gap in adult literacy comes not from the size of an individual’s vocabulary, but from the type of vocabulary that a learner has access to.

All good readers have some words in their vocabulary that they don’t know how to pronounce. These are words that you’ve seen regularly in print, and have assigned a particular pronunciation to, that has never been tested by hearing the word said aloud.

For a while, quinoa was one of these words for me.

I saw the word ‘quinoa’ on packaging and in print many times, automatically assigning it the pronunciation: kwi-noyah.

I heard the word ‘key-nwah’ a few times, and did not associate it with quinoa until my daughter pointed out to me that it was one and the same.

If you are a good reader, chances are you’ll have seen this word in print many times before hearing it pronounced. When you do, you have a chance of matching the sound (Key-nwah) to the spelling.

If you avoid reading, chances are that even if you’ve heard the word a dozen times, you will never recognise it in print, and therefore never recognise it in its packaging in the supermarket.

Good readers recognise a word they have heard in context when they see it in print, even if it looks completely different to how it is pronounced.

But if you’ve never been a good reader, chances are your eye will slip off an unknown word and discount it as relevant information.

No amount of phonics teaching in adulthood is going to overcome this tendency to discount unknown vocabulary as useful information, because adults are busy, efficient and driven. To decode new words using a code that you have just been taught is tiring, inefficient and time-consuming. Let’s face it, the kids aren’t going to eat quinoa anyway, so there’s not much point in learning how to read the word.

But there are much more pertinent words that it would be really useful to have more widely known and understood. Like, oh, I don’t know, parliamentary sovereignty, perhaps; or proportional representation.

Outside of the adult literacy classroom, in the real world of stress, poverty, pain and the pursuit of pleasure in order to endure it all, decoding new vocabulary is not going to happen without some kind of burning need; like being able to read the names of the medicines you’ve been prescribed. Without intense motivation, adults won’t do the work. We’re built to specifically avoid unnecessary work, and decoding new vocabulary is usually unnecessary work.

In the age of bubble communities built through increasing financial and social inequality and reinforced by social media as well as traditional media, our lexicons might be growing apart. What we read and who we talk to influences what new words we learn and how we use these words to interpret and represent the world.

Here’s an illustrative example: can any of you over the age of 40 explain what all the terms in the acronym LGBTQIA mean, without Googling it? Caps off to you if you can. If you can’t, you are separated by at least one barrier from a generation that uses these terms to identify themselves and others.

Here’s another example: grief. Nobody actually talks about grief, except to bemoan the fact that they don’t know what to say to somebody who is grieving. Those of us who read widely know that there is literature and a whole language around grief that allows us to understand the process, centre ourselves in it and identify with others – to not feel alone. But those of us who don’t read would have no way of knowing that what they are experiencing is normal, shared and a process. Being able to access vocabulary around grief, being able to put a name against your experience, can make the difference between mental health and mental illness.

General vocabulary is not addressed in and of itself in the adult literacy curriculum, current or reformed. We only come close to addressing it in the new Functional Skills standards in the way we are asked to teach decoding using phonics, and spelling lists, based on what I judge to be highly conservative language principles.

The sheer futility of using the Dolch list, compiled in 1936 from children’s “literature”, as the basis for new Functional English standards for adults in 2019 boggles my mind. Do we really think that teaching ‘squirrel’, ‘paper’ and ‘doll’ is more important than ‘debit card’, ‘food bank’ or ‘children’s centre’?

Is it harder to learn new words as adults? It’s harder to learn a foreign language. But we learn what we need to learn or really want to learn throughout life, so why would vocabulary be any different? If we want or need to learn a few thousand new words, what would help?

I would hazard: opportunity; engagement; motivation to keep using it in order not to lose it; and access to high quality lifelong learning with a curriculum that explicitly teaches vocabulary to empower rather than disenfranchise.

So, to finally answer my own question, is the vocabulary gap an issue for adult learners? Yes, I believe it is. As to what we can do about it in the adult literacy classroom, that’s another chapter, to which your brave and innovative ideas are very welcome.

Hit me up in the comments section.*

*Blog speak for hopeful anticipation of audience engagement and participation.

Putting a Spell on You

To spell is a curse we English speakers cast upon ourselves, while a spell is powerful magic, stored in a collection of words that interact to change the world in miraculous and disturbing ways.

Abracadabra

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble

Wingardium Leviosa

Of course, we science-fixated, sophisticated adults living in the West don’t believe in all that ‘mumbo jumbo’. We roll our eyes at the idea that mere words affect the world we live in.

Except that they do. Words frame our thoughts, desires, emotions and connections. We are so reliant upon language as to be unable to interact in society without it.

I lost my voice for several months once, and it was the most profound experience I’ve ever had; but I still had language in my mind to frame the thoughts I couldn’t express aloud. When there is something in your mind but no word to explain it, trouble chases your thoughts endlessly. We give words to victims of trauma to explain the emotions they experience, and merely naming them – setting them in a context that other people have experienced too – sets them free.

Words hold our ideas in a tissue thin membrane of ‘common knowledge’. They bounce between us, gathering dust and changing shape until they are unrecognisable to their origins. They pull our attention with them, so that we understand the world in this way, rather than that.

Take  ‘the West’, for example. Putting any thought into that concept exposes the phrase as the misnomer it is. Which of us, exactly, live in the West? West of whom? West of where? Do I, living in wintry and docile Cambridge in England, share any values or experiences at all with Joe Soap on the hot streets of Phoenix, Arizona? Do we have more in common than either of us do with Mpho Mphumelanga in the broken farmlands of Botswana?

When I used the phrase ‘mumbo jumbo’, I looked up its origins on Wikipedia. We use the term to connote meaningless nonsense, but it is derived from a wholly meaningful cultural experience that must have had a profound effect on the people involved. It’s a fascinating, horrible story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbo_jumbo_(phrase)

I believe in magic. I believe in the magic of words, anyway. I believe that the words we use can change the way we think; and if we change the way we think, we change the way we act.

 Take the word ‘consent’. It’s a beautiful word. Gentle, accessible, easy to spell. The consonants flow around the simple vowel sounds peacefully. It’s a word you can say repeatedly without flinching at all. Very different to rape. There’s a harsh sounding word, if ever there was one.

 My daughter would like to educate her generation about consent.

 She can see the difficulty her peers have with sexual coercion, sexual violence, revenge pornography, intoxication, emotional and physical abuse. Whether this is worse than any other generation has experienced is unknowable, because of the hidden nature of these crimes in times past; but they are certainly more visible, more public now. People are suffering, and much of their suffering is made profoundly worse by it being published. ‘Shared’. Did you read the Wikipedia entry I gave you above? The woman who was selected to be stripped and beaten in public by the Maamajomboo would likely empathise with the girl whose assault was filmed and posted on the internet.

 But to educate children with such frightening power in their hands in the gross and subtle dangers of abuse, humiliation and violence is a task we have proven unequal to.

How much more effective it would be, to teach what it means to give and obtain consent. To teach that if you do not have the conscious and untainted-by-psychotropic-substances active agreement of each party involved, what you are about to do is wrong.

 With similar reasoning, I would dearly like to discard the bleak term ‘domestic violence’ in favour of the eminently more positive ‘domestic safety’.

 Domestic violence is something to flee. It is meant to encompass a range of aggressive behaviours that the phrase is not robust enough to hold. Almost no one believes themselves a victim of domestic violence. They may live with an emotionally and physically abusive tyrant, but that doesn’t mean they are one of those weak and pathetic victims they’ve seen on the telly, does it?

Domestic safety is something to strive for. Everyone can agree that people have the right to safety in the domestic sphere. We can believe in our expectation of safety from all kinds of things in our own homes. It’s empowering to join others in standing up for our rights – an entirely different notion than than the isolation of being a victim. It also means that we can search for different ways to be safer. Leaving is not the only, desperate solution.

I would like to weave spells out of words and cast them upon the world. I want the cleansing poetry of consent to settle upon the foul waters of sexual abuse; the marching band of domestic safety to cheer us on to better homes and brighter futures. I want the West to take off its hat and kick off its boots and settle down to listen to the stories and wisdom of other cultures. I want the Maamajomboo to join the Big Bad Wolf in the world’s collective consciousness.

I want all the phrases to put on their best frocks, polish their shoes and snap their braces to attention. We should dance to our words, not run from them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=os70A7Vbh6U

Mal-appropriate Words

It takes great courage to write, once compulsory education is over.

Everything we write in school is marked. It doesn’t matter what colour the pen, or how kind the hand that wields it, as pupils we are all fully conscious that each word we scribe will be judged by a person of authority.

For some, this is no great trauma. Children who are quick to assimilate rules (of spelling, punctuation and grammar as well as how to play the institutional game) thrive on encouraging constructive criticism.

A larger group of kids – the sensitive; the slower learners; those with a different learning style; the high proportion of people with some kind of learning difficulty; children whose focus lies elsewhere; almost anyone, really – assimilate the idea that no matter how hard they try, their written words will be found lacking in some way.

Truth be told, without personal editors (and even then), our words are often lacking – or plainly wrong. No one can spell everything in the English language correctly. Without knowing the etymology of every single word, it’s a physical impossibility. We make mistakes all the time, and isn’t it embarrassing when we get caught out?

And yet, how irritated do we get when we read other people’s mistakes?

I asked around, and the answer is hugely.

Here are some of the frequently misused words (predominantly homophones or close homonyms) that drive different individuals crazy:

• to/too
• lose/loose
• definitely/defiantly
• rain/reign/rein
• vane/vain/vein
• genuinely/generally
• bought/bout/brought/bough
• manner/manor
• peeked/peaked/piqued
• mantel/mantle
• pallet/palette/palate
• alter/altar
• their/they’re/there
• dudgeon/dungeon
• and my personal favourite, bear/bare

Interestingly, not one of the people who sent me their pet hates mentioned the same word as anyone else.

I’ve been pondering our double standards. Writers who dare to share their words in public are frequently as vilified as they are revered, ask E.L. James.

It’s no wonder few people write. Many, many Facebook users never share anything on their walls, let alone their own words. Only a tiny proportion of blog readers are prepared to comment on what they’ve read. As for writing a note to the teacher, who still does that? We pretend to be far too busy to use whole words and punctuation in texts, Tweets and emails, and no one can judge us for that, can they?

Yet we read other people’s words voraciously and critically. We scoff at their mistakes, heap scorn upon their style and grind our teeth at the errors that we love to torment ourselves with.

But I secretly love the creative misuse of language. For one thing, the fact that someone bravely disregarded his or her inner demon whispering ‘you’re no good, and everyone who reads this will know‘, makes me proud. I’m proud of the guts humanity continuously demonstrates in the face of its own ridicule; and I’m proud to be thought worthy of access to otherwise private thoughts. I’m proud to count myself amongst the brave souls who share their words in public; and I’m proud to be one of the few allowed to read the words of some of the most marginalised writers in society, adult literacy learners.

My second reason for this unusual form of voyeurism (a secret desire to see a lot of inappropriate language is a little kinky, don’t you think?) is that errors are intriguing to me. The more bizarre the word choice, the better the puzzle. I suspect other adult literacy specialists out there may feel the same way. Curiosity over the origins of an author’s errors excites me. And when I say author, I refer to any courageous individual who puts pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – when it’s not absolutely necessary.

Just look at these beautiful examples of mal-appropriate words:

• his syrup latent lips (laden)
• we could somehow condone him into letting you meet them (cajole)
• He would just get up, sunder through the club and then return. (saunter)
• her pert pink nibbles (nipples – how cute is that?)
• thrown to the waste side (wayside, but waste side is so apt)
• from her shoulders to her crouch (crotch)
• he jester with his hands for me to come closer (gestured)
• I got into plastic surgery, to help people who are disfigured and scared (scarred – but helping scared people seems more noble)
• Then the thought accrued to me (occurred)
• There cannot be any secretes between us (there can, however, be secrets)
• donates a large portion of her time and recourses (resources)
• the silver band that adored my neck (much nicer than adorned)
• Yarning awake (yawning)
• two of them as duel ring bearers (dual! But duel is awesome in this context, can you picture it?)
• at the store, I bought some beagles, croissants, muffins and fresh fruit (you may not believe I whittled this list right down, but I think you’ll agree that I saved the best – bagels – ’til last)

Mrs Malaprop* would be proud.

You can tell a story with intelligence, grace and sensitivity and still spell a dozen words or more per chapter wrong. It doesn’t make you bad; it doesn’t even make you a bad writer. It does illustrate the need for more freely available editors, but honestly, where’s the fun in that?

* From Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 comedy-of-manners, The Rivals.

Demons writ it.

Where does grammar come from?

It doesn’t come from books. It isn’t agreed upon by university committees or issued in an edict from an elected authority. Experts may study it and write about it, but none of them will take it upon themselves to say ‘this is how grammar must be‘ (except in France).

 I see grammar as more of a living, breathing animal. Like a demon from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, it follows us through our speaking lives, never leaving our sides. It whispers in our ears about how we should say things, and it feels anxious and afraid when we say things the wrong way.

Grammar seems to be fairly independent of parental influences.

 Both of my daughters, very early on in life, used the word ‘writ‘ as the past tense of ‘to write‘. This seems to be common amongst children in Cambridgeshire.

 “I writ a letter to Father Christmas, Mummy!”; “He writ it, but she got in trouble.”; even “They writted all over his cast when he broke his arm!”.

 My husband and I have never used writ in this context. No adults that we know, no family members, certainly no teachers, have ever, to our knowledge, used anything other than wrote or written to indicate writing that has already happened, either in speech or text.

 The extraordinary thing is that the children began to use this word before they learned to write at all. It is hard to imagine writing as a hot topic amongst toddlers in the playground. I can believe that our younger daughter learned her grammar from her big sister, but where did daughter number one pick it up?

 It also stayed in their vocabulary for much, much longer than ordinary ‘learning to speak’ misconstructions. My oldest daughter, and all her friends, were still using writ in their every day language in secondary school.

 We discussed it – often. And the conclusion we came to was that it was a Cambridgeshire thing, picked up from the environment like the accent and the inability to walk or cycle up hills.

 The children’s grammar demons must have decided on it. They must have gathered together while their little people were playing, and had meetings about past participles and vowel phonemes. They must have decided they were an independent bunch, and would speak the way they wanted to, thank you very much.

 Grammar Girl talks about a similar unique grammatical construction in the midlands of America in this witty and accessible blog post. I recommend it – it needs read.

I writ my thoughts, and I look forward to hearing about any demon-led grammatical constructions you might share. We could collect them and give them to the grammar police to record in their big book of acceptable language.

 Oh! That’s right – we don’t live in France, so we don’t need to do that.

And relax, grammar-demon.