Language World 2010 - Cynthia Martin
The Keynote on Saturday morning at Language World was delivered by Cynthia Martin, President of ALL this year, and was report on research that she and others have carried out into Primary languages. Rather than try to write it all down, I took lots of pictures of the slides and made a movie. And here are a few comments that I hope will shed light on the slides.
The researchers took 40 schools who they felt would be representative of the country. Al were early adopters of PLL so the study was looking at oracy and literacy, and the potential problems facing them as they worked towards the four year entitlement. On the whole, staff were found to be positive and committed but acknowledged concerns.
General finding were that there was an increasing focus on phoneme/grapheme links but that this had not yet made a big effect by 2008-9 and that verb useage in writing was poorer than in spoken activities, but that comprehension was very good. Most pupils enjoyed their lessons and the vast majority of them were looking forward to further learning at secondary school, listing their least favourite thing as 'going over the same things over and over'.
The full report can be downloaded from the DCSF website, all 170 pages of it! Or you can go for the 7 page summary ;o)
I found the session really interesting - and encouraging too. Wonder what the findings would be a year or two on?
I took a Web Behaviour Test as part of BBC's The Virtual Revolution - investigating how 20 years of the web has changed our lives. 
