Dr. Bram Brouwer

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Reading comprehension


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 Merel van Vroonhoven

Merel van Vroonhoven is an extraordinary woman who left a high position in the financial world to work as a teacher at an elementary school with many deprived children. In the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, she writes a weekly column about her experiences as a schoolteacher. On February 5, 2022, her story was about reading comprehension. In these lessons, children learn to attribute meaning to written language. They then link new information to their existing content end linguistic knowledge and develop reading strategies. Teacher Van Vroonhoven says about this:

Since I am a school teacher, I realize more than ever that a lack of language skills is the biggest inequally maker. Without reading comprehension, it is impossible to understand an information leaflet or a letter from the municipal or conclude a mortgage contract. Quite apart from what you lack in comfort, inspiration, and imagination in a bookless life.

 

0-3 behind

However, teacher Merel is not happy with her teaching method of reading comprehension, especially for her students with language delays. She says:

"My pupils are 3-0 behind. So, it's not so strange, these lousy Cito scores. It gives me a shiver. The American educational sociologist Bowen Paull calls this 'the prison of flow expectations'. With that, he means you lower expectations towards a child because of difficult circumstances instead of assuming growth possibilities and talent.
     It's not my children who need to change; my lessons need to change! The way we teach reading comprehension as a stand-alone skill is absolute torture. The children are just looking for signal and referral words instead of experiencing the context. It is not gaining knowledge but learning a trick. Even the most incredible book lover fan gets a spontaneous reading allergy from this.
     Ask Sacha to talk about battles, and he is unstoppable. Years, locations, weapons, names of generals, number of deaths. The same goes for Tom about music, Joshua about computers, and Aram about birds. When I tell them stories, they hang on me every word. They are hungry for each chunk of knowledge. But as soon as I start with one of the prefabricated reading and language lessons from the costly teaching methods, the fire disappears from their eyes. Joshua gets a headache, and Aram blocks."

The Cito-test is a compulsory test in elementary school in the Netherlands that watches a pupil's progress and recommends further education.

My story

Bram 150r
Dr. Bram Brouwer 

I don't recall that in my elementary school days, in the 1950s, we had to learn about reading comprehension, and the Cito-test had yet to be invented. Yet I think I exactly understand what teacher Merel meant. When I had to write an essay at the elementary school, my male teachers (I don't remember ever having a female teacher) were always enthusiastic about the context. I thought that was important, so I paid much attention to that. I could make up the most beautiful stories, always with a grain of truth. But then I got a failing grade because of the dt-errors. My teacher only assessed the technical language aspects of my essay, while the creative content played no role.

I must learn saddled me with phraseology and rules that dictate whether I should use only the root or the root+t of a verb. That is an essential rule in the Dutch language. With that 'logical' trick, I would never make dt-mistakes anymore. A Cito-test would undoubtedly have confirmed my poor language skills. However, according to teacher Merel, such a test only assesses the technical aspects of language, just like my master's. Such errors are easy to score objectively. You only have to count them.


I didn't get it, and I wasn't the only one


I didn't get it, and I wasn't the only one. Research revealed that the dt-error is the most common error in Dutch. The dt-trick is less logical than my teachers argued. I later discussed this regularly with linguists, especially after it turned out that I am good at logical reasoning. A logical dt-rule I have understood and mastered within five minutes. However, I still don't get it. As teacher Merel said, it's a trick, and I'm not good at tricks. I'm about content.

LTS

Because of my low marks for Dutch, I went to the Lower Technical School (LTS). That was the lowest level of further education after elementary school in the Netherlands in my school time. There I learned to work with my hands, and language was secondary. At that school, you learned tricks about how to do something. However, I wanted to know how things work. I didn’t learn that at the LTS. I didn’t feel happy at that school, especially when the teacher explained for the fourth time what I had already understood after the first time. I was bored to death.

I remember a battery class in which I went into depth with the teacher. He liked getting rebuttals, and that complicated the discussion for my classmates. After a test about battery, I got a ten, and my best classmate got a five. The teacher apologized for not realizing that my classmates could not follow the discussion between him and me. He didn’t make the test count. However, some teachers gave me a failing grade because I showed that he was wrong. I can still feel angry about that fifty years later.

Scared of language

After finishing the LTS, I became an electrician and later, in my own opinion, a creditable measurement & control technician. In my spare time, I became a cyclist and a speed skater. In addition, I started making long performance treks on my bicycle. First alone and later with Gonnie, my wife and life partner. We crisscrossed Europe by bike. All activities in which language skills play no role. With my poor language skills, it had been made clear to me that it would be better if I did not concern myself with language. I didn’t dare write a letter for a long time for fear that people would think I was stupid because of my language mistakes. I let Gonnie write those letters. She was educated as a teacher.

Yet writing

After my active sports career, I took the course to become a speedskating trainer and then a cycling trainer. I had to write essays for these courses, and they were highly rated. It shouts be noted that Gonnie edited my work linguistically. Encouraged by Gonnie, who offered to remove the language errors, I started writing articles about cycling training and the technical aspects of racing bikes. People responded that they knew how things worked because of my writings. That motivated me to pay more attention to my articles. Unfortunately, that collaborative process stopped when Gonnie suddenly passed away, and I fell into a deep black hole.


I fell into a deep black hole


After steadily rising out of that hole, partly because of my experiences after Gonnie’s passing, I became more and more interested in why people do what they do. I also took a course in autobiographical writing at HOVO (Higher Education for the Elderly), intending to write down our shared experiences. The teacher’s feedback and the reactions of my fellow students strengthened my self-confidence to pay more attention to writing.

Dissertation

 Rode bloedcel
Dissertation

Although the LTS, completed forty years earlier, was my highest education, at 55, I decided to enroll in psychology at the Open University in the Netherlands. I relied on my growing interest in people, my strengthened self-confidence in writing, and my life experience to dare to do that. I felt at home at that university, especially writing essays, theses, and scientific papers. But I also proved to be strong in statistics and logical reasoning. I graduated with honors as a Master of Science (MSc) in Psychology six years later. Another five years later, I obtained my doctorate at the same university with my thesis: The myth of the red blood cell.

Author

Including my dissertation, I am now the author of three books that you can buy in bookstores. I’m proud of that. However, the language ghost is still in the back of my mind. I don’t write bestsellers. That’s not my goal. I hold up mirrors to people about issues they don’t like to hear. I have also written several essays in newspapers, magazines, and websites. Due to health problems, a fourth book is on hold for the time being. The core of my work is always the search for truth. The focus is on an exact, unambiguous text and not on a beautiful story with excellent sentences. I try to make difficult and complex problems accessible to a broad audience based on science with my work.

Intuitive Writing

I call myself an intuitive writer who puts down his initially chaotic, jumbled thoughts on a subject. That leads initially to a text that is still incoherent and incomprehensible, sometimes even to me. Then, in a cyclic process, this text is rewritten, corrected, added to, and thinned out until I find it is suitable for my readers. Such a process can include fifty cycles or more.

Reding comprehensively, analyzing texts, and writing my conclusions clear is now my core business. In doing so, I meet a lot of substantive errors, such as fallacies. In those analyses, I don’t concern myself with signal and referral words or with phraseology in that process. More than that, it would distract my attention from the content. Perhaps this problem also applies to the pupils of teacher Merel.

Language is more than a language technique

I don’t worry about dt-errors anymore. I hardly ever make them. That’s not because I’ve learned the dt-trick, but because that problem is now part of my intuition. However, if you start talking about phraseology, or about signal and referral words, or the dt-trick, I still run away screaming. Phraseology distracts me from the content of my work. I have often debated with university-educated linguists, who argued writing well without mastering language techniques is impossible. I think they are wrong. You don’t have to understand everything that goes under the hood to drive a car well. If you have to design a language or auto, that technical language of car aspects is probably essential. If you use them, they are not. It is not a problem that others hold those language techniques, as long as they realize that it is not for everyone.


as long as they realize that it is not for everyone


Of course, my elementary school teachers had to correct my technical language errors. However, they should also have considered the content of my essays. In my opinion, the content aspects of a text are even more important than the technical aspects of a language. After all, you can quickly correct the language errors in an excellent written explanation of a complex subject. However, you cannot simply adjust the content in a poorly written description without language errors. Is that why official texts are so often difficult to read? Technical language errors are rare in such texts, intangible content all the more so.

As mentioned, my elementary school teachers ignored the content of my essays. As a result, it took until I was 55 before I discovered that scientific research and, in particular, writing about it is my passion. Without Gonnie’s sudden death, which forced me to reinvent myself, I may never have known that. However, then I wouldn’t have known what I missed either.

Back to teacher Merel

I think my history is about what teacher Merel meant. Maybe her Sacha, Tom, Joshua, or Aram, or one of the other pupils in her class, are precisely such intuitive writers as I am. Is Sacha, with his knowledge of battles, a historian in the making? Is Tom perhaps a future musician? Maybe Joshua is a potential computer expert. Or Aram is perhaps an aspiring biologist. However, that goes undetected because we only assess their technical language skills.

Suppose their creative language skills get more attention. In that case, that technical side will come after them, and otherwise, there are always correctors available. But those creative aspects are difficult if not impossible to score in a Cito-test. That test then measures not the children’s language skills but the language skill of those children according to the Cito standards. These are two different quantities. I hope Sacha, Tom, Joshua, and Aram don’t have to wait until they are 55 to possibly discover that they have much more capabilities than the one-sided Cito test reveals.

Teacher Merel about the cito test

In her column of February 19, 2022, Merel van Vroonhoven continues her criticism of the Cito test. She then writes:

Our sacred belief in ‘the numbers tell the tale’ reduces children to a dashboard of performance indicators.” Further, teacher Merel says: “Why do we place so much value on a Cito test that only measures relative ability to peers? Why do we use a test covering only a tiny fraction of the entire curriculum – arithmetic and a few measurable parts of language –to paint a full picture of a child’s capability? Why do we praise objectivity while the Cito test is less objective than it seems? That is what test expert Karin Heij finely explains in her shocking and worth dissertation, “Van de Kat en de bel’ (From the cat and the bell).
We have been chasing our offspring with Cito scores since the age of six, via six-monthly tests to pupil monitoring systems. We hang everything on it until further education and thus your entire future. Instead of seeing Cito scores for what they are, one of the many colors in the kaleidoscope sheds light on a child’s development. So, it is not surprising that parents – who can afford it – send their children to tutoring sessions for Cito and exam training. And that schools are increasingly focusing on those few measurable indicators that inspection judges them on.

I wish I had a teacher like Merel in my elementary school. Then my life would almost certainly have turned out very differently. I will close by saying that ‘the numbers tell the tale’ is a good starting point. However, we must realize that not everything we can measure is meaningful. And, there are many important things we cannot measure.

Notes

 1.  DT-fout 
 2.  Heij (2021)

Literature

Heij, K. (2021). Van de kat en de bel: Tellen en vertellen met de eindtoets basisonderwijs. (PhD Dissertation), Tilburg University, Tilburg. (link)

 

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Tussenregel


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Copyright © 2006-2022 - Dr. Bram Brouwer - All Rights Reserved

Engelse versie website

[382]

In 2020 and 2022, I tried to present my website in English through automatic translation. However, my texts turned out not to be so suitable for that kind of translation after all. Therefore, starting in 2022, I will manually translate my texts into English and do the same backward with earlier texts. You choose the Dutch or the English text via the appropriate flag symbol.

 

Although I do my best, I am not a native English speaker. So I am calling on your help to correct my mistakes. Please send an email with your comments via the contact page.

 

If you sent me a correction, please include the grayed number in square brackets at the top of the page on the right side.

 

Thanks in advance for your response.

 

Dr. Bram BrouwerT__

***

©  2007-heden - dr. Bram Brouwer

Engelse versie website

[382]

In 2020 and 2022, I tried to present my website in English through automatic translation. However, my texts turned out not to be so suitable for that kind of translation after all. Therefore, starting in 2022, I will manually translate my texts into English and do the same backward with earlier texts. You choose the Dutch or the English text via the appropriate flag symbol.

 

Although I do my best, I am not a native English speaker. So I am calling on your help to correct my mistakes. Please send an email with your comments via the contact page.

 

If you sent me a correction, please include the grayed number in square brackets at the top of the page on the right side.

 

Thanks in advance for your response.

 

Dr. Bram BrouwerT__

***

©  2007-heden - dr. Bram Brouwer