Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Glossary
[pages 585 - 595]

Accent The way in which language or dialect is pronounced, commonly regarded as indicating the nationality, region, or social class of the speaker.

Accidence Changes that occur in the forms or inflections of words to indicate tenses, singular and plural, etc. e.g. climb/climbed, ox/oxen, table/tables,

AEC Association of Education Committees.

Aides, Teachers' Trained ancillaries whose purpose is to give substantial help to teachers within the school.

Allophone One of the variant forms of a phoneme or individual speech sound, e.g. the way 'n' is sounded in 'thin' is different from that in 'nose'. The two are therefore different allophones of the phoneme 'n'.

Alphabetic Analysis A reading method in which the child says the names of the letters, e.g. see-aye-tee 'cat'.

ATCDE Association of Teachers in Colleges and Departments of Education.

ATO Area Training Organisation. A regional organisation which is usually part of a university and is made up of colleges of education and departments of education. Its role is to supervise the training of teachers in the region and also to provide courses and conferences for serving teachers.

Auditory Acuity Sensitivity of hearing.

Auditory Discrimination The ability to discriminate between the sounds of words or syllables, detecting similarities or differences.

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation.

BEd Bachelor of Education. A combined degree and professional teaching qualification which is awarded at the end of a four-year course at colleges of education and various polytechnics. Current proposals are for a three-year course which will entitle the student to a pass degree whilst a four-year course would give an honours degree. Both courses will be recognised for teaching purposes.

Blending Ability to link together the constituent sounds in a word while pronouncing them separately, as in gr, pi and a consonant-vowel blend as in da, sto.

Breakthrough to Literacy A set of materials designed to enable the child to build up words and sentences and to learn to read through using the language he produces himself. This integrated approach derived from a programme set up to study linguistics and the teaching of English.

Burnham Committee (Properly the Burnham Primary and Secondary Committee). A committee consisting of representatives of teachers, local education authorities and the Secretary of State for Education and Science, constituted to negotiate teachers' salaries.

Capitation Allowance An annual allowance allocated to schools by the local education authority for the purchase of books, consumable materials, and equipment. The allowance is made on the basis of so much money per pupil, and the sum varies according to age.

Ceiling Effect A limitation of the value of a test which results from the fact that the most difficult items are too easy for many of the more able pupils (see annex to Chapter 2).

Cloze Procedure A procedure which involves deleting or omitting words in a text on a systematic basis. The reader is required to insert appropriate words with the help of the context. Cloze procedure can be used to measure reading attainment and the level of difficulty of any given book.

CNAA Council for National Academic Awards. This was established by Royal Charter in 1964 to provide more opportunities for students to take degree courses in the colleges of technology. CNAA degree courses are available mainly in the Polytechnics.

Coding Scheme A device for assessing accuracy in certain features of a piece of writing, e.g. spelling, punctuation.

Colour Coding The use of colour to provide additional clues to the value or function of letters in the early stages of learning to read. It may consist of a complex system where every phoneme is represented, or a simpler system in which the more general functions rather than the sound values are signalled.

Comprehensive School A non-selective school intended to cater for the secondary education of all the children in a given area. The majority of such schools take the children from 11 to 18, but there are alternative forms. In some cases there is a two-tier system with a break at 13 or 14; or a three-tier system involving 'first', 'middle', and 'upper' schools. Another variant is 11-16 followed by sixth form college from 16+.

Context Cues Words, phrases, or sentences that occur directly before or after a given word and help the reader recognise the word and its meaning.

Controlled Vocabulary Vocabulary of an early reading book in which the rate of introduction of new words and the number of repetitions of those words are carefully controlled, the principle being that the child can thus 'over-learn' rather than have to cope with an unrestricted number of unfamiliar words.

Creole A form of language resulting from a mixture of English and the native languages spoken by West Africans who were taken to the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries.

CSE Certificate of Secondary Education. A subject-based examination usually taken at 16+ and administered regionally by fourteen boards in England and Wales, with the option for schools of external or internal syllabuses and assessment. The highest grade awarded is equated with a pass at O Level of the GCE. (q.v.).

CSO Central Statistical Office.

CSV Community Service Volunteers.

Day Nursery Establishments where children under 5 can be left while parents are at work. Most are maintained and staffed by the social services departments of local authorities, but some, attached to hospitals, are run by area health authorities.

Decoding A term applied to the reading process to signify the translation from unfamiliar written symbols into familiar language.

DES Department of Education and Science. (Originally the Board of Education, until 1945, and Ministry of Education, 1945 to 1964).

Diacritical Marking A system of adding graphic signs to letters to indicate their correct sound value. It preserves traditional spelling, but the marks are added to help the reader cope with situations where the phonemes and graphemes do not correspond.

Dialect A form of language in which the grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary associate it with a particular region or social class.

Digraph Two letters which come together to represent a single sound and lose their individual identity in the process, e.g. ch as in cheap.

Diphthong The continuing of two vowel sounds to make a single sound, e.g. the o and i in 'moisture'.

DipHE Diploma in Higher Education A qualification to be awarded after two years' study in higher education; the standards of entry and of assessment will be comparable with those of the first two years of a degree course. While available as a terminal qualification, it will normally be followed by further study leading to a professional qualification or a degree.

Dyslexic A term used to describe children who experience a difficulty in learning to read that cannot be accounted for by limited ability or by emotional or extraneous factors. The term is not susceptible to precise operational definition. (See Children with Specific Reading Difficulties The Tizard Report, HMSO 1972.)

Elaborated Code A term devised by Professor Bernstein to describe a form of language which can produce considerable degrees of verbal differentiation.

English Speaking Board An association devoted to the improvement of speaking ability; as one of its activities it conducts examinations and awards certificates.

EPAs Educational Priority Areas. A concept introduced in the Plowden Report to denote areas with a high incidence of social and educational deprivation. It recommended that such areas should benefit from positive discrimination - i.e. an allocation of educational resources higher than would ordinarily be provided.

ESN Educationally subnormal children are 'pupils who, by reason of limited ability or other conditions resulting in educational retardation, require some specialised form of education wholly or partly in substitution for education normally given in ordinary school' (Ministry of Education The Handicapped Pupils and Special School Regulations pamphlet No. 365, HMSO 1959).

Education Welfare Officer An officer employed by the local education authority for school attendance and welfare work.

First School A school that caters for children from the age of 5 to the age of 8, 9, or 10, and is normally the first stage of a three-tier system.

Functional Literacy See paragraph 2.2.

GCE General Certificate of Education. A subject-based examination administered regionally by different boards in England and Wales. Ordinary ('O') level is normally taken at 16 and Advanced ('A') level at 18.

Grammar The rules and usages of a language which determine the way its words are ordered (syntax), and the changes occurring in those words to make them serve a particular function (accidence).

Grapheme A printed or written symbol which stands for a particular sound in a language.

Hadow Reports Reports of the Consultative Committee under the Chairmanship of Sir Henry Hadow: The Education of the Adolescent (1926), The Primary School (1931) and Infant and Nursery Schools (1933).

Health Visitor Health visitors maintain a link between medical and nonmedical social services, visiting children's clinics and the homes of all children under two years of age.

HMI Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools.

IBA Independent Broadcasting Authority, formerly Independent Television Authority.

Idiolect The form of a language spoken by an individual as distinct from a group, class, or nation.

Informal Reading Inventory A means of determining and recording a child's reading skills by observing his behaviour in a reading situation the teacher has devised for the purpose.

ILEA Inner London Education Authority.

Illiterate See paragraphs 2.1-2.4.

Impression Marking A process of giving a grade or mark to a piece of a work on general impression and without the use of sub-totals for different aspects or qualities of the performance. It is usually used in multiple-marking, the mark assigned to a piece of work being the sum total of two or more impression marks by different examiners.

IMTA Institute of Municipal Treasurers and Accountants, now the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.

Induction Year The induction year is an improved probation which gives the new teacher a lightened work load, and further training occupying one-fifth of his working time. It is proposed that during this year he should receive guidance and support from a specially appointed 'professional tutor'.

Infant School A school for pupils aged 5 to 7 years; it is sometimes part of a primary school and sometimes a separate school.

In-Service Education Continued education and training of serving teachers.

Integrated Day A form of class or teaching group organisation which provides for a variety of activities (reading, mathematics, art) to be undertaken by different children at the same time. It is usual for the class to be taught together for other parts of the day.

Integrated Studies or Integrated Humanities An arrangement in a secondary school by which a number of subjects are grouped together and taught in close relationship to one another, e.g. history, geography, religious education and English.

Interlinear Tests The interlinear test is one of several objective-type methods used to test capacity in English usage. Typically it consists of an ill-written piece of prose which is presented to the candidate with instructions to correct or improve the English.

Intonation The sequence of pitches that produces the 'tone' of an utterance and plays an important part in conveying the meaning. The intonational tone of a question, for example, usually features a rising pitch at the end.

Item Pooling Used in monitoring assessment, an item pool is a collection of carefully developed items which are drawn from a variety of sources and which will ensure an extensive coverage of the area to be assessed.

i.t.a. initial teaching alphabet. Designed to help beginners to learn to read on the basis of 44 visual symbols. The system seeks to avoid the difficulties normally associated with early stages in reading when the child has to cope with the irregularities of English orthography.

James Report Teacher Education and Training Report of a Committee of Inquiry under the chairmanship of Lord James, HMSO 1972.

Joint Four The Joint Four Secondary Associations (The Incorporated Association of Head Masters, the Association of Head Mistresses, Assistant Masters Association, Association of Assistant Mistresses).

Kinaesthetic Perception through the sense of touch and movement.

LEA Local Education Authority.

Learning Set An acquired tendency to respond in a way that will produce a successful solution to a particular problem, e.g. learning to look along a line of print from left to right; learning to attend to the shape of a letter while ignoring such irrelevancies as its size.

Lexis The words of which a language consists; more commonly called 'vocabulary'.

Linguistics The scientific study of language, concerned with producing a complete description of a language and obtaining information about the nature of language in general.

Linguistic Method A term used to describe a method of teaching reading by which words are graded according to the complexity of the spelling.

Logograph A symbol that stands for a whole word.

Look and Say A method of teaching reading in which the child is taught to respond to whole words rather than to attend to the separate parts of words.

Medium In reading terminology the form in which written language is set out on the page. This can be either the conventional form, when it is known as traditional orthography, or one in which a modified alphabet is used, as in i.t.a., or a simplified spelling system. A further variant is the traditional alphabet used with special marks or colours. (See diacritical marking and colour coding.)

Methods The word used to represent different ways of beginning reading instruction. For examples, see 'Look and Say', Sentence Method, Alphabetic Analysis, and Phonics.

Middle School A school that caters for pupils in the age ranges 8 to 12, 9 to 13, 10 to 13, or 10 to 14, and is the second stage of a three-tier system.

Miscue A context cue (q.v.) which in a given situation misleads a reader so that his anticipation of a subsequent word is incorrect.

Monitoring A term used in the text to denote the measurement of attainment in schools throughout England by means of random sampling.

Morpheme The smallest unit of language which has a grammatical function; e.g. 'van' and 's' in 'vans', and 'eat' and 'ing' in 'eating' are all morphemes, and each carries meaning.

Morphology The branch of grammar which is concerned with inflection and word formation.

Multiple Choice Tests In a multiple choice test the questions are followed by three or four alternative answers, one of which is the correct or 'preferred response'. The candidate records his answer by indicating one of the answers given.

NAHT National Association of Head Teachers.

NARE National Association for Remedial Education.

NAS National Association of Schoolmasters.

NATE National Association for the Teaching of English.

National Book League A body whose object is to promote reading and an appreciation of the value of books.

NCDS The National Child Development Study is a longitudinal study of the development of a cohort of 15,468 children born in England, Wales and Scotland in March, 1958.

NCTE National Council of Teachers of English (USA).

Newbolt Report The Teaching of English in England Report of the Committee of Inquiry under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Newbolt, HMSO 1921.

Newsom Report Half our Future Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education under the chairmanship of Sir John Newsom, HMSO 1963.

NFER National Foundation for Educational Research in England and Wales. The functions of the NFER are to encourage, organise, coordinate and carry out educational research, its primary concern being the study and resolution of such practical problems as arise within the public system of education and are amenable to scientific investigation.

NNEB National Nursery Examination Board; a central examining body which grants certificates for qualification as nursery nurse.

Norm A mean or median score for an age group of a representative population in an intelligence or attainment test.

NS6 Test National Survey Form 6. One of two tests used in the national surveys of reading standards. Devised in 1956 as a multiple-choice test of the incomplete sentence type; it has 60 items and a 20 minute time limit.

Nursery Nurse A trained person who assists qualified teachers in nursery school, class or group and who holds a certificate of the National Nursery Examination Board.

Nursery Class A class which is attached to a primary school and contains children aged 3 to 5; there may be more than one such class attached to a school but none must exceed 30 places.

Nursery School A school providing education for children from 3 to 5.

Nursery Unit A unit, not exceeding 20 places, which provides nursery education for children from 3 to 5.

NUT National Union of Teachers.

Orientation The direction in which letters and words are read along a line of print.

Overlearn To learn beyond the point at which the skill or process is first shown to have been mastered.

Paralinguistic features Aspects of spoken communication which do not reside in the words themselves but nevertheless contribute to the meaning, e.g. intonation, loudness and speed of utterance, facial expression.

Percentile An individual's position on a given dimension, as expressed by the percentage of other people who are at or below that position.

PGCE Post Graduate Certificate of Education; a certificate which confers qualified teacher status and is awarded on the results of a one year course of professional training taken by graduates or those with similar qualification.

Phoneme The basic sound unit of a language. Phonemes are identified from one another by contrast.

Phonetics The study of individual sounds in speech.

Phonic Method A method of teaching reading where emphasis is placed on the sound values of individual letters, or groups of letters, with the object of helping the child to blend sounds to form words.

Phonic 1 and Phonic 2 Terms used in the survey questionnaire to distinguish between phonic approaches which emphasise respectively (a) the sound values of individual letters, digraphs and diphthongs, and (b) the sounds of syllables.

Plowden Report Children and their Primary Schools Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) under the chairmanship of Lady Plowden, HMSO 1967.

Pre-Reading Exercises Exercises and activities designed to help children acquire the generalised learning sets which provide the essential bases for reading.

Pre-school Play Groups Voluntary part-time play groups for children under 5.

Primary School A school at present catering for children from 5 to 11 or 12.

Probationary Year The first year's full-time service of a qualified teacher, during which he must satisfy the Department of Education and Science of his practical proficiency as a teacher.

Rate Support Grant The RSG system is the principal means by which the government gives financial assistance towards the costs of services provided by local authorities. The estimated total expenditure of all local authorities on all services (education being only one) is determined by annual forecasts made jointly by government departments and local authority associations. The 'relevant expenditure' so determined is then used as a basis for deciding what proportion shall be paid by the government as RSG, and a formula is decided for the apportionment of the total RSG to each local authority.

Readability The difficulty level of reading materials, usually measured by the familiarity of the words and the length and complexity of the sentences used.

Reading Age See note 3 to Chapter 2.

Reading Laboratories and Workshops Collections of assignment cards and other devices designed to give practice in reading comprehension. The material is devised in accordance with some of the principles derived from the field of programmed learning.

Reading Scheme A graded series of reading books and related materials for the teaching of reading in the early stages.

Received Pronunciation The least localised pronunciation of English as spoken in Britain.

Redundancy The presence of more items in a message than the reader or listener needs for the purpose of receiving it.

Register of Language The kind of language appropriate to use for a particular purpose in a particular situation.

Reliability of Tests The extent to which a test will give the same scores on different occasions.

Restricted Code A term devised by Professor Bernstein to describe the language of a group with shared assumptions such that its members do not feel the need to make verbal differentiations.

Reversal Reversing a letter or word when reading or writing, e.g. d for b, or pat for tap.

Sampling The selection of a proportion of the total population in such a way that the results of a test applied to this proportion will indicate the characteristics of the whole.

Scanning Reading in such a way as to locate specific information within a piece of writing without reading it in its entirety.

Schools Council Schools Council for Curriculum and Examinations; a body set up in 1964 to keep under review curricula, teaching methods and examinations in schools, including aspects of school organisation so far as they affect the curriculum. Its membership includes representatives from local authority and teacher associations and the Department of Education and Science.

School Health Service Under the terms of the National Health Service Reorganisation Act, 1973, the school health services, previously the responsibility of local education authorities, became part of the child health services provided by Area Health Authorities within the reorganised National Health Service.

SLA School Library Association; an association devoted to the interests of library work in all its aspects in schools.

School Library Service A local authority service which maintains a link between schools and the public library, providing schools with long-term book loans, and providing various other facilities to support teachers in stimulating interest in books.

Screening The application of certain procedures to a denned population of pupils, usually a whole age group, to identify pupils likely to experience learning difficulties.

Semantic Relating to the meaning of words.

Semi-literate See paragraph 2.4.

Sentence Method A form of the 'Look and Say' method of teaching reading, by which the child is taught to respond to whole sentences in the earliest stages.

Setting The practice of grouping according to ability for certain subjects, the age group being divided into differently constituted 'sets' for each individual subject concerned.

Sight Words Words recognised immediately by the reader without his having to go through the process of breaking them into constituent parts.

Skimming Reading in such a way as to gain a general impression of what a particular piece of writing is about, by going through it rapidly and giving attention to key words, phrases, and sentences.

Specific Reading Retardation A term which has been used to describe children whose reading ability is characterised by severe difficulties which are not accountable for in terms of low intelligence and which are not explicable merely in terms of the lower end of a normal distribution of reading skills.

Standard Error A measure of the uncertainty inherent in a sample mean as an estimate of the population mean. It is computed by dividing the standard deviation of the sample by the square root of the number of items. (See note 14 to Chapter 2.)

Standardisation of Tests The process of establishing norms or standards for a test; this might include norms of administration, size of print, spacing of words/sentences, duration of the test, marking or scoring instructions, and interpretation of scores.

Stochastic Process Any process governed by the laws of probability. In the case of the language process, the expected probability of occurrence of any single element or sequence, from the point of view of the reader or listener, is governed by the immediate context and his previous personal experience of similar kinds of context.

Streaming Grouping of children in an age group according to ability.

Structural Grammar A grammar intended to explain the working of language in terms of the functions of its components and their relationships to each other without reference to meaning.

Syntax A branch of grammar concerned with sentence structure and the rules governing the relationships between words in a sentence.

Syntactic structure The arrangement of words in relationship to one another within a sentence.

t.o. The abbreviation for traditional orthography, which refers to the normal use of the 26 letter alphabet when it is employed according to the accepted rules of the English spelling system.

Teachers' Centre A centre where teachers meet to exchange ideas and share experiences, prepare materials for use in their work, and receive support in the form of local in-service courses. There are some 500 such centres provided by local authorities in England and Wales, and they differ widely in their activities, accommodation, and facilities.

Transformational Grammar A grammar that assigns structural description to sentences and relates deep structures to surface structures, i.e. relates the abstract structures postulated as underlying sentences to the actual utterances.

UDE University Department of Education; university department providing a post-graduate course of professional teacher training.

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

Validity of Tests The extent to which a test does in fact test the ability it purports to measure.

Vertical Grouping An arrangement by which children are not grouped strictly according to age; new pupils, instead of being placed all together in a reception class, are attached to groups containing children ranging in age from, say, 5 to 7.

Visual Discrimination Ability to detect differences between visual patterns. Involves differentiation of letter forms, word patterns as well as discrimination of gross forms such as pictures and geometrical patterns.

Vocabulary The words of which a language consists. Applied to an individual child the term stands for the total number of words he is able to use or can recognise when reading or listening.

Watts-Vernon Test One of the two tests used in the national surveys of reading standards. Devised in 1947 as a silent reading test of the incomplete sentence type; it has 35 items and a ten minute time limit.

Word Recognition Test Usually a standardised test of the ability to read aloud single words. The words are graded in difficulty and the tests yield scores which can be converted into Reading Ages.