Personal * Objects * Representation * Independence * Consolidation
For more information on using this book click on the relevant title.
PORIC will be useful for: -
Personal
Objects
Representational
Independence
Consolidation
These have arisen through (sometimes bitter!) experience.
The Overload Rule
The Development Rule
The Negatives Rule
The Relative Rule
The Comparatives/Superlatives Rule
The Semantic Confusion Rule
The Extra Cue Rule
The Generalisation Rule
Context
Towards a solution
Quantity
Complexity
Knowing where to start
For further information write, or telephone - see top panel, or email (click below).
PORIC is OUT OF PRINT and is no longer available.
PORIC Sequence, including the Golden Rules and the complete PREFACE by Ann Locke, author of Living Language (published by NFER Nelson)).
Introduction
PORIC has been produced following numerous requests for a manual giving practical ideas to be used for teaching concepts, preceding the use of Concept Consolidation.
Glinette Woods developed the PORIC method, aided by Deborah Acors, while working in a unit catering for primary aged children diagnosed as displaying severe and specific speech and/or language disorders.
PORIC can be used by parents in conjunction with Living Language and/or Concept Consolidation and in order to ensure following developmental levels.
* Children for whom English is a second language.
* Early Years - nurseries and reception classes where concept teaching is an important part of the curriculum.
* Children with learning difficulties who do not learn concepts incidentally but need to be taught them, introducing them at a slower rate than mainstream.
* Accessing some children to the National Curriculum which at present assumes children have these concepts at their disposal before they start.
The ideas in PORIC are suggestions based on the authors' practical experiences and their interpretation of the Living Language scheme by Ann Locke (published by NFER Nelson.)
PORIC therefore forms a basis which teachers, therapists, special support assistants and other professionals can adapt and add to according to the needs and circumstances with which they are faced.
PORIC does not provide an exhaustive list, but a starting point and a bank of ideas for when one "goes blank".
The ideas will need to be adapted in order to take into account: -
The concepts included in PORIC are most of those shown in levels in Living Language (published by NFER Nelson) and are presented in alphabetical order.
* local dialect and practises
* materials to hand
* interests of the child / adult
and so on.
Some concepts carry the symbol * which signifies that there are some factors of which the professional should be aware before proceeding with assessing or teaching that particular concept. These factors may include any of the Golden Rules set out in this introduction, plus tips arising from the authors' experience.
The PORIC Sequence.
The PORIC sequence provides a framework for teaching concepts showing a progression from the concrete to the abstract, from experience to verbalisation.
The first two sections emphasise teaching where the professional tells the child about the concept, using it emphatically and repetitively. They also emphasise the hands on approach. Educational visits are very beneficial here.
The child should then be encouraged to use the concept, first with the adult and then independently.
The professional will need to take into consideration the particular difficulties and stage of development of each child when deciding how strictly PORIC needs to be adhered to.
This stage involves the child personally with actions and experiences. The child does and feels the concept, and uses it in connection with personal issues. Actions, attributes, belongings and movement between children are utilised.
The child is taught concretely through reality, using real objects. A lot of adult involvement is still used. Actions with play people and other toys are used.
This stage provides a link from the concrete to the academic side of recording. Children need to recognise concepts in pictorial form. To many, this comes naturally, but some children require help. It is important to check that the child can interpret pictorial representation before assuming the concept can be used in classroom activities that involve reading, drawing and writing.
If children are having difficulty, photographs should be used first and then a progression through realistic pictures to line drawings.
PORIC provides 2 checks per concept for the pictorial stage, to be used with the accompanying pictures.
The next two stages encourage the children to use the concept themselves, independently of the adult. Parental involvement is particularly useful at this point.
Practical tasks are given to allow the child to use the concept independently without adult help.
The child is encouraged to use the concept in written form. Worksheets can be given so that the child reads, writes about and draws the concept. These worksheets can be devised by the professional, or pre-prepared, photocopiable worksheets can be found in Concept Consolidation Books 1-4 by Glinette Woods.
These worksheets can also be used for ideas at the Personal and Objects stages, and they provide visual evidence of concepts worked on, giving opportunities for revision, extra work by parents, etc.
PORIC indicates in which book(s) worksheets for each concept can be found.
Golden Rules
The Overload Rule *
The Development Rule *
The Opposites Rule *
The Negatives Rule *
The Relative Rule *
The Comparatives/Superlatives Rule *
The Semantic Confusion Rule *
The Extra Cue Rule *
The Generalisation Rule
The authors believe that there is a better chance of teaching concepts to children with speech and/or language disorders if one tries to understand the difficulties the children face. The Golden Rules show some of the many difficulties involved in learning concepts. There are many more to be found but the authors believe this is a starting point for continuing to access ways forward for children with speech and/or language difficulties.
Introduce no more than 4 target concepts at a time. The child may revise some concepts at the same time.
While teaching target concepts, remember not to use concepts that the child has not yet learned! Ann Locke's Living Language (published by NFER Nelson) provides a very good guide for this.
The Opposites Rule
* It is possible to confuse a child by teaching concepts in the wrong order.
* The developmental orders can be found in Living Language by Ann Locke (published by NFER Nelson).
* The levels can also be found in the accompanying Concept Consolidation Books 1 - 4 which give photocopiable worksheets for the concepts contained in PORIC.
* It is also strongly advisable to consult the child's speech and language therapist and/or teacher before embarking on a concept programme to ensure appropriateness and continuity.
* PORIC is ideal for parents to use in conjunction with Living Language and/or Concept Consolidation and in consultation with the Speech and Language Therapist.
Do not teach opposites together, and do not use the opposite while teaching the target concept. For example, if teaching tall, use not tall instead of short as a comparison. The child can easily confuse semantic labels even if the 2 concepts can be grasped together.
Remember to teach the negative side of each target concept, e.g. things that are tall and things that are not tall (they will not necessarily all be short!). Without the comparison the child may focus on irrelevant detail that the adult is unable to detect. For example, if only sad faces are shown when teaching sad, and the child focuses on the hair, nose or ears, the child may see all faces as sad.
An extension of this rule is to add the word "no" for those children who have difficulty with negatives. "No" is an earlier stage and easily understood, so saying, for example, "This is not tall, no" will be understood more easily.
Remember that many concepts are relative, so select materials accordingly to show an easily perceived concept. All size concepts are relative so, for example, if teaching small, objects are needed that are a lot smaller than the not small items. It is also prudent to be aware of the child's experiences. For example, if using 2 different sized toy buses the child may say they are both small in comparison with the bus in which he or she travels to school.
This is incorporated into the Living Language Scheme automatically, but if Living Language is not being used, remember to teach superlatives first and very separate in time from comparatives. Both the semantic labels and the concepts are very similar and can cause long-term confusion if taught together. Do not use comparatives while teaching superlatives - use "medium-sized" or " a bit tall" or "really tall" etc.
Watch out for this when choosing teaching materials. For example, when teaching heavy, if all the objects are also big then the child will confuse heavy and big. Similarly, when teaching cold make sure all the objects are not also hard.
For learning and consolidation to be achieved more speedily, use all the senses. Visual markers by signed speech, aural markers by voice emphasis, and encourage the child to use touch and smell where possible.
Use as many examples as possible while teaching each concept in order to avoid literal or limited circumstance learning. Parental involvement is invaluable here.PREFACE by Ann Locke
Context *
Towards a solution *
Quantity *
Complexity *
Knowing where to start
It can seem difficult, if not impossible, to teach spoken language to children who fail to acquire it in the usual way. The ability to understand and use spoken language normally evolves spontaneously in the course of everyday interactions with other people, well before school age. Children with severe language or communication difficulties have usually had much the same experiences as other children but have somehow failed to learn from them. This might suggest that they need to be taught in a totally new or different way. But it is not clear what alternatives there are and faced with children who seem unable to learn language for themselves, teachers may simply be at a loss what to do. Certainly, most direct efforts to teach these children to talk meet with limited success. The first step in the systematic teaching of spoken language is to appreciate why the task is so difficult, for both teacher and child.
Children normally learn language through hearing it used around them, in relation to their own activities and interests. Adults talk to them about what they (the children) are doing, about what is going to happen, or about what they might want or need. In this way language has both a practical and a personal relevance and reference, which enables the child to grasp what the words mean. But this type of experience, with children engaged in concrete physical activities, playing with objects or toys and using them for different purposes, and with adults constantly talking to them about what they are doing, is difficult to reproduce in the classroom - and the larger the class, the less physical involvement, and the less personal conversation there can be. It is not surprising that teaching language in school should prove so difficult - it is hard to imagine surroundings less appropriate for early language learning than the typical mainstream classroom!
The solution to this problem is to ensure that children who are having difficulty acquiring language, including older children, are provided with the concrete practical experience, and the supporting conversation from adults, which will enable them to learn. The content of this experience may be different for older children - they may be more interested in simple machines than in toys, more interested in adult tasks like cooking a meal than in playing and pretence - but the nature of the experience should still be the same. The child needs to be physically involved in practical activity with concrete objects, while an adult talks about what is happening or is going to happen, and encourages the child to respond, joining in a conversation. It is in these respects that the PORIC method provides a systematic basis for developing concepts that are essential in the child's ability to understand and communicate.
The next problem is the sheer amount of language that children need to learn. The number of words, and associated concepts, that children need to know by the time they start school runs into several thousands, and their vocabulary is expected to increase steadily through their school years. When grammatical competence, and the different ways of using language for different purposes, are added, the number of skills to be taught can seem overwhelming.
The only realistic way to deal with this problem is to use a language syllabus that specifies a developmental order in which specific concepts and skills can be introduced and taught. The content needs to be comprehensive, to prepare children for other learning and the various subjects of the National Curriculum, and flexible, to accommodate the differing knowledge and learning rates of individual children, who can then work through the syllabus at their own rate, spending more or less time on each item as needed. The syllabus in Living Language makes a useful start but it needs to be adapted and it can then be extended to cover all aspects of the National Curriculum.
A third difficulty is the complexity of most language. The meaning of nouns like dog or car that name tangible objects, or of verbs like run or jump that describe easily identifiable actions, should be relatively obvious. But it is much less clear what a more abstract noun like holiday or number refers to, and many verbs do not name a specific movement: give and put, for example, can apply to the same action. The meanings of adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are even less obvious and easily confused. Margaret Donaldson has shown that it is common for children aged around five or six to use the concepts less and more interchangeably. The children recognise that these words describe relationships of quantity but do not understand how they differ from each other.
Moreover, many words change their meaning in different contexts. This is demonstrated most dramatically with prepositions. Most children learn the word on fairly early: they understand that they climb on a chair or sit on mummy's lap. But then they are expected to put on their clothes, pin their picture on the wall, get on a bus, go on holiday, and are warned not to talk on their way to the hall, not to chat on the phone for too long, not to go on and on when someone else is trying to talk, and so on. It is not surprising that they sometimes get confused.
There are even more complexities in using words to form sentences. Most of us learn the rules of grammar so effortlessly that we hardly notice that they exist. Hence our difficulty in trying to explain or teach them to children who do not establish them spontaneously. And then there are the even more complex and even less obvious rules governing the use of spoken language in different social contexts. Most of us are hardly aware of these rules either, but individuals who do not establish them will have great difficulty communicating effectively with others.
Children learn the complexities of vocabulary and grammatical constructions from the different contexts in which they hear them used. An important aspect of vocabulary learning is understanding the concept to which the vocabulary applies. In order to help the children to understand concepts along with the language we use to communicate these concepts, the teacher needs to provide: -
· the active physical experience that gives initial meaning to the words (climbing on a chair, putting something on the table);
· gradual exposure to many different contexts and uses that will enable the children to understand and use language in more complex and more abstract ways.
The quantity and complexity of language also makes it difficult to know what to teach. Teaching should always start from what children know already, and then work through what they are in the process of acquiring ('the zone of proximal development'), but with language it can be particularly difficult to know what it is that children know or are currently learning. The development of language, especially in older children, is still only poorly understood, and once they are in school many children become adept at concealing their difficulties. As a result it can be difficult for teachers to establish at what level children are currently functioning, or what new skills they are in the process of acquiring. This in turn makes it difficult to know where to start, what to teach, or what progression to follow, especially when different children in a class are likely to be at different stages of development.
The solution to this problem too is to follow a structured language syllabus which is based on a developmental progression, so far as that is known, but which also builds in key items from all curriculum areas, to cover all the language which children need in school. By using a developmental syllabus and adjusting the pace to suit the individual case, the teacher can use the teaching process itself, rather than a separate assessment, to gain insight into the child's current level and development of language. This means, though, that learning needs to be checked regularly and systematically, to ensure that children do know what they seem to know, and retain the learning that they seem to acquire.
This is where the ideas and materials provided in the PORIC manual (with the associated Concept Consolidation Books 1-4) are so useful. Ideally, we should check children's learning through their spontaneous use of the items being taught, for this is the only way to be sure that they have become part of their working repertoire. But the time that this would take makes it unmanageable in most teaching contexts. The alternative is to use materials that enable the teacher to elicit items systematically, and from relatively abstract information. If children are able to produce an adjective, adverb or preposition from a black and white outline picture, it is reasonable to assume they will be able to use it with real objects and in familiar situations. If the checking procedure outlined in Living Language is also followed, there is a good chance that items that meet the learning criteria will be established and used spontaneously.
Everyday experience will always be the best forum for teaching spoken language, no matter the nature or degree of a child's difficulties. But checking learning is an essential part of the teaching process for many children with special needs. Some see this as a time-consuming and unstimulating process. The PORIC method makes it straightforward for the teacher and fun for the children.