Chapter 2 in the text focused on classrooms being linguistically diverse places and the areas of language use and language development. One thing that I found interesting out of the chapter was how Standard English is said to be the language of power in the United States. Many students come into classrooms with language derived from their cultural and social backgrounds and yes students need to know Standard English but their home language use should also be recognized. Both the correctionist and contrastive approaches to issues of dialects both have flaws. The correctionist approach corrects nonstandard language use but if fails to recognize the child's home language, while the contrastive approach fails to recognize that children must know Standard English. I can not say whether I agree or disagree with either of these approaches.
Daily Oral Language (D.O.L.) is an activity that I remember doing when I was in elementary and middle school. I remember doing this almost everyday in Language Arts and I never really got anything out of it. I did not realize that this was not a productive approach. This makes me think about the hundreds or thousands of teachers who use D.O.L. activities, but do not know that this is not really helping their students. Before I read this text I had contemplated doing D.O.L activities in my classroom, but now I know that the best way to learn about language is through the use of authentic texts. When I begin teaching Language Arts, authentic texts and authentic experiences will be key to helping my students learn about language uses and rules.
A third thing that the chapter discussed that I found very helpful was phonemes and phonemic awareness. I found table 2.6 on page 51 very helpful because I know that I will have to help my students understand and develop phonemic awareness and this will be a great guide to use. While I was reading this chapter I thought about the young lady who came to speak to our class about how she had trouble understanding and recognizing phonemes. I find it very interesting how some students can go their entire educational careers without being phonemically aware. The only way they were able to learn was through memorization of words.
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I also thought it was really interesting that D.O.L.s are not very productive or meaningful activities. During middle school and high school, we would do these activities very often. I also like the approach that the book describes where teachers work on the rules of language when students are using language. Thinking back to when I was in school, I always learned a lot through conferencing and editing my own writing. I agree that authentic texts and experiences will help our students learn.
ReplyDeleteI also remember doing D.O.L activities in elementary school and I also remember not getting anything out of these activities. I think that these activities are lost on many students, and that immersing them into the language is the best way to teach students “Standard English.” I think that we really saw this when we went to Carrboro Elementary and saw these young students speaking very good Spanish in addition to fluent English. While these students are placed into these dual language classrooms from a young age (kindergarten) and they are enrolled by their parents which would indicate strong parental support at home which not all students that are learning the Standard English. These D.O.L activities may help students that are struggling with language, but since I did not really struggle in elementary school, I did not benefit from these activities and I can not say whether or not it would benefit a struggling student. Honestly I think that teaching the students the chart that you found through various activities would be more beneficial to the student then those D.O.L activities.
ReplyDeletePHONICS. Let's talk about Phonics. Liz, I know you and I have talked about phonics and Hooked on Phonics, etc. I have to plug it just one more time though - the Phonics Dance is amazing. Kids love it. The teachers love it. It's an expensive program, but even my cheap self would buy it. Yay phonics. :)
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