KGZ, Discovery of Competence, Ch. 7

Reading Chapter 7, Extending Competence, made me want to read Chapter 6.  I have not had the time to do so yet, but I think that chapter will be important for me in my planning for my teaching unit.  That said, the main ideas of the chapter are as follows (at least as I understood them):

• Literature is not only written, but also spoken.  As teachers, we can use the spoken stories that students have heard in their family or friend circles as a way to help students understand how we “make meaning” in our everyday lives. 
• This helps students see themselves as tellers and interpreters of the world around them.
• We all command a range of styles of language use. 
• The way we use language is dependent on what discourse community we are working in. 
• Academia is just one example of a discourse community; by helping a student look at his/her own discourse community and the standards in it, we can help him/her understand the academic style of language.
• This supports students’ development of interpretive and figurative ways of thinking.
• It also supports a multicultural curriculum.

The authors have the students collect narratives that are told in their family.  The students record them and transcribe them as spoken, and then look at their stories.  As they look closely at all their stories, they start to notice patterns in purpose, style and form. They discuss these patterns in an essay.

I really like the ideas presented in this chapter, and will probably use some of them in the unit that Leslie and I are planning.  The idea of collecting family stories is a great one as it does so many things: it validates the stories as just as important as “real literature”; students will be motivated to work on these stories, since they are their own; it brings in each person’s culture, making the class truly multicultural; it highlights the differences between different discourse communities, specifically the differences in the way stories are told in their home discourse community and that of academia; it allows students to think about audience and shared knowledge. 

We were thinking of doing something similar to this, where the final paper for the unit would be written in two dialects, the students’ home dialect and the academic dialect.  This chapter gives us some structure and some theoretical reasons to do so.

Comments: Discovery of Competence

There was a lot in Chapter 2 that I did not agree with, though I agree with the authors’ general point that explicit grammar teaching is not enough to learn a language.  I also agree that students need to use the language they are learning to really communicate with someone in order to learn.  Needing to communicate and being immersed in the language is not enough, though, in my opinion as a language learner and a language teacher.  We all have met that person who has lived in a foreign country for years but does not speak the language well or fluently.  They can interact in society on a basic level, but their abilities and thus their potential in that society, are limited.  I think this is what happens when an adult is thrown into a new culture and language and just “acquires” the language.

Children, and specifically babies, learn in a totally different way than adults.  I think that acquisition is an important part of how adults learn a language, but not to the same extent as for children—our minds are just not as plastic as they were when we were kids.  Adults, though, have a secret weapon that children do not have: they can learn.  Any language teaching pedagogy that does not capitalize on this ability is missing some very important teaching techniques.

I think that most of what I disagree with in Chapter 2 is just based on the fact that the book was written in the 80’s when this idea of acquisition vs. learning was just starting to be discussed; I think more modern models of language pedagogy are a little more balanced in with respect to acquisition and learning.

Any problems that I had with the authors’ point of view in Chapter 2 were made unimportant when I read Chapters 3 and 4.  I really appreciated their discussion of the two Boston girls’ papers and what aspects made one writer have so much more potential than the other.  Alison’s ability to step back and think about how she perceived the situation, and her ability to interpret the Anne Frank text were really good examples of deeper, more analytical and more academic thinking.  As an ESL teacher, I am often more focused on surface features of a text.  I would have graded Jean’s paper (the one that was grammatically more correct but showed less dialectical thinking) higher than Alison’s.  This distinction, along with the great examples in the form of student texts, was really helpful for me as I re-evaluate the way that I assess, comment on, and grade student papers.