Blog Post 9
October 22, 2012
Kumar chapters 7 & 8
Brown chapter 22
In
Brown’s chapter 22, the concept of teaching grammar and vocabulary comes
up. This seems to be the hardest concept
to weave into teaching. Like we have
discussed and like the book mentions, there are many opinions as to how these
topics should be taught. Through the
last century there are mixed feelings about the place of teaching language
forms. I am not sure exactly what I
believe just yet but I do believe that there should be some explicit teaching
of grammar and forms.
“Organizational
competence is necessary for communication to take place….in other words,
grammar tells us how to construct a sentence, and discourse rules tell us how
to string those sentences together.
Semantics tells us something about the meaning(s) of words and strings
of words. Then pragmatics tells us about
which of several meanings to assign given the context of an utterance or
written text” (Brown 420). So obviously,
this is some important stuff that our students need to grasp. Can they grasp it just through communication
and observation alone? I don’t think
so. Just like when we learn our L1, we
learn a great deal of grammar and sentence structure, discourse, semantics and
pragmatics through observation and trial and error as children. When we enter school, however, we still are
explicitly taught the rules. I believe
that not explicitly teaching our students these things puts them at a disadvantage. We may not even be teaching them the specific
rules, but just teaching them about language in general and how it all works
together is important.
This
then leads into Kumar’s chapters 7 and 8, Fostering
Language Awareness and Activating
intuitive Heuristics. He begins by
discussing the two major reforms that the US and UK have undergone. The UK is using the Language Awareness
movement in which students become more sensitive to and conscious to the nature
of language and its role in human life.
The US uses the Whole Language movement which I have first hand been learning
about it my other classes. Because I am
an English major and I am becoming a certified reading specialist, I have taken
many courses on the importance and prevalence of language instruction. Like discussed in the Kumar’s chapter,
students learn best by experiencing the whole language experience which
consists of listening, speaking, reading writing, and two that are missing from
Kumar’s chapter but that I have learned about in my other classes, viewing and
visually representing. This helps the
student see that language is all around us and we use it almost constantly in
our everyday lives.
I
really like how Kumar brings up the concept of language effecting one’s
understanding of how language is often used to control people economically,
culturally, and socially. Being an
English major, I have created a unit plan that involves aspects of rhetoric in
literature and in our daily lives. To be
well educated and informed consumers, students should learn how language is
used in rhetorical strategies. This is a
type of discourse that teaches students to be critically aware of the input
they are receiving, which in turn allows them to make informed decisions.
Kumar
then discusses heuristics, which is the process of self-discovery on the part
of the learner. This type of strategy is
something that I have learn about before as well. When students learn and discover things for
themselves, it becomes a memorable experience and that will stick with them
longer than a lecture will. This can be
done in many different hands on types of lessons. I learned before that the best way to obtain
this is to have students create their own questions that they want to have
answered. They then work to discover the
answers to these questions with the guidance of their teacher. Because they have created their own lesson,
more or less, the student has taken autonomy of their learning which becomes
authentic. For example, Kumar discusses
the pre-grammatical stage and how it can be utilized to convey a large amount
of information of grammar and is acquisition without explicit rules. Students come across a grammar rule and
realize that they already know it or half-way know it from just native
observation. Because they discover a
rule that they already know or kind of know, they will more likely remember it.
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