In chapter 4 we learned that the children in Roadville are deliberately taught language. A lot of time and care is put into making a very structured, language rich environment for the child to be placed in when they are brought home. In contrast to Trackton where talking to babies is the exception, in Roadville baby talk abounds. Young children are seen as potential conversationalists even before they can string words together. Young mothers who are often home alone with their babies talk to them throughout the day in lieu of having the opportunity for adult conversation. When their children do start using words and labeling things within their environment, the adults in Roadville completely dictate the discourse related to the child's words. These conversations are more like monologues rather than true conversations. In this way, Roadville parents make sure that their children fit into a particular mold of what is viewed as an appropriate communicative role. Conversation is...
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In Trackton, children are often born to young mothers. If the father of the child does not live with the mother, it is expected that his family will care for the child either every weekend or a week or so out of each month. If the mother and father are older and married or in a relationship and live together, the baby will often be cared for by older siblings or other family members when not in the care of the mother. The young children of Trackton are viewed as children of the community rather than of a particular union of parents. Within this community, language acquisition seems to be viewed through an innatist perspective. Trackton adults believe that they play no role and have no control over their children learning to communicate; the children just eventually figure it out. The children watch, listen and learn from the laps or hips of their caregivers. Language acquisition in Trackton is based on performance and all about learning to read other people's behavior and respons...
Chapter two gave us an overview of what life was like in Roadville and Trackton. Three things stood out to me from this chapter. First, was the continued description of the importance of Adult Education programs in these communities. In this chapter there were five separate references to Adult Education programs. The next thing that stood out was that it was a common occurrence for people in both communities to begin having children in their teens.This seems to be a barrier that many women in the community face and it also may explain why the Adult Education programs in Roadville and Trackton seem to be filled predominately with women. The last thing that stood out was the desire among the townspeople in both communities to get ahead and do better for themselves and the view that the best way to do this was through schooling and being a hard worker. Ironically, much of what the townspeople learned in school never prepared them for anything they would be doing at the mill and har...
At the beginning of this week, I was happy to be introduced to the communities of Roadville, Trackton, and "The Townspeople." I was very surprised because my first impression was that this book would be looking at English Language Learners as dialect speakers rather than students whose first language is a different language such as German or Spanish. In addition, before I started reading this book, I hadn't given much thought to the concerns many teachers must have had in their newly desegregated classrooms related to teaching multicultural students. My understanding of this topic is growing. I am now seeing how teaching ESL and/or teaching students from others cultures involves so much more than whether or not they are proficient in speaking Standard English. Another theme within the prologue and chapter 1 that I was pleasantly surprised about was how both communities valued and supported their local Adult Education programs. From what I read, it seems that the Adul...
My kids can use my devices just as well as I can. My youngest who is four, has no knowledge of a time before YouTube. Many of the young adults I teach have mastered the new trending social media apps before I even know they exist. I don't feel old, but some days my lack of knowledge and skill with the latest technology says otherwise. I need to read more chapters like this one because I learn so many new things. I am second to last in the rankings of tech-savvy teachers in my building...but I'm trying. Just this year I learned how to use both Blogger and Google Docs. I haven't mastered them yet, but I have enough proficiency where I can use them somewhat effectively as I learn more. One thing I never thought about before reading this chapter is how when students use the internet to research a topic, they must first summarize an idea, and/or formulate a question in order to focus their internet search. I will never see internet searches the same way again. One negativ...
I really liked chapter 2 because I felt that it covered topics that I knew something about and could relate to (with the exception of The Input Hypothesis and comprehensible input, which I am still clueless about). The three Theories of Language Acquisition were interesting. I thought that the behaviorist theory was pretty ridiculous. I am wholeheartedly in the interactionists' camp, although there are parts of the innatist theory that I feel have merit. I connected the interactionists because the instructional strategies are very much like the ones I used to help my daughters learn language. The whole purpose of oral and written language is to go beyond one's self and participate in a larger community. I believe that the desire to learn to communicate is innate, but that the process to do so has to be communal. Something new that I learned from the chapter was the occurrence of fossilization and how when passed down to the next generation, it can become a new language...
CI 545 is the third class that I've taken in my graduate program and its probably the one I've known the least about at the start. I always thought of ESL instruction as something that was handled by a select group of teachers who were bilingual. Not being bilingual myself, I never considered that teaching ESL would have anything to with me teaching reading. Obviously, I was wrong. I was very interested in reading about the variety of students that could make up an ESL classroom. It seems a little overwhelming that a teacher could have students spanning from brand new immigrants who don't know the language or culture, to those who were born in the U.S. and speak English well enough that you would never know that they lack English proficiency unless they are in an academic setting. Another thing that I was not previously aware of and also seems overwhelming is the fact that ESL teachers not only have to have students meet the regular curriculum standards, but meet the ...