Chapter 3: Language and Identity at Home
1. What are the features of the forms of language that are spoken in a home environment that align with academic varieties of language?
In Jennie's case, the features are repetition and parallelism, story-telling, figurative language, and sympathetic fallacy.
2. What are features of Leona's specialized form of language?
Leona uses repetition and parallelism when telling her story in class. She also organizes her thoughts by comparing and contrasting the different patterns. Gee says, "She is interested in creating a pattern out of language, within and across her stanzas: a pattern which will generate meaning through the sets of relationships and contrasts which it sets up, like the multiple relationships and contrasts..."
3. Why is Leona's specialized form of language not accepted in school?
Gee states, "They stress linear step-by-step events or facts organized around one topic expressed with no poetry or emotion."
4. Explain the contradiction between the research conducted by Snow et al. (1998) and the recommendations made by Snow et al. (1998).
Gee mentions that poor readers are usually associated with certain ethnic groups, poor neighborhoods, and rural towns. Gee also states, "...the test scores were going up at a time that integration was also increasing."
5. What other factors besides early training will make or break good readers?
Another factor that will make or break a good reader is the need to have a variety of academic language and/or belong to a particular social group.
6. Why do some children fail to identify with, or find alienating, the "ways with words" taught in school?
Gee states, "Children cannot feel they belong at school when their valuable home-based practices (like Leona's) are ignored, denigrated, and unused. They cannot feel like they belong when the real game is acquiring academic varieties of language, and they are given no help with this, as they watch other children get high assessments at school for what they have learned not at school but at home."
1. What are the features of the forms of language that are spoken in a home environment that align with academic varieties of language?
In Jennie's case, the features are repetition and parallelism, story-telling, figurative language, and sympathetic fallacy.
2. What are features of Leona's specialized form of language?
Leona uses repetition and parallelism when telling her story in class. She also organizes her thoughts by comparing and contrasting the different patterns. Gee says, "She is interested in creating a pattern out of language, within and across her stanzas: a pattern which will generate meaning through the sets of relationships and contrasts which it sets up, like the multiple relationships and contrasts..."
3. Why is Leona's specialized form of language not accepted in school?
Gee states, "They stress linear step-by-step events or facts organized around one topic expressed with no poetry or emotion."
4. Explain the contradiction between the research conducted by Snow et al. (1998) and the recommendations made by Snow et al. (1998).
Gee mentions that poor readers are usually associated with certain ethnic groups, poor neighborhoods, and rural towns. Gee also states, "...the test scores were going up at a time that integration was also increasing."
5. What other factors besides early training will make or break good readers?
Another factor that will make or break a good reader is the need to have a variety of academic language and/or belong to a particular social group.
6. Why do some children fail to identify with, or find alienating, the "ways with words" taught in school?
Gee states, "Children cannot feel they belong at school when their valuable home-based practices (like Leona's) are ignored, denigrated, and unused. They cannot feel like they belong when the real game is acquiring academic varieties of language, and they are given no help with this, as they watch other children get high assessments at school for what they have learned not at school but at home."
Good understanding of the need for teachers to value and understand student's home languages.
ReplyDeleteThe contradiction in the Snow report is that the major finding was that children from high poverty communities fell further behind in school REGARDLESS of their initial reading skills. However the report recommended that to solve this problem teachers needed to spend time "INCREASING" these students initial reading skills. See the contradiction?