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?
Figurative language, story telling, sympathetic fallacy, repetition, and parallelism all of these applying to Jennie's case.
2. What are the features of Leona's specialized form of language?
Leona uses repetition and parallelism when telling stories. Leona also organizes her thoughts with comparing and contrasting patterns and sections. She creates patterns in the stanza's of her stories and builds relationships.
3. Why is Leona's specialized form of language not accepted in school?
Leona's teacher thought that when Leona was telling a story she was just rambling and nothing was making sense, and she would consistently get shut down and was not aloud to finish her stories. It was not accepted in school because according to Gee, schools want a linear step by step events or facts organized by a central topic.
4. Explain the contradiction between the research conducted by Snow et al. (1998) and the recommendations made by Snow et al. (1998).
Gee states that poor readers are usually associate with particular ethnic groups, poor neighborhoods, and rural towns; but he also states that test scores were going up at the same time as integration was increasing.
5. What other factors besides early skills training will make or break good readers?
Another factor that will make or break good readers is the need to have a variety of academic language and to below to a certain social group.
6. Why do some children fail to identify with, or find alienating, the "ways with words" taught in school?
As Gee states, children cannot feel they belong in 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 get 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?