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Acquisition of Literacy in the Classroom

An abstraction of An Alternative View of Learning (Chapter 4) in Colbourne Brian, The whole Story: Natural Learning & the Acquisition of Literacy in the Classroom. Toronto: Scholastic, 1988.

The author compares learning to talk with learning to write and issues a challenge for teachers and schools

Two Assumptions

Oral and Written Forms of Language: Only Superficially Different

Reading, writing, speaking and listening, while different in many respects, are but manifestations of the same vital human function: the mind's effort to create meaning.

Once past the eye or ear, the sound waves (oral mode) or light waves (written mode) which set the processes of meaning construction in action are reduced to the same sorts of neural impulses using the same neural machinery.

Learning to Talk is a Stunning Intellectual Achievement

Learning oral language occurs with such monotonous regularity and success that we overlook the enormity of the task

What is involved in learning to talk?

Learning to talk involves learning countless thousands of conventions. These conventions have no inherent rightness or logic' to them -- just as driving on the right or left side of the road has no inherent rightness or logic to it. Every language is an amazingly complex, cultural artifact, comprising incredibly complex sets of sounds, words and rules for combining them.

For thousands of years, little children have successfully learned to talk. Children seem to have talking under control by the time they are five or six years of age and they have done so without formal schooling.

As recently as 1970, a child, called Genie in the scientific reports, was discovered who had been confined to a small room under conditions of physical restraint, and who had received only minimal human contact from the age of eighteen months until almost fourteen years. She knew no language and was not able to talk, although she subsequently learned some language.

It seems that the potential for language learning, needs certain conditions to prevail before it can be realised. If we identify the conditions for successful oral language learning, we can ask:

Learning to Talk: Conditions for Success

Newly born members of every community are faced with the daunting task of making meaning using the same oral language that the rest of the community uses. Here are some factors that seem to account for successfully learning oral language.

IMMERSION

From the moment of birth, young language learners are saturated in the oral language they are expected to learn. The older members of the culture make available to the new members of the society thousands upon thousands of examples of talk. The examples are always whole, usually meaningful and in a context which makes sense.

DEMONSTRATION

Father asking at the breakfast table, 'Will you pass the sugar, please?' and the subsequent passing of the sugar is not only a demonstration of what that sequence of sound means but also a demonstration of how language is used to achieve different purposes. Without demonstrations, oral language learning will not occur

ENGAGEMENT

Every day, young learners encounter thousands of demonstrations many of which they ignore. To learn from a demonstration, a youngster must be engaged by the demonstration. To become engaged, learners need to be convinced of the following:

EXPECTATION

Young learners usually believe that they are capable of learning anything until they're convinced otherwise. Young learners receive very clear indications that they are expected to learn to talk and that they are capable of doing it.

RESPONSIBILITY

When learning to talk, learner talkers are left to decide (take responsibility for) which particular convention or set of conventions they will attend to and subsequently internalise. Their 'tutors' don't try to sequence what the learner should learn. Instead they give off very strong expectations that the task will ultimately be completed. They continue to provide high saturation and to give meaningful demonstrations. However, the learner himself or herself is left to decide just what part of the total task will be internalised at any one time.

The learner has two levels of responsibility. Firstly, he is expected to become proficient in the total act; this is not negotiable -- he must eventually learn to talk. Secondly, he is expected to make decisions about how to engage in the demonstration which he is currently experiencing. Once we take this responsibility away from the child by predetermining what he should or can learn, we begin to complicate learning by decontextualising and fragmenting the language act. We begin to trivialise language.

APPROXIMATION

When learning to talk, learners are not expected to wait until they have all the systems and sub-systems fully intact before they're permitted to talk. 'Baby talk' is expected, is warmly received and is treated as a legitimate contribution to the context. Adults know that immature forms will drop out and be replaced by conventional ones.

The willingness to accept approximations is absolutely essential to learning to talk. In fact it sets in motion the 'hypothesise, test, modify hypothesis, test again' cycle which characterises all natural learning.

USE

Young learner-talkers need both time and opportunity to use their immature, developing language skills. They need both time and opportunity to use their language with others, as well as time alone, away from others to practise and use what they've been learning.

RESPONSE

When the learner-talker says, as he points to a cup on the table, 'Dat cup,' the response from the parent, if indeed it is a cup, typically goes something like this, 'Yes, that's a cup.'

The parent is supplying the missing bits of the child's approximation. The information which is shared by the 'expert' is a full (as opposed to fragmented) version of what the learner attempted. The expert intuitively understands the importance of responsibility and says to himself, 'I've no right to decide which aspect of this learner's approximation should be attended to right now. Therefore I'll give him the conventional version of what I think he wanted to say and leave him to decide which aspect he'll attend to and adjust.'

While parent-child exchanges of this sort may vary in detail and richness from family to family, the exchanges usually have certain things in common:

Quite often the expert in these exchanges provides a scaffold for further language learning to occur, 'Yes, that's Daddy's blue cup, isn't it?'

While learning to talk is seen as a 'natural' form of behaviour by most people, there is not the same agreement that learning to read and write is as 'natural'.

Talking is a universal medium of communication. Every culture has an oral form of language which every member of that culture strives to learn, sometimes against overwhelming disabilities and handicaps. The stream of everyday, ongoing behaviour keeps providing opportunities for new members of a culture to use their talk for purposes other than learning it. As a consequence they seem to learn to talk as a by-product of using it.

The same cannot be said for the written form of the language. There are very few contexts in the real world where writing is the major medium of communication, where young learners can engage with it in much the same way that they can engage with demonstrations of the spoken form. The very strong need in our society to be error-free --to meet all the conventions of written language before producing a text for public consumption -- means that before one really engages in acts of writing, one must know how to do it first.

Writing is perceived as a medium of communication. It is usually performed in special settings, (offices, classrooms, libraries) in isolation. All of these factors must militate against writing being learned as a by-product of using it.. The world simply does not provide the conditions for learning to write that it provides for learning to talk.

The only reason for not trying to simulate for writing what we know happens when young learners learn to talk, would be to assume, that the written form of the language cannot be learned under the same conditions. I find this argument difficult to sustain, for it assumes that learning is a topic-based phenomenon. It assumes, that while one can learn to talk under the conditions of learning described above, a completely different set of conditions is needed for learning writing or math or science. I find it much more satisfying to believe that there is a single set of conditions for effective learning: exemplified by the conditions under which we learn to talk.

What we need to realise is that while the 'natural' world provides the opportunities for oral language learning processes to go into action, it does not provide them for other kinds of learning, especially learning to read and write. Herein lies the function of schools. Schools are settings in which we need to create those opportunities for learning to read and write that the real, everyday world does not provide, at least to the degree that it provides them for learning to talk. Thus, when I use the phrase `learning to read and write 'naturally', I'm really talking about simulating the natural conditions that we know work for learning to talk, so that they're available for the learning of reading and writing. I'm arguing that teachers in schools need to simulate the natural conditions of learning in the area of reading and writing because nature does not provide for them elsewhere.

Just because the world does not provide the natural conditions for learning the written forms of language, is not a valid reason for trying to teach literacy by imposing conditions which interfere with the processes for which evolution has prepared the brain.

IMMERSION
DEMONSTRATION
ENGAGEMENT
EXPECTATION
RESPONSIBILITY
APPROXIMATION
USE
RESPONSE