Educ. 3351  Double Journal Entry # 3

3 things I learned about teaching literacy development.

I learned that teaching literacy development can be challenging in the Appalachian culture and since it contradicts so many rules of “proper English”, teachers are challenged with finding ways to embrace  the culture while properly educating the students I also learned about something called “code switching”. I have never heard of this technique before but it makes sense. Code switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety in conversation. I can see how this technique would allow students to make more solid connections between how they speak and what they write and how the two are interrelated. Finally, I learned that this type of contrastive analysis can be very successful and I would certainly  be willing to give it a shot in my classroom

2 examples from my schooling experience that reflected effective or ineffective instruction for speakers of non-standard dialects.

I knew several teachers when I went to school who refuse to speak to or answer the questions of a student until they used “proper English”. Most of the time this was embarrassing and frustrating to the student. Some students would hesitate to speak up after something like that happened to them.

Also, many of my teachers would automatically place students in an LD class when they heard a student with a strong and pronounced Appalachian dialect under the presumption that these students could not grasp English as well as the rest of the class.

Explain 1 relationship between the strategies for the teaching of literacy.

One relationship I noticed was that the was Instruction rooted in the awareness of dialect and the idea that it CAN be used to the benefit of the student as well as the teacher.




CHECK THIS OUT! Ever heard of "mountain talk"?

References:


Dingus, Kathy. (n.d.). Mountain talk. Dancing on the mountains. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from
http://www.dancingonmountaintops.com/mountaintalk.htm


Epstein, P. & Harris, L.H. (September 15, 2011). Honoring dialect and increasing student performance in standard English. In National Writing Project. Retrieved January 25, 2012, from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3655.