Week 3 Blog Topics

Blog #6: Copy and complete the activity at the end of chapter two of:

• Freeman, D., and Y. Freeman. Essential linguistics: What you need to know to teach: reading, ESL, spelling, phonics, grammar. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
• Determine Learning (L) vs. Acquisition (A) and explain your answers on your blog.

The image below is a scan of the exercise from the Freeman book with my answers for each student and teacher activity. I found it most helpful to complete the list while in the process of reading the selected chapter.

My answers, for the most part, directly reflect the book, as the ideas of word recognition vs. sociopsycholinguistic approaches to instruction are new to me. I did, however, feel that a few specific answers ought to be identified, supported, and explained in order to best reflect my understanding of this new and very interesting topic.

As I read and completed the form, I kept oscillating between which approach was better. While definitively qualifying one as better or worse than the other was ultimately unsuccessful, I really enjoyed reflecting upon my own practices and opinions to teaching reading and writing. Overall, I tend to prefer the sociopsycholinguistic approach in both reading and writing instruction. Of the activities listed in the reflection exercise, I do much more of the acquisition activities than the learning. For example, I believe strongly in the need for practicality and immediate relevance of both reading and writing instruction. Students who construct meaning first, and have a purpose beyong simply needing to know are more likely to succeed in reading and writing endeavors. I regularly have my students read silently and in groups, they meet in literature circles, we have discussions and debates, and at least once a week they have time to free-write. I think building and drawing upon background knowledge is far more important than memorizing definitions and practicing rote "kill and drill skills" such as looking up definitions and just copying them down.

While I tend to learn toward the acquisition approach and even at some points questioned the usefulness of the learning approach, I can see how, particularly for elementary or early education teachers, the learning approach may in fact be superior. Take the learning approach to writing, for example. While having various purposes to write and having a message first is important, I don't particularly like the creative approach to writing conventions. Some skills, like spelling and grammar and punctuation, have defined rules that must be taught and then habitually practiced, and practiced correctly. Students who learn by trial and error go years before finally internalizing the rules.

When it comes to second language learning, particularly for older students who may struggle more with the conversion of one language to another, I feel the acquisition approach is better--it has more purpose and meaning than the learning approach. Presumably, these students were already fluent/proficient in their native language. They may not need the ground up approach to phonics, graphemes, morphems, syntax, etc. that a beginning speaker would need. Instead, using the acquisition approach seemed to me to take the background knowledge in the one language and allow students to translate across to the second. In our school's ESL/ELL classroom, I have observed far more acquisition activities taking place than learning/word-recognition. While pre-teaching vocabulary and correcting spelling and pronounciation are common, students engage in many different comprehension strategies that allow them to draw upon background knowledge or textual features like pictures to aide them.

Ultimately, a solid curriculum ought to be comprised of activities of both approaches. I do a lot of root study in my class when it comes to vocabulary (learning/word recognition), but then students use that knowledge to later access new vocabulary and use inferencing skills to confirm or disconfrim their predictions of word meaning (sociopsycholinguistics). While current research is still debating how much of language can be learned versus acquired, I agree with the general lean toward the acquisition approach, both in theory and practice.