Khross wrote:
I have no expectations of your child, by the by, because your child is not one of my students or part of my family or even my circle of acquaintances. I know no more than what you have told the Glade, inasmuch as I know anything about your child.
You do not need to be any of those things, but you have been on the glade as long as we have if not longer and based upon the posts and knowledge of what you know about us (Foamy and Myself) that you can understand we are not any other language speakers other than that of being English as our primary language. Just also the same as you would know based on Lydiaa's posts that she speaks other languages as well as English
Khross wrote:
That said, I find your position on teaching people to read and write curious, because the that debate rages on and on, and it has since the early 80s and Kenneth Goodman (and a few other academics). The "whole language" position, sadly, is compromised by pedagogical politics (namely multiculturalism, diversity, equality rhetoric), but the same can be said for any "system" of "teaching" something. Nevertheless, "whole language" theory teaches language as it is spoken. It teaches people to write as they speak. And, at least insofar as the language is concerned, it teaches people how to understand and communicate. It simply focuses on larger morphological units than a phonics based system.
I am aware of Ken Goodman's views and Noam Chomsky's views on language. I did read parts of the "pyscholinguist guessing game." And as what I believe you may be referring to is Chomsky's idea of "Universal Grammar" basically everything about grammar is already preprogrammed in the brain without a single lesson being taught. I agree with that theory, I am not arguing this with you.
Goodman wrote:
The language is kept whole so that all the necessary add for language learning will present' (p. xi) In other words, language is dealt with as a whole and functional phenomenon taking place in a meaningful context.
Yes-Whole language teaches people to write how they speak, but the way schools today approach whole language learning is different in its efforts not to teach how we speak but on the ideas of building vocabulary and focus on word meaning and comprehension of that word. That is what Whole Language in this case means.
Wiki=
Quote:
Whole language describes a literacy philosophy which emphasizes that children should focus on meaning and strategy instruction
Not that I like rocking the wiki but this was the first line.
I get what you are saying because...
Khross wrote:
A balance between the two is useful, but then that's pretty much as its always been in most analytic languages.
I believe I said this already in my original post.
Khross wrote:
But, the situation is a bit more complex than that because one need not necessarily know the Roman Alphabet or Arabic Numerals to write down a given language. The fact that we can "Romanize" nearly any language indicates the flexibility of various symbol sets as "written language". This, incidentally, prompts a lot of Ferdinand de Saussure's and Claude Levi-Strauss's work in structuralism. The goal of language, whether written or spoken, is to convey "meaning". In that regard, "whole language" theory advocates teaching a language (any language) as a system of "making" meaning; whether the language is written or spoken does not matter, because the metastatic nature of language simply serves to reinforce the internal systems that produce meaning.
Yes- Meaning. Schools approach the system as meaning the written I am not going to argue with that spoken could be approached as part of the "whole language" but unfortunately we can do that because there are too many other factors involved, namely dialect and lingo. I also feel that the large majority may be insulted because in my teaching community "ebonic lingo" is the accepted norm. ESL children receive language instruction along with english written instruction and probably better than the children who have english as their native tongue. What is seen as whole language in schools is by and by not what Chomsky would have had in mind. It is teaching a "holistic" approach to vocabulary not the spoken word. I believe this is also done because If you were to base language teaching entirely on how we speak instead of graphophonemic instructions,symbols, we have far too many rules in our written language.
For example if I didn't teach the kids the other day the correct pronunciation of "soldering" they would never have said it correctly in the first place. This is a vocab instruction on the approach of "holistic" meaning. They read it and had to use context clues to figure out what it meant. I know that this is an example of teaching language "whole language", but experience of this would never occur to my kids. It is a combo of language, I guess, and meaning as a new word. At this point in their studies I would hope i wouldn't have to teach Phonetics this is what should in itself support my views on Chomsky and the idea of what you are saying
Khross wrote:
A person who can speak already knows how to read; the problem is convincing that person your symbology is better than theirs.
Giggles- Yes but in a philosophical sense don't we need that symbology to technically be reading? It can be any symbols. Many I have taught cuniform, pictographs, hieroglphys it doesn't matter. I'm not worried about convincing people someone elses symbology is better than someone elses. People still need to know their language, whether spoken or on a page, and most of my kids don't based on experiences, so a holistic approach to reading is taught. I guess i should have said that instead of "whole language" Sorry for the confusion this is just the term used.
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