Orality and Literacy
My work as a teacher has been primarily in learner support and English language. Since transferring from secondary school to elementary, I find myself thinking ahead to skills that I believe my current students (grade 4/5) will need to be competent English language learners when they reach a secondary school classroom. There are many skills that I see my students already struggling with that will affect them more and more as they get older.
The most obvious difficulty I see is in a student’s ability to transfer their thoughts to the paper in front of them. I have students who are able to tell me beautiful stories orally, filled with details and description. They are able to answer comprehension questions orally, again with good detail and description. They are imaginative, and they still feel comfortable and included when they can share their thoughts with the class. The problem arises when many of these students try to put their ideas down on paper. “For a beginner, learning to write involves ‘the most arduous discipline’, whilst speech ‘comes about with far less anguish than does writing… Speech… is not drilled into the child with the grim determination that often marks the teaching of writing… Writing… is learned by concentration or application, and it rarely becomes… so spontaneous or flowing as speech,” (Ong, 1967, as cited by Chandler, 1994, Phonocentrism). How do we teach students struggling with literacy that they are significant in society, when they are not able to accomplish what society says they must be able to do to be proper members of that literate society?
As Chandler emphasizes through reference to Ong, with few exceptions, we all learn to talk and “(o)ral speech is fully natural to human beings…” (Ong, 1986, as cited by Chandler, 1994, Phonocentrism). When young, children love to share their knowledge orally, to tell stories, and show us what they know. Young children still believe they can succeed and fulfill their dreams. However, as Chandler points out, “Our educational institutions are obsessed with the primacy of the written word. Graphocentrism is hard to escape, since we have been shaped by writing.” (Chandler, 1994, Graphocentrism). By the time I see students in grades 4 and 5, some have already realized that they do not fit properly into our literate world. They believe school is ‘stupid’ and worse, they believe that they are ‘stupid’.
The school I work at uses SMART reading strategies in an attempt to increase literacy skills and students’ abilities to transfer thoughts to paper. Many of my students enthusiastically draw pictures, as I read, to represent their ideas. When I ask them to describe their pictures, they usually quite happily explain, orally, what their drawings represent and how the images relate back to what we have read. At that point, they are asked to use their ideas in some form of writing assignment, which is where school loses its magic for many of them. “We are so literate in ideology that we think writing comes naturally. We have to remind ourselves from time to time that writing is completely and irremediably artificial’ (Ong, 1978, as cited by Chandler, 1994, Phonocentrism). We now have adaptive technology to help students and adults alike with reading and writing; however, those technologies are expensive and users need to be trained to use the programs, which then means following written directions. Our society is so literacy-based that it is impossible for me to imagine going a day without significant interaction with text; what an incredibly scary reality for people of all ages living in our society who are struggling to master literacy.
References:
Chandler, D. (1994). Biases of the ear and eye: Phonocentrism [Online]. Retrieved, 18 October, 2015 from: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral/litoral2.html
Chandler, D. (1994). Biases of the ear and eye: Graphocentrism [Online]. Retrieved, 18 October, 2015 from: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/litoral/litoral3.html
Regarding the photo:
Photo credit not available – I ask students to complete ‘Home Journals’ for me. I do only very limited marking in the home journals, as I use it to encourage students to write with fluency without worrying too much about spelling, a specific topic, etc. The home journals are tied into the token economy we have set up in the classroom. This piece of wood, which also has writing on the back, was handed in to me by a student this week. The boy said he could not find paper at home, but he said they had ‘lots of wood’.
Mary,
First off let me say thank you for an enlightening post. It makes me wonder how anybody coming from an ELL background can embrace writing in a different language as so nonsensical as English. That being said I wonder what Chandler’s and Ong’s views would be if they observed how the way in which writing is taught has changed. The statement of “learning to write involves ‘the most arduous discipline (Ong, 1967, as cited by Chandler, 1994, Phonocentrism)” is certainly true up until 20 years ago. Writing, up to 6 to 1 Write-Traits, has been seen almost as very formulaic. Traditionally it has been taught, ‘all good writers have proper punctuation, correct spelling, proper verbs and adjectives and (something that makes me groan) neat handwriting.’ Although this still is certainly a part of the Writers Process I would like to think our philosophies on the way writing is taught has evolved over the past couple decades.
The school that I am currently teaching at has begun the large task of implementing the Writers Workshop, by Lucy Caulkins, throughout the entire elementary school. This is a program which focuses on the content of a child’s writing as oppose to the structure which becomes a secondary off-shoot. Do you think using programs such as the Writers Workshop accompanied with the use of adaptive technology will lead to writing becoming more ‘natural’ for students who are not familiar with the English language or writing itself?
Mary,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and honest questions through your post.
The photo of the student’s writing on wood reminds us as educators to caution at naively accepting conventions as we’ve been taught. Writing programs can be excellent tools and resources, but they can also put both the educator and the student into a box – a box that inevitably never fits all learners or teachers!
In the BC Ministry language arts learning outcomes for kindergarten, the C2 outcome states “It is expected that students will recognize that writing can be ‘talk written down'”. At this pre-writing stage, the use of narration is extremely valuable. Students share their learning and understanding orally and if possible the words can be scribed by a more fluent writer.
Before students can write successfully independently, I believe that there are three stages of writing: narration, copy work and dictation. Narration is having the student speak while a fluent writer scribes; copy work is having the student copy quality language from literature or from their own narration; and dictation is having a reader dictate a familiar and previously studied passage of writing to the student while the student writes. In a typical classroom, most of these three stages are completely skipped over and students are encouraged to write independently as early as grade one. Independent writing tends to be more valued than accurate writing, along with a focus on being creative.
In chapter 3 of Writing Spaces, Bolter describes writing as “topographic”. He challenges the idea that writing is simply talk written down as a linear expression of thought, and embraces the notion that writing is a textured place where the spatial, verbal and visual can intersect. My description of the three stages of writing above does not align well with Bolter’s topographic style of writing. However, can I suggest that the building of solid foundational writing skills will enhance the opportunity for creatively and the art of writing as the student develops? Furthermore, at early stages of writing a wise educator could embrace the topographic approach to writing, by providing interesting spaces, visuals and words to be a part of many writing experiences for the student both in print and electronically.
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of
Print. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2010) Kindergarten curriculum package. Retrieved
from https://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/curric_grade_packages/grkcurric_req.pdf
I loved your post because it is something that is very much a contextual part of the everyday in my classroom. I think teachers everywhere, particularly those of the elementary variety can resonate with the “struggle” of getting reluctant writers to write. Like you, I often find that these children can orally communicate with much richer and descriptive prose than when asked to put their thoughts into writing.
Successful strategies that I often employ in this arena of getting reluctant writers to write, do lean towards the digital variety. I am fortunate to teach in a (fairly) well technologically resourced international school in China. True, this technology comes at an enormous expense of the privileged, but I do remember working in less fortunate rural schools in Korea and New Zealand, yet still being able to employ similar strategies noted below with one or two (not so cutting edge) digital devices. Whilst socioeconomics still play a big part, in what Norris (2001) termed the digital divide (in Dobson & Willinsky, 2009), amongst the “have” and “have nots” with digital technology, it’s interesting what creative minds have thought up in areas of limited access. Recently, I was just a part of a digital technology network of educational technology learning coaches and teachers of international schools in my district. We meet once a year to discuss and collaborate on strategies to overcoming the hurdles of limiting bandwidth and restrictions behind The Great Firewall of China. As Stone (2007; in Dobson & Willinsky, 2009) illuminates, this Firewall limits some of the multi-modality literacy practices we wish to participate in. One coach in this think tank, and also new to China, was an African native who taught for years in many rural central areas of his continent. He mentioned that schools in the area were breaking ground with getting donations of lightly used digital technology and that students were having much success with Wikis, since these required very limited Internet bandwidth and technological complexity. With technology like Chromebooks setting precedent of what can be accomplished with digital technology at such a little price, it would be amazing to see this translate to a shift where the digital divide of economic disparities and gender biases are narrowed further.
As fortunate I am for my learners and I to have access to some (newish) digital technology, my learner needs are as diverse or arguably more diverse in stature to the needs of learners anywhere else around the world. From my experience, I’ve found that teaching under the public systems in the west to have less needs than those prevalent in international schools I’ve taught at in East Asia. I have third culture kids who are living in China, speak a non-native tongue and English (i.e. the instructional language) is not their mother tongue. On top of this, I have western children who have learner needs in English, and some children of various cultures that even have learning difficulties in their native language whilst learning the second language of English. Let’s not even go into some of the defined behavioral needs of my classroom. My point here is that differentiation and making the learning outcomes accessible to all my learners is very much a concern, particularly under the scope of written literacy.
Context of location and my learners is important to note, because I find that it is important to the naysayers of digital learning. Regardless of location, I find that educators will either engage willingly or avoid digital technology like the plague. More importantly, there are also those who are likely to be keen, given the proper scaffolding.
Here are three simple strategies that work great for me in getting those difficult souls to write using digital technology:
1. PuppetPalsHD
I love this application for narrative writing. It gives those reluctant writers a strong visual prompt of setting and characters that they choose to insert, either from the stock selection or real photos that they take, or those sourced from the web, into their story. Users can create multiple scenes and then record themselves orally. I find the quick and entertaining visuals allows for much richer use of descriptive language when students talk about their characters and setting. They can move the characters to new scenes and record everything from the orientation to the problem, solution and ending. The recording feature of what they orally describe, along with the visuals, is great for drawing out detail when working with each child.
2. Video Recording and Movie Editing
So awesome for all aspects evidential learning and so easily accessible from a camera or phone at this day in age. Procedural and explanation writing, for example, benefit from filming first, then drawing out the process onto paper. The ability to watch and re-watch steps visually and orally can be such a crucial form of self-reflection and formative assessment for students when conferencing.
3. Translation Apps with Cloze Activities
For those really struggling to access the language and learning outcomes, cloze activities work wonderfully. I’ll often give my very low ELL writers fill in the blank sentences with word banks around a specific genre of writing and supported by a picture. I’ll often have these sentences and pictures out of sequential order; it is up to them to look up the words into a translator, then once again with the sentences completed. Translators can be of any digital variety; I find the analogue dictionaries to hinder the process, rather than aid it.
References
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital literacy. The Cambridge handbook of literacy, 286-312. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Digital%20Literacy.pdf