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December 07, 2005
sharks and kangaroos (genre 20.1/25)
Christie, Frances. "Writing in Schools: Generic Structures as Ways of Meaning." Functional Approaches to Writing Research Perspectives. Ed. Barbara Couture. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1986. 221-40.
conclusion: "in learning to write, children are engaged in learning to construct meanings. as they do so, they learn to select from the resources available within the language system appropriate lingustic items which are fashioned into different patterns to realizie different meanings....yet many children consistently fail to master the patterns of discourse and associated methods of working which schools are intended to teach....failure to master the skills, capacities, and knowledge of schooling goes hand in hand with an inability to handle the language structures necessary to make such mastery possible. once teachers are clear about the nature of these structures, they will be in a position to guide students' learning....and can draw attention...to the linguistic features of the different genres they must learn. further, they can invite their students to explore and to experiment with the linguistic structures through which meanings in writing are made, thus freeing writers from the needless mystery that sometimes surrounds it."
passages
221. "meaning is REALIZED in language"; "successful participation in one's culture involves learning to interpret and employ its ways of meaning"; the school behaviors we reward center on "developing methods of reasoning, habits of working, styles of argument, ways of judging and valuing, and skills of analyzing and synthesizing information" <-- things we rarely explicitly address.
222. "though the evidence for relationships between patterns of discourse and ways of learning in schools is strong, many teachers continue to work with students in a manner which effectively denies the relationship"; "children learn both the skills that schools value and the language used to demonstrate those skills"--and not to uniform degrees; for genre means "not merely...those forms of writing normally valued in literary studies, but also...the expository forms or genres used to construct meaning in the various school disciplines."
224. "language and its relationship to learning is in an odd sense 'invisible.' it is the resource for learning which we most frequently use, yet most take for granted. thus, when teachers choose what they intend their students to learn, they tend to focus on 'content'....they believe that if students get the 'content' right, their language will in some fashion fall into place"; realistic implications of the relationship:
- "students in the process of learning content must manipulate different ways of constructing and organizing meaning in texts"
- "teachers must recognize the linguistic demands associated with the content areas of schooling, so that they may guide students more usefully in their learning"
we teach students narrative structures in school mostly by reading & expecting them to follow along, which of course works better for kids who are read to/with more. 229. c says "as children grow older, they learn to construct narratives of increasing complexity and variety, but at each stage, teachers will need to examine the kinds of generic structures they actually produce in order to ensure maximum progress" (this is a little hard to buy. if students who are exposed to lots of narrative structures learn w/o deliberate instruction, then isn't it just as (if not more) reasonable to argue for an increase in exposure?)
Posted by ttobryan at December 7, 2005 11:57 AM