The author who wrote this quote is quite brilliant. I understand that we expect our students to read properly and write properly, however, I believe that the best time to see their true abilities is to give them a chance to write whatever they feel or write about whatever they choose to write about. It is amazing to read and see the stories children come up with and gives a source of direction of what areas needs work. In my classroom, I observed my students picking up big books and reading it to their classmates. However, they are not reading the words from the book, but making up the story from what they remember what was being read to them. Children's minds are filled with great ideas and creativity and we need to give them a chance to put that in writing or drawing to help them build their schemata and improve in their reading and writing skills.
In class, we discussed ways to assess writing. Writing is a skill and process that I believe is difficult to achieve to perfection. Being a fluent English speaker, I would have to say that my writing can be a bit imperfect. As the chapter explains, every educated child in developed countries learns the rudiments of writing in his or her native language, but very few learn to express themselves clearly with logical, well developed organization to the purpose of writing. Yet, we expect our English language learners to write coherent essays. I believe that we should not put such high expectations on our students if we ourselves are unable to deliver the same expectation. Before we can teach our students how to write we must teach them proper grammar.
Teaching kindergarten and beginning English language learners, I started off with them writing their name. I believe that once they can write their name they will be able to learn how to write more and are off to good start. Being that this is my first year teaching, I am more focused on my students writing legibly and improving their skills in copying words and sentences on the board. Recently, I have been putting sentences that they have read in their storybooks and have them copy the sentences in order on their paper and most importantly in the lines provided because this is one of the skills that most 1st graders now are struggling with. I am seeing great improvement with them writing legibly and putting the words in the proper place of the sentence instead of all over the paper. The last few weeks of the quarter, I would like to try a new task called ordering tasks where my students would be given words and they would have to put the words in order to make a grammatical sentence.
Now, there are many types of written language such as academic writing, job related writing, and personal writing. In today's society, we are practicing writing through facebook, texting, emails, messaging, journals, etc. However, I believe writing in properly is becoming less and less proper with short terms such as "lol" for laugh out loud, "omg" for oh my gosh, or "ttyl" for talk to you later. My instructor use to say "the way a person practices is how they are going to perform" although this may be towards dancing, but this can also be towards all four skills of reading, speaking, writing, and listening. How we practice these skills in our everyday lives shows on our personal or academic work.
I enjoyed your reflection. I think what you mentioned in the last paragraph is important: the way a person practices IS how he performs. I am not one to condemn a generation hooked on text-speak, but I do know that I have seen first hand its effect on academic writing. My students sometimes did not even know that words they used were not words. Many did not understand the difference between personal writing where "lol" and "ur" and "ttly" are acceptable, and academic or even professional writing where even contractions are not always permissible.
ReplyDeleteI once received an email from a student that I honestly could not comprehend because her writing was so distorted by text-speak.
Second language students- particularly middle and high school students who socialize with students who regularly use cell phones to communicate-have the challenge of learning two diverging English languages: short hand text-speak and proper English. This is something else that we as teachers need to be aware of and take into account.
It is important to teach children how to write properly when they are young. This will help them throughout their school years. We have developed and implimented Engligh rubrics at my school that address paragraph and essay writing. It is interesting to see how many native English speaking high school students still cannot even write a correct sentence. We are even having to teach them that it is not correct to capitalize every word in a sentence just because they like the way it looks.
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