UNIT 2- LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM-Understanding Language across Curriculum -
Part 3-BEd notes
Prepared by
Sabarish P
Contents
- Dialect- Deficit Theory- Discontinuity Theory
- Need for supporting resources at the affective and cognitive levels for teacher and learner language for communication in co-curricular practices in schools
Dialect
Dialect is the usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people.
A dialect can be a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, especially a variety of speech differing from the standard literary language or speech pattern of the culture in which it exists.
The use of a second language or dialect as the language of instruction across the curriculum raises concerns about the possible impact on student achievement throughout their school career.
In addition, since language can empower or exclude students from the learning process, valid questions arise with respect to equity and access for students who have limited competence in the language in which they are instructed in every area of the school curriculum.
In a linguistic environment, differences between language varieties can lead to miscommunication between speakers.
Deficit Theory
The deficit theory emerged in the 1960s as an attempt to explain why disadvantaged students tend to experience high rates of failure in school.
The deficit theory suggests that children from lower socio-economic background are at an disadvantage as they lack verbal stimulation in their homes and they enter school without the linguistic resources needed for success.
Some children under-achieve at school because their language skills are inadequate.
The deficit theory is related to a view of society that suggests that certain kinds of homes, like working-class and those of some ethnic minorities, do not equip children with adequate language skills to cope with the curriculum and other demands of the classroom.
The children characterised as disadvantaged and at risk of failure have been variously referred to in the literature as:
children from low-income families,
culturally deprived,
culturally different,
urban disadvantaged,
inner-city children,
children at risk,
children from low SES backgrounds,
working-class/lower-class children,
or children with educationally disadvantaged parents.
Essentially what all of these children have in common is a background where parent(s) are unemployed/uneducated, there is poverty/instability in the home, and cultural or racial differences may be compounding the problem.
The linguistic skills of such children were seen in the first instance to be deficient (Deficit Theory, e.g. Jensen, 1969) and reflective of an underlying cognitive deficiency which impeded learning.
This view was replaced by a Deprivation Theory (e.g. Bereiter and Engelmann, 1966) which argued that such children were starved of stimulation in the home and exposed to a poor linguistic model which resulted in an inferior ability to express and communicate using language, thus resulting in massive failure in the school system.
Discontinuity Theory
School is an institution of the state which functions through the medium of standard language and considers the teaching of the standard language to all as one of its first and most fundamental tasks.
For some children, this task may be complicated by the fact that the spoken language of the home may not necessarily be the standard language of the school
A mismatch occurs for these children when attempting to access the education system, sometimes explained in terms of ‘the concept of discontinuity’.
Discontinuity is where the culture of the school, predicated on middle class language style and behavioural norms, makes it appear an inhospitable place.
The research is unequivocal in relation to the discontinuity experienced by some children when attempting to access the school system due to a mismatch in terms of language experience.
It is also clear from research that the language of these children is judged negatively, and sometimes their cognitive abilities are misjudged on the basis of their language variety, leading to feelings of inadequacy and failure to achieve their potential.
Need for supporting resources at the affective and cognitive levels for teacher and learner-language for communication in co-curricular practices in schools.
Part of Bloom's Taxonomy, the classification of educational objectives includes the cognitive domain, the affective domain and the psychomotor domain.
The affective domain is part of a system for identifying, understanding and addressing how people learn.
The cognitive domain is organised in a hierarchy that begins with the straightforward acquisition of knowledge, followed by the more sophisticated cognitive tasks of comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
The psychomotor domain relates to the learning of physical movements.
The affective domain describes learning objectives that emphasize a feeling tone, an emotion, or a degree of acceptance or rejection.
Affective objectives vary from simple attention to selected phenomena to complex but internally consistent qualities of character and conscience.
A large number of such objectives can be found in the literature expressed as interests, attitudes, appreciations, values, and emotional sets or biases.
The affective domain is essential for learning, but it is the least studied, most often overlooked, the most nebulous and the hardest to evaluate of Bloom's three domains.
In formal classroom teaching, the majority of the teacher's efforts typically go into the cognitive aspects of the teaching and learning and most of the classroom time is designed for cognitive outcomes.
Similarly, evaluating cognitive learning is straightforward but assessing affective outcomes is difficult.
Thus, there is significant value in realizing the potential to increase student learning by tapping into the affective domain.
Similarly, students may experience affective roadblocks to learning that can neither be recognised nor solved when using a purely cognitive approach.
Cognitivist teaching methods aim to assist students in assimilating new information to existing knowledge, and enabling them to make the appropriate modifications to their existing intellectual framework to accommodate that information.
Common to most cognitivist approaches is the idea that knowledge comprises symbolic mental representations, such as propositions and images, together with a mechanism that operates on those representations.
Knowledge is seen as something that is actively constructed by learners based on their existing cognitive structures.
Therefore, learning is relative to their stage of cognitive development; understanding the learner’s existing intellectual framework is central to understanding the learning process.
While behaviorists maintain that knowledge is a passively absorbed behavioral repertoire, cognitive constructivists argue instead that knowledge is actively constructed by learners and that any account of knowledge makes essential references to cognitive structures.
Knowledge comprises active systems of intentional mental representations derived from past learning experiences.
Each learner interprets experiences and information in the light of their extant knowledge, their stage of cognitive development, their cultural background, their personal history, and so forth.
Learners use these factors to organise their experience and to select and transform new information.
Knowledge is therefore actively constructed by the learner rather than passively absorbed; it is essentially dependent on the standpoint from which the learner approaches it.
As knowledge is actively constructed, learning is presented as a process of active discovery.
The role of the instructor is not to drill knowledge into students through consistent repetition, or to goad them into learning through carefully employed rewards and punishments.
Rather, the role of the teacher is to facilitate discovery by providing the necessary resources and by guiding learners as they attempt to assimilate new knowledge to old and to modify the old to accommodate the new.
Teachers must thus take into account the knowledge that the learner currently possesses when deciding how to construct the curriculum and to present, sequence, and structure new material.
Unlike behaviorist learning theory, where learners are thought to be motivated by extrinsic factors such as rewards and punishment, cognitive learning theory sees motivation as largely intrinsic.
As it involves significant restructuring of existing cognitive structures, successful learning requires a major personal investment on the part of the learner.
Learners must face up to the limitations of their existing knowledge and accept the need to modify or abandon existing beliefs.
Without some kind of internal drive on the part of the learner to do so, external rewards and punishments such as grades are unlikely to be sufficient.
Cognitivist teaching methods aim to assist students in assimilating new information to existing knowledge, and enabling them to make the appropriate modifications to their existing intellectual framework to accommodate that information.
Thus, while cognitivists allow for the use of “skill and drill” exercises in the memorisation of facts, formulae, and lists, they place greater importance on strategies that help students to actively assimilate and accommodate new material.
Likewise, providing students with sets of questions to structure their reading makes it easier for them to relate it to previous material by highlighting certain parts and to accommodate the new material by providing a clear organizational structure.
As learning is largely self-motivated in the cognitivist framework, methods are suggested by researchers which require students to monitor their own learning.
Other methods that have been suggested include the use of learning journals by students to monitor progress and highlight any recurring difficulties, and to analyse study habits.
Prepared by
Sabarish P
(MSc Physics, MEd, NET)Contact: pklsabarish@gmail.com
