Oral Language

It was really interesting to read this chapter after our visit to Carrboro Elementary school! I have always heard that once a student reaches puberty, their ability to learn a foreign language is severely hindered. This means that while students are in elementary school, it is extremely important to teach students the correct sounds that letters make, the correct combinations of sounds to create words, and pretty much everything else about dialect that they will need to succeed later on in life. The two main influences that a student has in their development come from at home from their parents and at school from their teachers. All students come into the classroom with languages derived from their home culture and their various social backgrounds. These different backgrounds need to be recognized in the classroom as well as the “Standard English.” The correctionist approach works to correct a students “nonstandard” language to help them move towards “standard” English. This approach fails to recognize the different backgrounds that a student comes in with which need to be recognized considering the big influence that their home lives have on their learning. The contrastive approach on the other hand fails to recognize that children must know Standard English which is seen as the proper form of English and needs to be taught for standardized tests at least. I don’t know which one of these I agree with more, both taking a students home life into consideration and teaching them standard English are important.

When I got to the section on Cambourne’s conditions of learning, I couldn’t help but think about the classrooms that we saw at Carrboro. These classrooms are proof of how these conditions work to teach students different languages, English, Spanish, and any other languages they may want/need to learn. The first condition is immersion. This condition calls for the students to be surrounded by an authentic use of the language. Students need to hear and experience the language first hand which is what the students in the dual language classrooms have had since kindergarten. The second condition goes along with the first of immersion, and that is demonstration. The students need to hear how the language gets used in every day conversations and see that social interaction using the language. The third condition is the use of the language which the students at Carrboro have all but mastered. It was amazing to see these young students that have heard and interacted with a foreign language be able to speak it so fluently to their fellow classmates and their teacher. The rest of the conditions are also important and they were very apparent in the dual language classrooms. The students were taught in the foreign language, expected to speak and interact in the foreign language, and they were encouraged to ask questions in English about the Spanish words that they did not know the meaning of. These dual language classrooms are fascinating and really demonstrated what most of Chapter 2 talked about!