Text, Role, and Context

Text, Role, and Context

1. Developing Academic Literacies

   • Literacy and Pedagogy
     • Three views
       • Traditional views and pedagogies
         • The linguistic world can be described in terms of facts, rules, and regularities about the language
           • Grammatical and lexical facts are studied.
         • Focus on the teacher-directed study of grammar and vocabulary and the student production of perfect English sentences and discourses
           • Error-free texts
         • Emphasis is put on formal, factual text organization
           • Illustration
           • Exemplification
           • Comparison
           • Contrast
           • Classification
           • Definition
         • Learner
           • Passive recipient of expert knowledge and direction
             • Their meanings, motivations, and voices have been ignored.
         • Teacher
           • Expert and authority. Directs all student learning,
       • Learner-Centered views and pedagogies
         • ´Schooling is successful only if it is directly relevant to students and their lives´
         • Teacher
           • Coach, facilitator that assists students in finding their own meanings and in developing cooperative and supportive classroom communities.
         • Acceptable variations in language, form, and topic
         • Learner
           • Individual meaning-making is important
         • Two views
           • Personal-Expressivist view
             • Emphasis on self-discovery and development of a unique, personal voice, and on individual interpretation in reading and writing.
             • Helps students to develop fluency, confidence, and their personal literacies. Also to know about issues of form and social context.
               • Consideration of textual contraints, readers and writers´roles, and of the context.
           • Psycholinguistic-Cognitive view
             • Individual cognitive development and text processing at their core.
             • Key terms
               • Schemata and Interactivity
                 • When readers or writers need to process texts, they draw from their schemata, their past experiences with the text content and form.
               • Text Processing
                 • Reading and Writing require planning (prewriting or prereading), drafting (initial writing or reading), revision (modifying and extending), and editing (correcting or rereading)
                   • The teacher helps students to develop different strategies to help students get started, plan, draft, revise, and edit.
               • Strategies and Metacognitive awareness
                 • It is important to analyse and discuss individual strategies for text processing.
                   • The teacher encourages students to think about particular strategies they use to complete a task (Metacognition)
       • Socioliterate views and pedagogies
         • Literacies are acquired principally through exposure to discourses from a variety of social contexts.
           • Individuals gradually develop theories of genre
         • Learner
           • Constantly involved in research into texts, roles, and contexts, and into different strategies for completing literacy tasks.
         • Teacher
           • Provides leardership. Introduces texts from various genres. Acts as a mediator within academic contexts.
         • Schemata and interactivity redefined
           • There is much more that text content and form in a literate person´s schemata
             • Knowledge about context
             • Knowledge about readers´and writers´roles
             • Knowledge about the values and registrers of cultures and communities
           • Key to successful processing or production of texts appropiate to particular situations
     • Literacy
       • Is more than ´reading and writing´
         • Reading and Writing skills are influenced by speaking and listening ones
       • Refers to strategies for understanding, discussing, organizing, and producing texts.
       • Is related to the social context in which discourse is produced and the roles and communities of text readers and writers.
       • Is used to refer to previous experiences, not only with texts but also with parents, teachers, and literate persons.
       • Integrates into one concept the many and varied social, historical, and cognitive influences on readers and writers.
     • Literacy is integrated with Pedagogy as Ann M. Johns (the writer of the chapter) believes that for most practicioners, application of theory takes place every day in classrooms.
     • Basic theoretical elements
       • Nature of Acquisition
         • It is necessary the inclusion of beliefs about how abilities to read and write are acquired.
         • Its theories vary according the practicioners.
         • All its beliefs have direct and immediate implications for the classroom.
       • Learner´s roles
         • Different considerations
           • The learner is a passive recipient of data.
           • The learner is an active participant in the process, the prime motivator, and meaning-maker.
           • The learner must drill and practice the correct forms in order for literacy to be acquired.
           • The learner is caught between his/her own motivations and purposes and the constraints of the context and culture.
       • Teacher-Expert´s role
         • Contrasting considerations
           • This person is a role model, the source of knowledge, and the director of learning.
           • This person is the facilitator in the process of exploring and producing texts.
           • This person is an intermediary, the arbitrator between the learners and the worlds of language and literacy.
       • Nature of Language and Texts
         • Divergent considerations
           • Languages and texts are principally formal, primarily grammatical patterns, and rethorical structures.
           • Texts are produced creatively by individuals, whose search for meaning supersedes form and other text features.
           • Learners and texts are socially constructed, produced through the intersection, tensions, and negociations between individual purposes and the constraints of contexts.