Week 4, Blog 4: TDOC, Ch. 6, "Discovering Competence"

I appreciate the jigsaw readings we did for TDOC, especially because this spared me reading some extremely dry material and privileged me with reading Ch. 6 -- from what I could tell, easily the most interesting chapter in the book so far.

Chapter 6, "Discovering Competence," represents the culmination of all the thought and preparation laid out in previous chapters.  This is where all the theory is put into action.  Here we see Krashen colliding with Piaget, Vygotsky and Brunner.  Here the authors turn loose their curriculum on developmental college students (the broken-wing starlings!), transforming the numb, disenfranchised into the invigorated and welcomed by way of ethnography, transforming every student into a little anthropologist/linguist, armed with a tape recorder.

Of course, it's what students do with the interviews and recordings afterward that gives the project true merit.  Rather than being spoon-fed little mouthfuls of info to memorize like most remedial students, this group discovers how language works and why it works, noting the differences between the written and spoken word, and understanding how and why the rules that govern it exist to clarify the process.

It strikes me as a tremendously freeing, energizing, fun way to teach and to learn, and I'll be excited to implement some sort of research project like this where the students get jazzed about language from such an organic level.

Of course, just how one moves students into the college mainstream after these delightful "finger painting" exercises remains to be seen.  A large portion of the program is directed to developing a curriculum that provides meaningful context for acquisition.  The classroom itself is seen, not as a catalyst for joining the intellectual conversation, but as as a killer of inspiration and acquisition, since it strips language of all context and meaning (p. 28-9).  Presumably, a program like TDOC is used as a stepping stone for students to acclimate them to the chilly, sterile environment of the classroom?  At what point is the student ready to turn from this "mother's breast" to drink a glass of cold milk with colleagues?