The Discovery of Competence's "ethnographic approach" to teaching reading and writing is a paradigm shift, to be sure. The question is: Does their approach fit college classrooms generally?
The authors refuse to accept a curriculum where language acquisition is sacrificed for mere language learning. Like Krashen, they believe real acquisition only occurs in a meaningful context, that is, where a student must use it as a means to function socially. On the contrary, most language learning is broken down into chunks and fed to students by the spoonful; they're memorizing it instead of figuring it out for themselves.
All of this is upside down in terms of the natural process of language acquisition. Toddlers, for example, don't memorize grammar in order to understand their mothers. To get an additional helping of food, the child learns to say "more." In this natural way, language is acquired as a means to an end an not vice versa.
Where most classrooms deal with the abstract study of language sub-units (verbs, nouns, etc), TDOC's approach challenges students to become "ethnographers," studying their own writing and speaking, noting the differences in each, and arriving at generalizations about the rules and functions that underlie them. Thus, TDOC's approach is not learning, but acquisition through research and discovery.
Most teachers of college remedial English don't have the luxury of re-inventing the wheel, which is what these three authors are doing, and what they're proposing that we all do. Most teachers don't have the option of working side-by-side as a team of three brilliant researchers. Most teachers, I fear, often feel less like teachers and more like ranchers, moving the herd from the fieild, into the corral, counting the livestock in the stockyards, obliged to follow in lockstep with the other ranchers. The Discovery of Competence offers an ideal, a ring to reach for, though it's unclear how to get from point A to point B.
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