As a former ESL adult ed teacher with virtually no pedagogical education, The Discovery of Competence is both intimidating and liberating. Though I'd gone to a handful of workshops and heard Krashen's name dropped, I'm afraid I wasn't hungry enough to dig down deep and find out what "meaningful context" was all about. Besides, I felt I was overworked and underpaid as it was. How to justify additional self-education? On the other hand, it was no secret that the majority of our students in non-Krashen classrooms showed little sign of language acquisition (in spite of plenty of language learning), nor much desire to utilize the bits they'd learned. Clearly, something was flawed in our methodology.
Kutz, Groden and Zamel's book points out that the gross errors in ESL courses can be traced back to the set-up of the average school classroom: teaching is focused on gleaning non-contextualized information as an end in itself, stripping education of all meaning for students. If this is true in general, and if students struggle to find meaning in literacy and composition classes, it's reasoned, then it's time to teach these subjects in meaningful contexts, affording language acquisition, not language learning. Reading this, I felt, on one hand, enlightened (Ah-ha!) and, on the other hand, as if the wind had been knocked out of me.
I love the way they discuss the power of narrative writing. While I've long enjoyed writing, it was hard to say why it seemed to take me out of myself and yet develop my sense of self. The authors quote Gee, who explains that "human beings make sense of their experience...by casting it in narrative form" (40). Their commentary paints a picture the narrative writer then standing back, like a painter, observing how the piece expresses his ideas, and what it needs to express them more fully. Engaging in narrative, students have to "select details from experience and shape them into story...restructuring raw data and finding its pattern and meaning" (51-2).
Their survey of salient research on ways of thinking pertinent to successful narrative construction is illuminating. While working with narrative can develop competence in students, there is a requisite level of mature thinking that may preclude students engaging fully; this may explain why some students who seem capable of writing, fail to do so with depth. What's needed is "adult thinking," or what Piaget calls developing past "childish egocentrism" to the "formal operational" level in order to reason abstractly, particularly when it comes to imagining and writing for an audience.
Chapter Six focuses on the "ethnographic approach" to learning language, which I find fascinating. Far from alienating students for their existing (non-standard) ways of reading and writing, students are given projects for studying their own language, in particular the differences between spoken and written forms, and the discovery of the underlying rules that govern them. Students' own writing pieces, then, are studied as "data," examined for stylistic differences, instead of being judged as right or wrong. (In the margin beside this, I wrote: WOW.)
Again and again, we see why the book is titled The Discovery of Competence. In this context, students who were labeled as lacking the necessary skills or talents -- "academically deficient" -- are "raising academically significant questions about the defining characteristics of a speech situation" (107). This book, along with others like it, represents a major paradigm shift. In an "acquisition-rich" environment, a "delinquent" student transforms into a scholastic star. Perhaps equally important, this re-casts the role of teacher. If recent controversy has colored the conventional teacher as the stubborn, authoritative problem in the situation, this envisions tomorrow's teacher as the adaptable "collaborator"-teacher, and the potential hero of thestory.
As to the application of such a heavily activity-based curriculum in a conventional college classroom, some head scratching is in order. Most community college teachers, for example, are strapped with a very stringent curriculum and its concomitant regimen of assessments. Exactly how Kutz, Groden and Zamel -- or, for that matter, Sugie Goens -- rose to the position politically to be able to move the chess pieces is a topic for another paper. Short of that kind of clout, however, it's hard to imagine the implementation of such a program -- no matter how effective it may be -- either piecemeal or wholesale. Still, the writers' research, passion and commitment is absolutely palatable. Little by little, teachers eager to make a difference will be testing out out these concepts. Given half a chance, I will, too.
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