The Discovery of Competence offers a model for language acquisition based on challenging the student to discover the meaning of language by having to use it in real situations. The authors' most brilliant move, in my opinion, is the element of student-centered research. Since these writers know from personal experience the benefits of digging through research, they decided to pull their students into the game; this follows form Shirley Heath's Ways with Words and her ethnographic research in the Carolina mountains. Students are asked to interview friends and family at home, school and in the workplace, studying and writing about the way language is used.
In this way, the TDOC approach shares much in common with Goens' model in that language is studied in real, meaningful contexts, rather than isolated and examined apart from workaday situations. Goens' primary thrust, to integrate reading and writing apprehension together, is achieved through the TDOC model as well, since students are constantly considering the implications of the spoken word vs. the written word; they're forced to grapple with the implications of reading and writing from an almost anthropological perspective, deriving their own conclusions.
In regards to The Discovery of Competence, student-centered research is a good way to put it.
ReplyDeleteMy question is: how does making a student-centered composition class for remedial L1 speakers play out over the course of a semester or year? How does the teacher constantly gather topics relative to their students in a timely fashion that remain relevant, and is there any sort of scaffolding of concepts since (it seems) that specific writing concepts are not made explicit?
Perhaps in the next few chapters...
I'm with you, Will. It sounds absolutely exhausting, but what teaching and curriculum building isnt'? I imagine that if you could design a unit this way, then it would just be a question of expanding the program, adding more units. Or, maybe not. Maybe, after you've gotten the students to "buy in" to the value of participation in the academic community, then you could veer off into a more conventional setting, gradually acclimating students to the less contex-driven activities, which is to say, typical college classes.
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