"The children need to experince the many different types of written language in use, listening to it, observing its formation by the teacher, and then reading and writing themselves."
I chose this quote from the article because I do feel that children need to learn literacy in many different forms. Every child learns differently and it takes a good teacher to help the students to explore those forms.
"As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth" Video:
"As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth" Questions:
1. Literacy knowledge refers to the concepts children acquire during their preschool years, during the years preceding the beginning of formal literacy instruction, in kindgergarten and first grade, in reading, writing and printed language. Print literacy knowledge is to learn that written stories sound different from the way people talk, to learn that letter make words and words make sentences, and that when you read you must begin at the left and move your eyes across to the right and then go back to the left again, to learn that letters stand for individual sounds--to learn all of these basic concepts requires extensive experience with people using print, with people reading and writing around you and to you and for you and allowing you to try your hand at reading and writing.
2. Donny's failure to learn was not considered worthy of attention, and Jenny's inability to get herself heard was intimately related to this fact. Jenny wasn't taken seriously as a rightfully concerned mother because it is a deeply held belief, or stereotype, of the middle class that poor urban Appalachians are unfit as parents. Stereotypes interfere with literacy instruction by preventing school personnel from interpreting complaints and concerns in the same way they woud interpret complaints and concerns from a middle-class mother.
3. Schools contribute to poor literacy instruction by doing nothing. They fail to address the experiential difference, and they are also seemingly unconcerned about the child's failure to learn. Even though parents know what is best for their children, schools and teachers also do not listen to the parents, which contributes to poor literacy instruction.
4. If the child's family is poor, his parents undereducated, his dialect nonstandard, then we are much more likely to interpret experiential difference as a deficit in the child, in the parents, in the home, in the sociocultural community within which this child has grown up. And when we do this, we play God, conferring or denying educational opportunity to individual, socioculturally different, children. And we do not have the right to do this.
5. One misconception about the relationship between language and literacy is that your dialect tells how intelligent you are. Jenny's dialect marked her immediately, within this context of a city where urban Appalachians make up the poorest and least successfully educated minority population, as unworthy, stupid, and of no real concern to teachers like her. Another misconception is that people cannot learn to read because of the way they speak. When Jenny was shown that her knowledge of language could help her learn to read, that she did not have to say words the way the phonics system described the pronunciations, that what she had to do was to "sound out" to her dialect, then she could get a toehold on this process of learning to read.
6. There are several moves that schools and teachers can make to improve literacy instruction. The first, and most obvious, teachers and schools must accept, believe, and act upon the belief that children of poverty are learners, have been learning since birth, are ready to learn at anytime, and will learn. Secondly, and as part of this stance of accepting the children as learners, it is necessary to accept their language to help them begin their education. Third, we must realize that speakers will use the appropriate oral language register (or "type"" or form) to fit the social context they find themselves in, if they know it.
7. I don't feel that there really is a "Proper English". If you are forbidden to use your language to learn to read and write, if you are forced to speak differently when reading and writing, then you are in effect being closed off, or at least seriously impeded from accessing the world of print.
Tall Tales of Appalachia Quote:
"In the 1870's, there was no 'Appalachia.' At that time, this mountainous stretch of the country from West Virginia to northern Georgia was one of the most prosperous agricultural areas in America."
I like this quote because it shows West Virginia in a good light, which is unusual nowadays because people see us as "white savages" and "barbarians." West Virginia is a great state, but the few people who live like this ruin our reputation for the rest of us. West Virginians have strong values that other states do not have. We remain loyal to our traditions, which have for the most part protected us from the economy and things that are going on in states around us. I think this video is a good representation of how people outside of West Virginia see us. West Virginia is a wonderful place to live, but these are the people that give us a bad name.
Tall Tales of Appalachia Video:
Citations:
Purcell Gates, V. (2002). As soon as she opened her mouth. In L. Delpit & J.K Dowdy (Eds.), In The skin that we speak: An anthology of essays on language culture and power. (Print: Anthology)
Triplett, Z. (2009). Stereotypes of an appalachian dialect [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIJq-T1FbQo
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