Talking to Learn; From Home to School
4. Talking to Learn
Conversation in purposeful and goal-directed
- 053.1 "Conversation is rarely an end in itself, particularly
where young children are concerned. They talk in order to achieve
other ends: to share their interest in the world around them,
to obtain the things they want, to get others to help them, to
participate in the activities of the grown-up world, to learn
how to do things or why things are as they are, or just to remain
in contact. And similar purposes underlie their parents' reasons
for talking with them. For most of the time, therefore, conversation
is purposeful and goal-directed--aimed at enabling the participants
to integrate their behavior in order to achieve the purposes
of one or other or both of them."
Learning from joint activities; role of discrepancies
- 054.1+ Simon and mother and grating lemon peel for cake
- 054.2+ Jacquie and mother and washing clothes
- Jackie: LINda bought you SOCKS, MUM.
- Mother: YES, Linda bought you SOCKS.
They're DIRty. They've got to be WASHED.
- Jackie [_trying to repeat mother's words_]: Did Linda brought
you--me got. WASHED? [Have the socks that Linda bought me got
to be washed?]
- Mother: PARdon?
- Jackie: LINda wa-WASH them.
- Mother: NO. MUMmy's going to wash them.
- Jackie: LINda wash them.
- Mother: NO. Linda's NOT going to wash them.
- Jackie: LINda's not going to WASH them.
- Mother: NO. MUMmy wash them.
- Comments
- good example of child's communicative intentions exceeding
her current linguistic ability
- 056.2 "I have analyzed this short extract in such detail
because it is such a clear example of how a misunderstanding
with respect to intended meaning can be quite literally negotiated
until a collaborative resolution achieved. At the same time,
one can almost see Jackie working on the evidence supplied by
the discrepancies between her own utterances, her mother's utterances,
and the situation to find the appropriate linguistic devices
to express her original meaning."
Questions and answers
- Children ask questions to understand why
- 058.2 "As they get older, though, their questions show
a developing interest in getting to the bottom of things. Their
questions seem to arise more frequently from a sense of puzzlement--from
a desire to make sense and get things straight in their own minds.
. . They seek explanations rather than justifications."
- Children need to ask questions
- 060.2 "Children need to be persistent questioners,
therefore, and provided their parents attempt on most occasions
to provide an answer, they will continue to ask--using others
as a resource for making sense out of their experience."
Situations for collaborative meaning making
- 060.4+ James and mother watching bird
[transcript
& audio]
- 061.2 other situations for collaborative meaning making
- 061.2 "Other situations that are particularly likely
to give rise to collaborative meaning making are looking out
of the window, recalling past events and planning or speculating
about future ones, watching television together, or reading a
story.^4"
- importance moving away from the here and now; hypothesizing
about future events
- TV as focus of child and parent
- 061.3 "Since television is often considered to have
an almost entirely negative influence, it is worth quoting several
examples to show that it need not always be harmful. In the first,
James (at 3 years 3 months) is watching a nature program about
deer." [transcript
& audio]
Exploring the world of imagination
- 064.2+ * James and mother on imaginary train ride [transcript
& audio]
- [_James is playing trains with his mother on the sofa. He
is sitting astride the arm as drive_.]
- Mother: There we are. I'll sit to the side. Right. Are you
ready? All set? Right. Off with the brake.
- James: I'll start it up.
- Mother: Oh, sorry! Right.
- James: Mum! You don't steer it yet.
- Mother: Oh. Well.
[_James makes a noise, pretending to start the engine._]
Oh! That's a quick-starting engine. Very good! Got enough coal
at the back? Have you shoveled enough coal on, James?
- James: Yes.
- Mother: Good. Away we go, then. Wave good-bye to your friends.
Right
[_Engine noises accelerate. James chuckles and makes a noise
for the engine whistle._]
We're going very fast now, James. Can you feel the carriages
swaying?
- James: Yeh.
- Mother: Can you?
- James: Yeh.
- Mother: Oh, they're rolling about. Oh--all my breakfast is
rumbling in my tummy. Oh--oh--oh!
[_Engine noises_]
I think we'll have to slow down don't you?
- James: Mm.
- Mother: I think we're going a bit too fast. . . . That's
better. That's easier now, isn't it?
- James: [_agreeing_] Mm.
- Mother: [_hums a bit, then says_]: Look at the cows in the
field, James.
- James: Mm.
- Mother: And there's a farmer, look. The farmers' waving at
you.
- {imagination allows use of words in an imaginary context
that might not be used often in the real context, e.g., cow,
shovel, coal, farmer, etc.}
From Dialogue to Reflective Thought
- Internalizing dialogue
- 065.2 "They come to be able to frame questions and interrogate
their own experience in the search for an answer. The dialogue
begins to be carried on internally. In this way, language becomes
a tool for thinking."
- Developing good language skills can lead to the development
of good, critical thinking skills.
- Children as "active constructors of their own knowledge"
- 065.6 "In learning through talk--as in learning to talk--children
are active constructors of their own knowledge. What they need
is evidence, guidance, and support. Parents who treat their children
as equal partners in conversation, following their lead and negotiating
meanings and purposes, are not only helping their children to
talk, they are also enabling them to discover how to learn through
talk."
5. From Home to School
Functions of schooling: to broaden experiences
- 067.3 "One of the most important functions of schooling,
therefore, is to broaden the range of children's experiences
and to help them to develop the sustained and deliberate attention
to a topic or activity that makes more systematic learning possible.
Above all, they need to be helped to become more reflectively
aware of what they already know and still need to know, so that
they can gradually take over more and more responsibility for
their own learning.^2"
The Language of Home and School: A Systematic
Comparison
087.2 Home-school differences in language
use (see also Table 5-1, p. 86)
- the children speak less with an adult at school
- 087.2 "But not only do the children speak less with
an adult at school. In those conversations they do have, they
get fewer turns, express a narrower range of meanings, and, in
general, use grammatically less complex utterances. They also
ask fewer questions, make fewer requests, and initiate a much
smaller proportion of conversations. . . . Teachers initiate
a much higher proportion of conversations than parents do and,
of course, it is the initiator who chooses the topic. Furthermore,
in their turns, teachers make a higher proportion of requests
and ask a higher proportion of questions, particularly of display
questions. The result is that, at school, children are reduced
for a much greater part of the time to the more passive role
of respondent, trying to answer the teacher's many questions
and carry out his or her requests. This is what accounts for
the narrower range of meanings that they express and for the
high proportions of utterances that are elliptical and fragmentary."
- they get fewer turns
- express a narrower range of meanings
- use grammatically less complex utterances
- they also ask fewer questions
- make fewer requests
- at school, children are reduced for a much greater part of
the time to the more passive role of respondent, trying to answer
the teacher's many questions and carry out his or her requests.
This is what accounts for the narrower range of meanings that
they express and for the high proportions of utterances that
are elliptical and fragmentary."
Schools don't provide environment to foster
language development
- 087.4 "As with other researchers who have compared the
language experiences of younger children at home and in the nursery
or preschool play group, what we have found is that, compared
with homes, schools are not providing an environment that fosters
language development. For no child was the language experience
of the classroom richer than that of the home--not even for those
believed to be "linguisticaly deprived."
Teachers suppress children's curiosity
- 088.5 "The objection to this and to many other similar
conversations that {089.1} start with something in which the
child is interested is not that teachers try to extend children's
knowledge, but that they try so hard to do so that they never
really discover what it is about the child's experience that
he or she finds sufficiently interesting to want to share in
the first place. Thus are children's enthusiasms dampened and
their impulses to question and explore suppressed."
Teachers appear to attempt to transmit knowledge
- 089.2 "Their [the teachers'] goal is, rightly, that
children should come to see the world from a similarly mature
perspective but, in the way that they engage in conversation,
they fail to recognize that their perspective cannot be transmitted
directly but must be constructed by children for themselves,
through a process of building on what they already know and gradually
elaborating the framework within which they know it."
Need one-to-one or small-group interaction,
not large-group
- 093.2 "It would seem, therefore, that if teachers wish
to help young children to extend their thinking, to develop their
ability to express their ideas fluently and coherently, and to
listen carefully and critically to the contributions of others,
they should not attempt to do so through large-group discussions.
Instead, they should try to plan one-to-one or, at most, small-group
situations, in which more equal interaction is possible and in
which children can try out their ideas in a tentative manner,
free from the constraints felt by both children and teacher in
the large-groups situation."
Lessons learned by children at traditional
schools""
- 093 "That the only valid learning is that which takes
place when they are engaged in teacher-prescribed tasks.
- 094 "That personal experiences, particularly that gained
outside the classroom, is unlikely to be relevant for learning
at school.
- 094 "That taking the initiative is unwise; as thinking
things out for oneself frequently leads to unacceptable answers,
it is better to play safe--to follow only the steps laid out
by the teacher."
Rosie: A Learning-Disabled Child?
- 095 Rosie at home [transcript
& audio]
- 096.2+ differences in Rosie's "verbality" with
- Teacher A ("deprived") [transcript
& audio]
- Teacher B ("quite verbal") [transcript
& audio]
- 099.5 "When provided with {100.1} the support of a teacher
who was interested in what she had to say, Rosie was no
longer incompetent."
Learning: The Active Making of Meaning
- knowledge cannot be transmitted from teacher to learner
- 101.4 However unequal the balance of knowledge between teacher
and learner, there is no way in which the knowledge of the teacher
can be transmitted directly to the learner. Indeed, the greater
the disparity, the more inappropriate such a conception becomes.
Teaching is essentially a matter of facilitating learning, and
where that learning depends on communication between the teacher
and the learner, the same principles apply as in any successful
conversation. The aim must be the collaborative construction
of meaning, with negotiation to ensure that meanings are mutually
understood."
- How do the following concerns expressed by Wells relate to
what you have see in the video about Williston School?
Construction vs. transmission of knowledge
- 115.5 "Central to this style of teaching is the recognition
that knowledge {116.1} cannot be transmitted to students in a
prepackaged form in the hope the that it will be assimilated
in the form in which it is transmitted. Knowledge has to be constructed
afresh by each individual knower, through an interaction between
the evidence (which is obtained through observations, listening,
reading, and the use of reference materials of all kinds) and
what the learner can bring to bear on it. The teacher arranges
the situation--or encourages those that the children themselves
have set up and so has considerable control over the evidence
that the learners encounter. But teachers cannot control the
interpretation the children will make."
Developmental appropriateness (raising the
bar; zone of proximal development; scaffolding; extending the
ladder)
- 111.3 "One way of helping children to harness the dynamo
of language to power their own thinking is through such exploratory
talk. Lev Vygotsky refers to this sort of collaborative exploration
at the limits of the child's working ability as working in "the
zone of proximal development," suggesting that this is one
of the most important contributions that a teacher can make to
a child's development. What the child is able to do today in
conversation with a supportive adult, he or she will to- {112.1}
morrow be able to manage alone in that interior dialogue that
he called "inner speech."^5"
Student ownership of curriculum
- 121.3 "What is important is that, for at least a substantial
part of the curriculum, there be genuine negotiation that enables
pupils to feel that they have inititated some of the activities
and have taken on others and made them their own. "Ownership"
is the word that Donald Graves uses to make the same point about
children's writing,^9 and it applies equally to other activities,
right across the curriculum."
- 121.4 "When children have a feeling of ownership and
share the responsibility for the tasks that they engage in, teachers
find that their relationships with the children change. Given
responsibility, children behave responsibly and no longer have
to be closely supervised every moment of the day. With an agreed
agenda, they know what has to be achieved and spend their time
productively, using resources appropriately, asking for the teacher's
assistance only when other sources have proved inadequate, and
moving on to a new task when the present one is completed. As
a result, freed from the demands of managing resources, answering
trivial questions about procedure, and continually monitoring
classroom behavior, teachers are able to spend considerable periods
of time with individual children giving assistance when it is
really needed and helping them to reflect on what they are doing
and to see how to extend it in various directions."
Student-teacher collaboration
- 123.4 "To teach collaboratively, it is not necessary
to know all the answers to pupils' questions or to be already
competent in all the skills that an open curriculum may call
for. Indeed, a teacher who is universally knowledgeable and competent
may actually make it more difficult for pupils to gain confidence
in their ability to learn on their own. Learning {124.1} is first
and foremost a process--a continuous making and remaking
of meanings in the lifelong enterprise of constructing a progressively
more and more effective mental model of the world in which one
lives. Learning is never complete. Furthermore, since this process
is essentially interactive, it is more helpful for the apprentice
learner to work with teachers who are themselves still actively
engaged in learning and willing to engage with their pupils in
doing so than it is to be instructed and evaluated by those who
apparently no longer have the need to engage in such processes
themselves."
Using language as a tool for thought
- 109.2 "With the teacher as listener and occasional prompter,
Colin is helped here to think through the requirements of the
task he has set himself, using language to consider alternative
courses of action and to evaluate their consequences before he
actually undertakes the activity."
- 111.2 "As before, language provides the means for reflecting
on action--not only actions that have been performed, but also
those that might be performed, such as taking a photograph by
the nearby pond. In this way, Colin is helped to establish connections
between different aspects of his experience, using the power
of language as a system of symbols to represent objects and events
that are absent or no more than hypothetical possiblities."