Double Entry Journal #10

Chapter 3: Language and Identity At Home

1. What are the features of the forms of language that are spoken in a home environment that align with academic varieties of language?

When Jennie is telling her story, she uses six distinct forms of language which she has learned from an academic reading environment.  They are as follows

a. she announces a beginning and an end to her story and offers a summary

b. she “adopts a frame that mimics story book reading as it is often done by teachers and teacherly adults (saying “you can read along”)

c. she offers a title for her story

d. she uses literary syntactic structures such as phrases like “once upon a time”

e. she uses literary repetition and parallelism (ex. “They were punching.  And they were pulling.  And they were banging.”)

f. she uses “sympathetic fallacy” (the sky turning dark when the fighting in the story occurred)   

2. What are the features of Leona's specialized form of language?

Throughout Leona’s story, she uses lots of patterns in the way that she speaks.  By ending each line of certain stanzas in the same word, the rhythm created by her story is poetic.  Gee even goes as far as to say (on page 34) that Leona tells this story with a “theory of signs.”  I’m not sure if I agree with this or not, but nonetheless, Leona’s story does do some interesting things!  He also says “Leona has inherited, by her apprenticeship in the social practices of her community, ways of making sense of experience that, in fact, have a long and rich history going back thousands of years.  This enculturation/apprenticeship has given her certain forms of language, ranging from devices at the word and clause level, through the stanza level, to the story level as a whole -- forms of language which are intimately connected to forms of life.  These forms of language are not merely structural; rather they encapsulate and carry through time and space meanings shared by and lived out in a variety of ways by the social group.”    

3. Why is Leona's specialized form of language not accepted in school?

Gee says “Research has shown that teachers at sharing time are often not listening for stories like Leona’s.  Rather, they expect blow-by-blow narratives or reports.  They stress linear step-by-step events or facts organized around one topic expressed with no poetry or emotion.”

4. Explain the contradiction between the research conducted by Snow et al. (1998) and the recommendations made by Snow et al. (1998).

Initially, Snow et al. says that poor readers are concentrated “in certain ethnic groups and in poor, urban neighborhoods and rural towns.”  However, then in the long quote on page 35, it makes claim that black children made gains in reading while the white-black gap remained constant. 

5. What other factors besides early skills training will make or break good readers?

How well people read when test taking (Steele says “how people read when they are taking tests changes as their fear of falling victim to cultural stereotypes increases.”), mastering academic varieties of language, and people feeling like they belong to a particular social group are all factors besides early skills training that will make or break good readers. 

6. Why do some children fail to identify with, or find alienating, the "ways with words" taught in school?

“Children cannot feel they belong at school when their valuable home-based practices (like Leona’s) are ignore, denigrated, and unused.  They cannot feel like they belong when the real game is acquiring academic varieties of language, and they are given no help with this, as they watch other children get high assessments at school for what they have learned not at school but at home.”  (Gee 37)

Source: Gee, James Paul. Situated language and learning: a critique of traditional schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.