Classroom Talk and Emergnt Readers

The two chapters in the Gibbons text were about how to make an environment in the classroom that allows for the students to engage in productive talks. Gibbons feels that productive classroom talk is important because "development of the spoken forms of language are essential for second language learners as a bridge to the more academic language." (p.14) ESL students are not only learning the new content that is being presented, but they are also learning a new language. Simply listening to the teacher all the time does not allow the students to practice the new language enough. Sadly, classrooms are most often set up in an IRF (Initiation, Response, Feedback) format. This means that the teacher asks a question of the students, gets a simple response, and then evaluates that response as to whether or not it is correct. In this type of an environment the ESL student suffers because they are not able to really practice the new language and hear their peers using language. I would take this point a step further and argue that all students suffer in this situation because I feel that all students benefit from work on their spoken language.

Gibbons goes on to argue that in order to get away from the traditional IRF format in schools, teachers need to get their students to do more group work. This allows the students to hear a "greater variety of language...interact more with other speakers...[and hear language] in an appropriate context and used meaningfully for a particular purpose." (p. 17) All of this leads the students along what Gibbons refers to as the "mode continuum...from spoken to written language." (p. 41) The group work allows the students to work together using informal language, piece together all of their ideas, and then come back together to report their work verbally to the class or write out individually what they learned. Reading through these chapters reaffirmed to me the importance of group work. However, in my placement I have not seen much, if any real group work. This is obviously because I am in a kindergarten classroom and the students are so new to formal education. These students are just now learning how school works and what is expected of them. Effective group work takes practice, and the students in my classroom are far from being ready to productively work in small groups.

The Tompkins chapter was much more in line with what I have seen in field. All of the students in my kindergarten class are at varying levels within the emergent reading and writing stage. At this stage, "young children gain an understanding of the communicative purpose of print, and they move from pretend reading to reading repetitive books and from scribbles to simulate writing to writing patterned sentences." (p.89) Reading about the instructional recommendations that Tompkins has for emergent reading and writing students, found on page 97 in figure 3-3, was like going through my classroom's daily routine and listing everything that they do each day.

I could write for hours about all of the literacy instruction that I get to see everyday. Just last Thursday I worked with the students in the afternoon on their daily journal entries. In a notebook, at the bottom of the page, they write out a sentence by themselves and then above that illustrate the sentence. My CT stresses to them that they are to write the sentence by themselves, carefully sounding out each word as they write. The sentences are very simple, such as, "The alligator bites." The spelling doesn't have to be correct, as the objective is for the students to work on breaking words apart and sounding them out as they spell. Looking through their journals I can already see some improvement for most of the students from when they began back in October. I can barely remember my time as a kindergarten student and my struggles as I learned to read and write. As a teacher, regardless of what level I am working with, it will be helpful to have been in a kindergarten class and to have seen what emergent readers and writers must go through to become literate.