Literacy and Culture (Chapter 6)

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Chapter 6 talks about extended meanings and applications of literacy --- from traditional print to computer technology. In the 21st century, it is important for teachers to help students learn about all the symbol systems, the necessary cognitive strategies to interpret the message, and the larger patterns to structure messages in diverse symbolic systems. However, the close relationship between literacy and culture is often neglected in educational settings. In such a global village like the U.S., at school there are people from different cultural backgrounds. Their diverse backgrounds influence how they approach the literacy. For example, African-American children often use a “topic associating” style when narrating while white children use “topic-centered” style. Therefore AAVE students are usually misunderstood and evaluated negatively since their literacy performances do not conform to those of dominant groups.

The same case also happens to foreign language learning. In English writing, it is writer-responsible while in East Asian countries, it is reader-responsible. For instance, instead of introducing the statement of purpose initially, Chinese learners prefer to dance around the topic and gradually turn to the main point. When they transfer from L1 to L2, their English writing is labeled as unclear and unorganized by native speakers of English who think writers should take responsibility to clarify the theme.

As a result, when teaching students of different culture backgrounds or ESL/EFL learners, educators should keep in mind how culture influences literacy learning. In spite of the same symbol systems they have to learn, these cultural minority groups have different ways of encoding and decoding messages and different discourse forms, which may result in their difficulties with literacy learning in the countries of dominant groups. It is also a challenge for teachers to teach literacy of a variety of symbols in the increasingly diverse classrooms.

Alternative Assessment in Writing (Chapter 9)

In chapter 9, traditional standardized tests are criticized for its primary concern of the product of learning. It only focuses on the acquisition of the desired skills and facts and lacks measurement of higher-level thinking. To solve the problem, alternative assessment is proposed and promoted to test students’ cognitive and constructive skills. It reminds me of the learning experience in the writing class I took as an English major. At that time, every week every student was required to hand in one journal. From our writings, the teacher picked up five to ten sentences or small paragraphs which she found problematic in structure and meaning. She made these selected sentences or paragraphs anonymous, so we did not know who of our classmates had produced them. The whole class was divided into several groups and assigned certain sentences or paragraphs to discuss how to make them better. Then each group explained their revision and listened to the opinions of the other groups. After that, the teacher returned our homework and asked us to revise based on her feedback.

Unlike the traditional assessment, this kind of peer evaluation made us analyze the problem and tried to solve it with all the knowledge which we had learned in class. By doing so, when revising, we reflected on our own writing and paid attention to the same problem which we also had. The next time, we would remind ourselves and avoided making the same mistake. When we knew how to improve others’ writing, we knew how to make our own writing better at the same time. For the teacher, the process of learning was emphasized and she built the assessment into the instructions. Instead of directly and explicitly telling us the problems of our writings, she designed the task for us to solve. By listening to our discussion and evaluating the sentences each group revised, she could measure our deeper understanding and relevant knowledge. For foreign language writing, I think it is an excellent way for alternative assessment instead of just giving explicit feedback.