Читать книгу Student Learning Communities - Нэнси Фрей - Страница 13

Language is how humans think. It's how we socialize with others. We use language to acquire, store, and retrieve information. It is the fuel of the human cognitive operating system (the voice in your head); spoken language (and its signed equivalent) is the representation of that thinking. Take, for example, the concept of area in geometry. Even if learners simply engage in plug-and-chug problem solving, each of them has a cognitive operating system that uses language to work through the problem. They might be working in silence, but they are still engaging in internal self-talk: That side is the length, and I multiply it by this side, which is the width.

Getting students to perform their internal language of learning aloud helps teachers gain insight into student thinking, but it's also a powerful way for groups of students to drive their thinking forward. Given that teachers strive to have classrooms filled with thinking, it's reasonable that we would also strive to have classrooms full of talk. But consider the following exchange from Amanda Larson's 3rd grade classroom. As you read, ask yourself how much academic language is being used. How much thinking is happening?

Ms. Larson: I was thinking about the life cycle of an insect. Do you remember the life cycle we studied? Malik?

Malik: Yes.

Ms. Larson: What was the first stage in the life cycle? Jesse?

Jesse: They're born?

Ms. Larson: Yes, things are born, but think about the life cycle of insects. Let's try to be more specific in our thinking. What is the first stage in the insect life cycle? Miriam?

Miriam: Eggs.

Ms. Larson: Yes, insects start as eggs. Then they change and develop. They become larva after eggs, right? And then what? What happens after they're larva? Adrian?

Adrian: They're adults.

Ms. Larson: They do eventually become adults, but there's a step missing. What is the step between larva and adults? What is that stage of life called? Joe?

Joe: Mature larva?

And so it goes. The first problem, of course, is the nature of the teacher's questions, which focus strictly on the recall and reproduction of information. The second issue is structural—the teacher is asking questions of individual students one at a time. The result is an utter imbalance of spoken language. Ms. Larson used 112 words, while her students collectively used 8 words. You may have noticed that the teacher used a lot of academic language, which is great. But the degree to which her students did not puts them at a disadvantage linguistically, socially, and academically.

What's also missing is any chance for the students to interact with one another. Studies of teacher talk suggest that as much as 70 to 80 percent of instructional minutes are filled with the voice of the teacher, with the percentage increasing at higher grade levels (Sturm & Nelson, 1997). Student discourse is surprisingly rare, even in content areas and grade levels where we might expect it to be common. True discussion, defined as academic exchanges among at least three people for at least 30 seconds, occurs rarely in secondary English classrooms, occupying less than two minutes per period (Wilkinson & Nelson, 2013). In other words, in many classrooms, teachers talk and students listen. We are left to wonder about the potential dearth of discourse in distance learning environments and to what extent online instruction may be even more dominated by teacher talk. In either case, that isn't a recipe for engaged collective learning.