Languages
is one of the most important tools of learning to read. Time and again it has
been shown that one's ability to read and make meaning out of the printed page
depends upon one's language facility and past experiences. Now this raises the
question of the students who do not have that facility in the language or dialect
at home. These are situations in which there are more than one language spoken
in school, where there is some understanding but not total understanding. What
are the problems faced by those children? How are their differences in communication
with the middle class culture related to methods for their instruction in reading?
This question is most relevant in India where there are 1,658 mother-tongues;
where the medium of instruction in many instances may be (is) vastly different
from the languages and dialects spoken at home.
Culturally
different is the term used for those people whose language is usually different
or at least dialectically different from the teacher. The attempt to segregate
by terminology has its problems, causing false barriers to be erected as is shown
by the studies of ROSENTHAL and BEEZ. Their studies on self-fulfilling prophecies
in behavioral research showed that by labeling students, negative expectations
were planted in the minds of teachers, which produced low performance on the part
of students at a significant level of one chance in ten million that the difference
was only coincidence. ROSENTHAL took I.Q. scores on classes of students and simply
told the teachers the kind of scores that these children had. They did not give
the correct scores to the teachers. The teachers assumed that they were actual
scores. At the end of the course it was found that the children performed in terms
of the scores ROSENTHAL had given and not in terms of their actual scores. The
attitude a teacher has towards a child in a classroom has a great deal to do with
how that child is going to perform. Two things account for it. First, teachers
mark in terms of this. Second, the child himself tends to perform according to
what the teacher thinks he is.
In helping the culturally disadvantaged
students to learn to read one must bear in mind the fact that the general category
does not indicate what certain characteristics are actually present or whether
even, if present, they can be considered an educational disadvantage. These facts
must be determined individually.
One of the general characteristics is
that since language represents the humanizing element that brings true intimacy
between one another possible language differences have a way of separating and
alienating as well as the opposite. There is no dearth of examples for this phenomena.
In India, apart from the various regional languages, there are dialect variations
within a particular language itself. The language varies from area to area horizontally
and vertically; it varies according to community and education. Language being
what it is, language patterns may act as a significant restriction to reading
achievement unless certain basic principles about the language reading relationship
are considered during reading instruction.
According to LEFERVE 'language
forms a network, a continuous webbing indissolubly linking inner man, his thoughts
and emotions with other events, actions, sanctions, social groups and institutions'.
He continues to say that 'thought at higher levels is inconceivable without a
prior development of both the audio-lingual and manual visual systems of language.'
Regarding the interdependence between the words of language, experience and
reading, Alexander JOHNSON has this to say. 'Words', he says, 'can refer us to
sensible information which we have experienced; but they cannot reveal to us what
we have not experienced.' Reading is the mental process of reconstructing the
experiences behind language. A child in the middle class acquires spoken language
through feedback correction of his own active speech. For example, a child speaks
and he is understood. He has asked for something; he gets it. There is a feedback
of reaction to that speech. There is a conscious knowledge that the language has
been received in one way or the other.
The
culturally disadvantaged learns his language by passive exposure without the operant
control of feedback. From a very culturally disadvantaged background very little
oral language is used. Without guided perception of things which he has experienced
or verbal manipulation of ideas about his experience, very little in terms of
a significant body of meanings or concepts can be accumulated. Language has little
use for him as a mediator in his interpersonal relationships. This restriction
by simply passive exposure is related to the way he experiences. He cannot accumulate
perception, knowledge. Under the normal teaching conditions he will not learn
to read if he has not had previous exposure to the use of language in his everyday
world.
Hence there is a very strong interdependence between language,
operant feedback, thought and experience and the power of these functions to reconstruct
and re-associate through reading.
However,
just because a person speaks with a dialect or accent does not mean that the difference
is educationally handicapping. The syntactical and grammatical level of the person's
native language or dialect may be used as a present potential for language facility
in the adopted culture, for the rules under which the native language operates
transfers from one mode to another with relatively little difficulty. But for
a person who has not developed a complex syntactical or grammatical fluency in
his first language, little transfer can take place. Attempts to educate through
the second language will find difficulty, because it does not have the requirements
to carry as a sophisticated kind of activity as the language to be acquired. For
example, a tribal child may find it difficult to learn through English or Hindi.
For a child coming from one of such areas the whole language structure is different.
It is a change from a simple structure to a complex and more sophisticated structure.
There are other facts of a language difference that are more than linguistic;
they are the far reaching effects in the total adjustment of the individual, maintaining
a wall of separation between him and the world into which he is thrust.
To
begin with, he has had few experiences wit toys, pictures, books or magazines
and few, if any, of the other common denominators of middle-class life. Very little
spoken language has passed between him and his parents. He possesses strong negative
feelings concerning his personal worth and devalues himself as a student. He has
not learned to communicate, especially with the middle-class, developing instead
fears and suspicions of their way of life. This whole process of exclusion, based
to a significant extent on linguistic separation, helps to set a self-concept
that has a higher correlation to achievement than do so-called measurements of
intelligence. As said earlier, this self-concept is based on at least two factors:
The expectations one's society and peers have for him and the kinds of behaviour
patterns which the individual himself selects as a 'style of life', which helps
determine what he will see and hear, think and say, remember and forget. Any value
which is inconsistent with the individual's valuation of himself cannot be assimilated;
it meets with resistance and is likely, unless a general reorganization occurs,
to be rejected.
The typical classroom which is usually geared to middle-class
speech patterns, likely places this linguistically different child in a 'slow'
or otherwise labeled class. And this probably contributes significantly to his
feelings of inferiority and likely creates lowered expectations on the other part
of the teacher also.
Added to this physical exclusion are too often found
intolerance, rigidity, strict discipline and even physical force meted out by
the teacher. To start with, the student does not come out with a built-in feeling
of relatedness to the classroom and these actions do nothing to lessen his feelings
of rejection. This is why it is strongly recommended that the reading and writing
of the classroom must reflect the identity of the learner to the extent that they
do not feel they are discarded. LOBAN also stresses that the language the child
brings should be fostered as a means of thinking, exploring and imagining, helping
the student to develop and amplify his own language to the full range of his linguistic
potential. FLEMMING emphasizes the point that reading instruction should not be
a test of a match in pronunciation between the student and teacher, but that differences
in pronunciation, even substitution of words, should be seen as differing from
mistakes in reading. To do this well the teacher has to know the 'language' of
the student, including his grammar and homonyms.
Assuming the ideal that
the teacher has learned the language of the student, the teacher must have yet
another change of heart or practice from the typical classroom. The teacher habitually
dominates the interactive opportunity of the classroom by his own speech. If the
student is to learn how to interact and to communicate within the classroom, then
this is going to have to change.
One method studied to bring out this change is through self-directive dramatization
of stories. Self-directive
dramatization refers to the pupil's original,
imaginative, spontaneous interpretation of a character of his own choosing in
a story which he selects and reads co-operatively with other pupils in a group
which is formed only for the time being and for a particular story.
Another
good way to bring together the student's experiences, language, thought, feedback
and reading is through the language experience approach. The idea of building
all the language arts from an organic vocabulary is described by Sylvia ASHTO-WARNER.
It is organic because it springs from the innermost recesses of the child's inner
self, expressing his fears and desires. These first words are the bridge from
the known to the unknown and from the inner man out. They have intense meaning
for they are a part of the thought process of the child himself. The above approaches
are some techniques for working with children with language differences. They
illustrate the kinds of things that teachers can do to capitalize on the strength
that the student brings with him to the classroom. It should also be kept in mind
that the student or the group must at times at least be the power variable psychologically
within the classroom; it need not always be the teacher. Role playing, activities
growing out of language experience approaches and the like; can help bring together
parts of both worlds-the world of the student and the world of the classroom.
The student's perceptions from his environment are not interpreted as grotesque,
but are superimposed upon the adopted culture, creating at least a medium of integrity
for him within the capabilities of his own psychological system. Further, these
activities have indicated inter-dependence between language, operant feedback,
thought and experiences and the power of these to reconstruct and re-associate
through reading.