Discourses

If you want to learn English, the classroom is not the best place to pick up the language. Think about when children are learning how to talk. Typically the parents or guardians of the child teach this by acquisition. James Paul Gee defines acquisition in his short story “What is Literacy” as “…a process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a process of formal teaching. It happens in natural settings which are meaningful and functional in the sense that the acquirer knows that he need to acquire the thing he is exposed to in order to function and the acquirer in fact want to so function. This is how people come control their first language.” (Gee, 107) Which, miraculously, is the reason why, for most children, their first word is usually Mommy or Daddy. I’m sure this wasn’t because they decided at toddler stage to pick up a book and read the word Mom or Dad. Generally parents constantly reinforce that they are Mommy or Daddy over and over. Which sets up the natural subconscious setting that Gee said is to be where most learning takes place, eventually the child picks up on it and spits out the word. Even when you grow old enough to venture off to school it is the teacher’s job to teach you how to read and write. Really though, English is so much more than strictly reading and writing. In order to fully understand the English language you need to be taught by acquisition. Not only would you learn English more efficiently you will also be introduced to social rules of English that are not talked about in the classroom.

I have heard it is easy to learn the basics of English but, in order to master and become fluent it is difficult because there are so many expectations and rules to everything. If I were to guess it would probably be due to enormous vocabulary, confusing spelling system accompanied by the many tricky rules, and the synonyms. Our vocabulary roots from many different cultures, making it difficult to break down a word into roots, if your not an expert in many different cultures that we have borrowed words from. The reasons there are spelling bee’s for the English language is because the way words sound in some cases aren’t how they are spelt with silent vowels and other rules. Our language also contains words having the same or nearly the same meaning as another. Also, depending on where you learn English or which dialect will be different from another area that is spoken. To myself, being raised the in the U.S. and being exposed to different dialects, it’s something that I have learned to expect and not be confused by. However to others that aren’t in my situation I could see how this could be very problematic. James Paul Gee feels that acquiring secondary language is crucial “The point can be made using second language as the example: most people aren’t very good at attaining a second language in any very functional way through formal instruction in a classroom. That’s why teaching grammar is not a very good way of getting people to control a language. However, people who have acquired a second language in a natural setting don’t thereby make good linguists, and some good linguists can’t speak the languages they learned in a classroom. What is said here about second languages is true, I believe, of all of what I will later refer to as “secondary discourses”: acquisition is good for performance, learning is good for meta-level knowledge (cf. Scribner & Cole, 1981). Acquisition and learning are thus, too, differential sources of power: acquirers at talking about it, that is, at explication, explanation, analysis and criticism.”(Gee, 107) It’s almost as if English has two sub divisions, communication inside the classroom and communication beyond the classroom.

Too many English classes curriculum are simply formal reading and writing. I use the word formal because unless your preparing a business letter or in a classroom, you really don’t use formal English. Sure being part of a businessperson discourse would cause this curriculum to be helpful. Not everyone is a businessperson though, so this part of English would be irrelevant to the majority of people. As mentioned in “From Silence to Words: Writing as Struggle” by Min-Zhan Lu “When I listen to my daughter, to students, and to some composition teachers talking about the teaching and learning of writing, I am often alarmed by the degree to which the metaphor of a survival tool dominates their understanding of language as it once dominated my own. I am especially concerned with the way some composition classes focus on turning the classroom into a monological scene for the students’ reading and writing. Most of our students live in a world similar to my daughter’s, somewhere between the purified world of the classroom and the complex world of my adolescence. When composition classes encourage these students to ignore those voices that seem irrelevant to the purified world of the classroom, most students are often able to do so without much struggle. Some of them are so adept at doing it that the whole process has for them become automatic.”(Lu, 133) If we spoke the same way we construct papers we would most likely sound like robots. Sure it is important to know how to formally address someone in a respectful manner. However, in my experience formal language is way too much of a dominance of English class. English should be a place where communication skills are practiced and discussion is abundant. Ideas should bounce around to introduce students to different perspectives to make students more well rounded and get exposed to other people’s discourses, because really school is an institution to prepare children for the real world.

The English language is constantly changing pushing English classroom discourse to change as well. Going back to when William Shakespeare was composing famous plays English was spoken completely differently from then to current date. Shakespeare created slang for the English language that has even carried on to dialect today. In classes I have previously taken, we read and acted out some of his plays. It was extremely difficult to understand what was going on even after the translation. The English language has come quite a way and gone under major transition. Every generation new words and phrases are produced to develop the English language to something different than it was before.

The younger generation is mainly responsible for new terms and slang. For example five years ago the word “bootylicious”