homework No.3 Mr Zhang

summarize Gee's point

After knowing the main meanings of learning and acquisition, we read a new article about the Literacy. I still remember what I said in the class: Literacy is a kind of tool or skill which is used to help people communicate and understand each other. That's what the word 'literacy' mean in my mind, simple and absurd. But after reading this article, what literacy means expanded and become linked with my life. 

Discourse, which means to communicate and express one's idea to the audiences, was firstly discussed in the passage. Every sorts of background knowledge is useful to the speaker because in Gee's opinion, discourses are meaningful only when the audience have background knowledge about it. Next he introduced some kinds of views that are unfamiliar to American but well known in the Europe. These views finally make up and idea that the American people focused too much on individual and ignored that each part or result of the discourses is based on historical and social experience of the audience. And this conclusion, whIch is much convincing,leads to a new discussion on how people come by the  discourse. The question is similar to ' how do people know something form a discourse'. So the discussion on acquisition and learning was directly followed.

From Gee's view, acquisition is a kind of process acquiring something and explore to models and a process of trail. Differently, learning involves conscious knowledge gained though teaching. While people cannot usually separate the two things and always mix them together. But in this paragraph, author gives some typical examples and gives two direct conclusions: acquisition is good for performance and learning is good for metalevel  knowledge. 

And next, after introducing primary discourses which mainly about the difference of culture and language background, the author Gee strongly emphasized the secondary institution, which mainly about family impacts and build on extend. Literacy is a control of secondary uses of language, Two kinds of literacy was divided: the dominant one, represents the influence from family and Powerful literacy which about primary or other secondary discourse.

While, the discuss on study is still continuing. Someone says teaching is not reliable to success and it takes too much time. But there is another saying that meta-knowledge is the best developed through learning and we can't discourse with another unless the meta-knowledge. And learning and acquisition, although they have different goals on teaching, people still easy to mix the together in real life and can't get what they expected. Acquisition, so as Gee said, should be stressed. Unless the classes, it's more natural and functional. We should realize that teaching and learning is connected. The mainstream students acquire by practicing developing skills. However, learning should face all students. No matter how good our school be, those non-mainstream students will always have conflict. Gee believe that we must remember that conflicts while they do very often detract from standard sorts of full mastery, making it commonplace in society at large.