Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Rui Wang 1st Writing Assignment NO.1

Rui Wang/ Frank    
Writing assignment No.1
After carefully reading through the whole passage, I have a deeper comprehension about how we can grasp a written language proficiently -----direct learning or acquisition.( Summarized from the passage Written and Second Language Acquisition) Some of the phenomenon talked in the passage really happens in my life and I will talk about it combining the information in the passage.
First, the author talks about 2 exactly different views about how children should be taught to read------one is Word Recognition View which states that written language should be learned and another one is Sociopsycholinguistic view which believes that written language can be acquired through specific ways. Mainly, Word Recognition View believes that the essential task that students will accomplish is to identify words and try to remember them. If the word is long, the student can break the word into several parts that they are familiar with and try to integrate the meanings of each part into one to get the meaning of the word. On the contrary, Sociopsycholinguistic View holds that the main task will be to combine their background information with the cues on the textbooks in order to get the meaning. And they believe that students can not just break a sentence into several parts in order to understand it so that it is not a useful way to figure out the meaning of a sentence or a single word.(Summarized from the paragraphs in this passage)
Secondly, the author focuses on the how students practice written language in classrooms. The Word Recognition View advocates that the teacher will pre-teach the words that most students don’t understand, let them look up the words they find to be difficult and remember the definitions. However, Sociopsycholinguistic View believes that the teachers will give students some useful strategies in order to help them when they have difficult constructing meanings in a text, which improves their reading proficiency to a large extent..(Summarized from the paragraphs in this passage)
Finally, the author emphasizes on the differences between Learning View and Acquisition View concerning the study of writing. In a traditional classroom, teachers teach writing by breaking a whole article into several individual components and teach each part to the students so that the students will know the structure of a whole writing which is very beneficial for their future writing. For correctness, the teachers in a traditional classroom correct each of the students’ writings, especially making sure that the spelling of each word is correct. However. In a process classroom, the teacher will let the students be versatile, not just knowing the structure of a piece of writing; and the teacher will let the students produce several different kinds of writing .For correctness, the teacher will let the students exchange their writings with each other and correct each other’s writings so that everyone can get feedbacks from their classmates and then the teachers will revise their writings so that the students will know where they use inappropriate sentences or words that confuses the teacher and their classmates so that they will make modification to that writing following social rules in order to make their writings more comprehensible.( Summarized from the paragraphs in this passage)
In my personal perspective, I am convinced that written language can be acquired through some specific ways. When I was in kindergarten, I really can’t recognize the words on Chinese textbooks. My Chinese teacher used a very efficient way to help us recognize the words-----first, they first copied down the words from the textbooks onto the blackboard; then, she read the words aloud to us accompanying by pointing to the wording she was reading so that we could find the same words on our textbook and then we can combine the pronunciation of the teacher with what our parents taught us. Finally, the teacher would explain the words in words that we could understand so that we could correspond the pronunciation of the words to the actual words appeared on the textbook and we could both grasp the oral and written language very well. The method that our teacher used to recognize written language may be a combination of words recognition and acquisition methods. Our teacher taught us to identity the words by writing the words on the blackboard and this method can be a Word Recognition process. According to the passage, this method will result in the student’s knowing the pronunciation of the word but not knowing what the word means. (Summarized from the paragraphs in the passage) To avoid this phenomenon happen, the teacher will explain the words to us in the words we already know and let us read several texts in order to be familiar with these words so that we can grasp the oral and written language simultaneously by combining what the teacher told us with our oral language (background information) without encountering the situation as I talked above. So, we can’t emphasize the significance of acquisition in written language too much.
Shortly, I am convinced that acquisition plays a much more significant role in written language than learning does. We should bear in mind that remembering just the spelling and the handwriting of words is not sufficient for us, we should read more articles that contains these words to help us become familiar with these words which could help us acquire these words. Acquisition is nearly a perfect method to use in grasping written language and it should be advocated.


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