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. My definition is simple and absurd. But after
reading this article, what literacy means expanded and become linked with my
life.
Gee first gives out the definition about discourse before
answering what is literacy. Discourse, which means to communicate and express
one's idea to the audiences.
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. The meaning of identity kit including few
examples of that, and how people in different identity kit use diverse
discourses. 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. As Gee says: ‘focused on the individual, and
thus often miss the fact that the individual is simply the meeting point of
many, sometimes conflicting, socially and historically defined discourses’.(p.258)
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 definition and 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, the author gives
some typical examples and gives two direct conclusions: acquisition is good for
performance and learning is good for meta-level 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 defined as: dominant literacy and
powerful literacy and 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, 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 he said, ‘should be stressed’ (Gee p.261).
Unless the classes, it's more natural and functional. Much research shows that
the mainstream students acquire their literacies through their experience at
home both before and during school. 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.
Works
Cited
Gee, James. “What is Literacy?” Language and
Linguistics in Context. Eds. Harriet Luria, Deborah Seymour, and Trudy Smoke. London: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2006. 257-264. Print.
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