Tuesday, September 17, 2013

summary edition Mr.Zhang

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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