Friedman discusses many important details related to literacy change on Somali students and how it is related to Krashen’s Hypotheses on SLA. She does not mention specifically that she agrees with Krashen, however based on the way she applied her pedagogies on her Somalians’ students, I bet she is Krashen’s fan.
She stresses that teaching writing is not solely focus on product vs. process rather concentrates on the combination of both. These reflect from her grading rubric on her students’ drafts. They focus on content + organization (product) as well as mechanic+ style and voice (process). I said product and process is actually reflected to Krashen because he believes language learners learn language through two processes, which are acquired and learning though more concentration is given to acquisition because it is subconscious rather than learning which actually reflects upon the students’ grammar conscious.
I like Friedman’s approaches to these students because the story itself related to the schema experiences that they had experienced in Somalia, this actually enriches the responses in their papers as well as guiding their understanding because it just can fit into the schema.
In addition, we can see how Friedman’s students improve gradually especially in terms of their vocabularies by having capabilities to use different words. This is an improvement in the area of semantic.
In terms of pronunciation, we can see improvement when Fatma transcribed the word [listen]to [lissen]. Though it was wrong, but it shows that she tried to make sense of pronunciation/sound in English with English spelling/ graphonic. A knowledge of linguistics is useful when teaching TESOL or TEFL!
The best part of learning that I gained from last week reading was the discussion and comparison with other group members based on different case studies. This expanded my perspectives as I could see every group tried to make bridge between students’ spoken language ( or the language that students have) with the students’ works. I think my class members already becomes fan of Krashen because students/kids that we operated their works came to classroom already developed their language already. Our task( as a teacher) is to build and accommodate them the bridge so that they can make sense of it.
Tags: analysis, linguistic