Literacy shmiteracy

[flonnebonne]

"Fanfic in Chinese is better! All the English ones are so bad! And you know, there's so much...18+ stuff!"
--something a Gr. 8 student said to me the other day

Getting students to read fanfic to help them improve their language abilities sounds good in theory, but all the badfic and porn out there gets in the way. The last thing you want is parents complaining that you told their kids to read porn. I think anime fandoms are especially porny, for whatever reason. Too bad, since that's what the Gr. 8 student likes.

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On another note....when I read in Japanese (which isn't that much), I tend to read crap. I read celebrity news--about Westerners, so I can't even make the excuse that I'm gaining cultural knowledge. I read manga and rarely books. I read freaking MSN ads. I rarely ever read anything difficult or substantive. And because I don't read difficult stuff in Japanese, I don't have the language to even think about difficult stuff in Japanese. I am barred from higher thought.

It really hit home the fact for me that access to high levels of literacy = access to thinking = access to power.

(This is my way of saying, "Ugh, I should have read more essays to prepare for the stupid JLPT.")

Comments

[harumi.livejournal.com]

Yup. There's the separation between language fluency as well. BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) can form within a year, and make people seem fluent or even native-like. CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) however, will take as much as 10 or more years to form. So academic language takes time, yo. Which is why education is so important. Because if you can't develop CALP, or aren't given enough time to develop it *cough* NCLB *cough* you're cutting people off from a lot of things.

[flonnebonne]

The sad thing is I have neither good BICS nor CALP at this point (but if I live in Japan for a month my BICS will come back).

I heard CALP usually takes 5-7 years? For students in the school system, anyway. Ten is such a depressing number.

Man, everything I hear about NCLB makes me want to not teach in the US, even if there are no jobs here. Didn't Obama say he wanted to axe NCLB, though? What happened to that?

[harumi.livejournal.com]

It depends on the year. The later you learn English, the longer it takes, which makes sense. A 6 year old's CALP will mostly form alongside her peers, but a 15 year old will be essentially 11 years behind. I think 10+ is the upper limit, assuming there is a limit. Some never develop CALP after all. And recent research has shown that overall comprehension can only happen if a reader understands 95% of the words, which is pretty scary also.

Aw man, NCLB sucks, like really. You know how much time they give teachers and students in ESL programs out of those programs and onto the native speaker track? 3 years. At most. a;sdkjfa;slkdjfads arrrrrrrrrgh. And then they wonder why immigrants and their children are doing so poorly in schools.

Let's not even talk about what Obama is going to do, because I have no idea. Like many, I've been pretty disappointed, but the Republican candidates are even worse. Ugh, America, why you keep failing?!

[flonnebonne]

Ah, that makes sense. The kids who immigrate over here in the higher grades have heartbreakingly high dropout rates. I saw it on my practicum in a public school.

I've heard the 95% thing too and totally believe it. Vocab vocab vocab. It just takes ridiculous amounts of time to learn, especially if your L1 isn't similar to the target language.

Three years??? That's just...pedagogically unsound. Is that for students of any age? Makes no sense.

The one thing I've heard about the US that sounds awesome to me is bilingual education. We're starting to copy it here in my province in a few places (it's all Mandarin-English classes). Have you got a lot of that going on in your state? Ever observed a class? It sounds super interesting but I bet they need ridiculously well-trained teachers to pull it off.

[harumi.livejournal.com]

It is. When we got into talks about it our professors went into a hissing/spitting fit of RAEG. The NCLB is incredibly unsound, pedagogically, theoretically, practically, you name it, it's got problems. I don't know what they were thinking.

There are a few Spanish-English and French-English bilingual programs, but while they work well in theory, the program has to be designed very well, and the teachers well trained to pull it off. Unfortunately politics again gets in the way. Michigan's bilingual education is in danger of being closed down after affirmative action was voted away (ugh, the ignorance of the population just frustrates me. It's not about quotas people!). Pennsylvania has not, and the programs seem to be thriving. A few of my professors have kids in those programs, and according to them, they're bilingual, so that's something.

I'm hoping to do an internship at one of those places this summer. Wish me luck.

[flonnebonne]

NCLB (and your school system in general) is kind of a boogeyman up here. Our province's union just has to mention NCLB and all the teachers get scared. "Don't let standardized testing ruin our schools!" My cousin (who's a vice-principal) trained his nine-year-old kid to be able to give a very cogent argument against standardized testing.

Ha ha I'm such a hypocrite though. I'm working part-time at an SAT prep centre. It's uber reductionist education.

OOOH, if you do do an internship at one of those places I would love to hear about it, even briefly. Do they generally stick to one language at a time, or do they mix it up? I'm guessing in the lower levels they'd have to mix it up.

[harumi.livejournal.com]

Depends on the program. From what I've heard, it's half and half. So sometimes every other week, other times every other day, or half day. Bilingual programs are ideally supposed to have half-English/half-other speaking students, so that both can exchange. Since America is such an English dominated country though, it mostly doesn't work that way, so more emphasis on the other language portion is given to give it a little balance in the beginning. Toward the end though, students should be fluent in all four skills for both languages, ideally.

[flonnebonne]

Cool. I'll have to look into it more on my own. Wish I could have been in a program like that! (Though as a kid I probably would have rebelled.)