genre-based teaching & literacy
Genre-based teaching & literacy | Nina Blair | June 30th, 2000
To the list:
This is really quite a long spiel that you may not want to read if you're not interested in genre-based teaching and literacy. I'm wondering about the quote below that comes from an email of a week or two ago:
This topic really hit home when I was reading about the syllabus stuff in Australia in which SFG linguists were mounting a challenge to the view of writing that had been presented in Australian schools historically. That small "l" liberal idea of an expository essay that defended a position of the author was, for most of my life, completely beyond my comprehension. The SFG linguists were aware that people like me existed. That made me feel a lot better.
First of all as I understood Martin, Christie and Rothery and others, their argument was/is against the traditional diet of narrative writing only, and in favor of other genre types such as report, exposition and argument so I found this reference to be misleading.
There were no comments that picked up the real issue here, at least as I understand it. Please correct my interpretation, as this is a foundational issue for genre-based teaching. Their bone of contention is that students are disadvantaged when restricted to only one genre type (and particularly the narrative genre). It's important to highlight the existence of genres, plural, and the communicative purposes they serve rather than giving students the impression that there is one correct form and purpose for writing. It would be nice if we could solve the problem by teaching all genres but since we can't, the choice of which genres to teach becomes an issue at the elementary and secondary levels. What you decide to teach means as well that you have decided NOT to teach something else. This is political whether you admit it or not.
The argument for genre-based teaching revolves around choice, both textual and ideological. I know these ideas are noxious for many and also that they don't impact all teachers. Much depends on the culture you're working within, but once we do get outside our own native environments it's clear that there are implicit and uninformed choices being made for and carried out by teachers and the ultimate consumers are the students. There are so many issues here of where you stand as a teacher and particularly whether or not you feel that what happens in your classroom has any long-term impact. If it does not, then no problem. If it does, then these political issues will resonate.
An issue I find equally fascinating derives from the discussion on why narrative genres may not constitute the optimal pathway for many students whether non-Western ESL or developmental or socially and economically disadvantaged. Here are the views of the Australians themselves as quoted in McCarthy and Carter, Language As Discourse, p30 and 31 on the subject of the narrative genre:
In my view the intellectual legacy ...is a legacy well entrenched in much western thought, for it is the one which prizes persons first, conceived of in some ways apart from social processes. It explains human behavior less in terms of social experience, and very much more in terms of innate or inner capacities that are to be brought forth in some way. (Christie, 1985)
Beyond this, I worry that overly strong emphasis on individual creativity quite overlooks the fact that children come to school with very different linguistic/generic preparation from home. To the child from the literate middle-class home the teacher's exhortation to express her-himself is no threat - she or he will implement the generic forms acquired at home. A child from the inner-city slums of Sydney cannot respond in the same way. If the possibility of generic creativity is thought to reside in individuals, then success or failure equally can be laid at the door of the individual- entirely inappropriately (Kress, 1987).
It may be that the intellectual qualities that we value are ones that are culturally and socially embedded, and not part of a fixed cognitive developmental sequence. There is a fascinating section in Grabe and Kaplan The Theory and Practice of Writing, Chapter 1.3 on the debate over literacy and whether or not it develops a singular array of cognitive skills or whether these skills are socially embedded. You really can't get away from the politics of it. It seems like something we should have been able to piece together from the idea (I can't remember the exact quote) that all languages are complete for the needs of the society they serve. It would follow that the society constrains the development of language. And then it is a short step to understanding that.
Schooled education rather than literacy appeared to predict the sorts of individual cognitive skills (such as abstract deductive reasoning, drawing logical inference, and connecting unrelated information) that are assumed to result from learning to read and write. Rather than literacy being the cause of the cognitive skills valued by academic institutions, it would seem that the skills are inculcated by the institutions, which then attribute to these skills the idea that they represent basic cognitive development (p. 13).
This has sparked my interest in Goody and literacy in traditional societies. Is anyone up on this? This issue helps me a great deal as a teacher of second language students in a developing country because the conclusion is so prevalent that they "just don't get it" (whatever is being taught) because they either "just don't have it" (abstract thinking, deductive logic) or they "just don't want it" (lazy, ignorant, hopeless). This view affords an opportunity to reformulate the approach to the instructional content. Does anyone else find this informative and even transformative of his or her teaching and thinking?
Thanks,
Nina Blair
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