Week 7

Overall, I thought chapter 1 in the Wong textbook was really interesting.  It covered a lot of material and I felt that I learned a lot in reading just the first chapter!

The first thing that really struck me was the idea of inequity in the school systems.  If students aren't in school, they aren't becoming strongly literate and the oppression just worsens.  "In the United States there are more African American young men in prison than in college" (3).  This struck me as unbelievably sad, because prior to that, Wong explains how Caucasians get lesser punishment for the same crimes.  This eventually led into the idea of linguistic racism, which is a new idea for me that was really interesting.  Do we treat those who are of lower power differently?  We certainly do discriminate with the idea of Standard English.  We don't treat African American Vernacular or other dialects of English as correct or even intelligible.  The stereotypes we place on those people after hearing them speak is both astounding and extremely sad.

Later on, Wong discriminates between Krashen's i+I (input hypothesis) and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.  I thought the table on page 31 was extremely helpful because on the surface, I thought these two theories seemed identical in most aspects.  Wong was able to draw out the differences and I learned to discriminate between the two.

I like the idea of Dialogic Pedagogy.  I think it certainly is important to use the community as a site for motivation.  As we've learned before, motivation is an extremely important aspect in second language acquisition.  We, as teachers of ELL students, want to provide meaningful lessons and messages to the students.  What better way to motivate and keep interest than by using meaningful information including the students' own environments?  Inquiry and exploration keep the interest and motivation levels high as well.  The dialogic approach really pushes students to explore and create meaningful messages, lowering their affective filter and eventually leading to much more solid learning than just memorizing grammar facts would do.