Discussion Post: Monika, Eug, Hak, Benjamin, Danny.

Discussion Post: Monika, Eug, Hak, Benjamin, Danny.

Hi class,

It is so easy for me to blame children for their less-than-ideal performances. However, as Rick Cass hit it home during his lectures, when students are not meeting expectations, it can mean that teachers are not doing their job ideally. One the other hand, what if students do not learn, not because of the lack of support from teachers, but because of the inherent characteristic of those teachers? This made me think about how to understand not being able to help students as much as I want because of myself being myself.  In Sarah Michaels reading it is noted that when there is a mismatch between students and teachers’ way of speech, those students will not benefit as much as those students whose prosody matches with their teachers. As somebody who did not study linguistics and who have never closely observed and studied my own rhythm, stress, and intonations of speech, I was not sure how I can try to meet the needs of all students while being helpful to all students in the most equal manner. Perhaps, my idea of fair needs to be thought out more thoroughly since it is not practical for me to strive for complete and absolute equality in developing students’ oral literacy. 

Through this post, I would like to ask your opinions on how to understand the comments below.

“There is evidence to suggest that when a child’s oral discourse is at variance with the teacher’s own literate style and expectations, interaction between teacher and child is often asynchronous and marked by interruptions and misinterpretation of semantic intent. This child, over time, often does not gain access to the kind of instruction and practice required to develop a more literate discourse style” (Michaels,  424).

“The consistent problems that Mrs. Jones had with certain children during sharing time had to do, not with attitudes, but with autonomic, unconscious processes at the level of discourse, stemming from a mismatch between teacher’s and child’s prosodic signaling system narrative schemata. Such mismatches, over time, resulted in differential amounts of practice doing literate-style accounting for black children and white children in this class” (Michaels, 440).