Book reviews

 

The Language Experience Approach

“The Language Experience Approach is an approach based on the use of students own spoken words as the reading text.” It is typically used to teach language and more specifically reading. It operates on the premise that language is best taught through a “whole language” approach, meaning that language should not be broken down into parts like reading, writing, talking and grammar, instead, all should be used together to strengthen communication as a whole skill. “The four skills [of language] are interrelated and mutually beneficial components of the whole language and thus should be taught simultaneously.”

I work with children diagnosed with autism and this article greatly influenced my work with them. A big hurdle in autism therapy is generalization; skills that are taught in segmented broken down ways are more easily learned but very difficult to generalize to natural environments. LEA advocates for a more personalized approach to language rather than text book lessons and breaking apart language in order to teach specific language components. “Words describing personal experiences provide context of maximum support.” I immediately started using stories that my clients tell me to target reading comprehension and expanding vocabulary, as well as more personal IPP goals. These stories were highly motivating for the boys because they used their own words and ideas and gave merit to the language that they did have. “Personal experiences when connected to personal language, is much more easily remembered and understood than someone else’s language and experience.” Not only did LEA influence my exceptional needs teaching it has also helped in planning language lessons in my France placement.

Currently I am obligated to teach vocabulary from Aesop’s fables, and the language barrier means talking about personal experiences around the fables very challenging. After the Aesop lessons are completed, my TAB partner and I can use a more motivating and personal approach to our lessons. We plan to consider LEA guiding principles such as language arts must be integrated and language is for making meaning and is best acquired through meaningful use and practice. In our France school worksheets are abundant and used as the primary mode of daily learning. This goes against LEA principles of meaningful use and practice. Lessons will include oral dictation and conversational practice about motivating experiences that children have engaged in. We plan to teach through an inquiry into monsters, what makes a monster, are monsters always good or bad, what things do monsters need to learn about, what things do monsters do in a normal monster day, can people be monsters too?

The language experience approach to language development and acquisition will be a critical foundation to my teaching in France as well as in my practice in Canada. LEA is also profoundly important when considering the kindergarten curriculum of Early Literacy. LEA views reading as an extension of speaking, “the major purpose of this approach is to impart the understanding that anything that can be said can be written and anything that can be written can read or said.” There isn’t anything in the Early Literacy curriculum that can’t be taught through the language experience approach.              
 Written and Prepared by Perla H. Cuanzon

 

The First Time I Saw Paris by Peter Miller

Paris is a strange city. It’s a place where nothing has changed and yet nearly everything has changed. Peter Miller wrote about Paris in the 50’s, now 60 years later the Paris I see is so strikingly similar its as though Parisians have pressed pause and rarely but occasionally press play and allow some alterations. The Paris that Miller talks about is one that was struggling to overcome the grips of World War 2 and the German Occupation. However in their struggle Parisians gained a sense of self that maybe only an occupation can create. When who you are is stripped away and bulldozed and bombed it becomes the only thing you hold sacred. I am French, I am not German. I stroll, I do not march. The images that Miller has in his book are amazingly similar to some of those that I have taken, Paris has monuments that were erected long before Canada was even discovered. Paris has grown around these buildings, and renovated each one along the way. But then again Paris also has grand sights that are torn down and something new and bigger is built. For example the Museum of Architecture (The City of Architecture and History) was built on a sight that housed two other just as magnificent buildings before it. What Parisians hold dear to them is a private affair not to be understood by a mere tourist.

Even though some buildings are seemingly meaninglessly torn down Paris remains steadfast in its essence and culture. The buskers and musicians that Miller saw in the 50’s still are around today. But today they ride the subway, hoping to different cars at each stop instead of sitting on a corner with a cup in front of their accordion. The mothers and children still walk in front of the Eiffel Tower as though it was just another piece of metal, but instead of long cotton dresses the women wear jeans and the children have Dora backpacks. The homeless and clochard are still everywhere, but instead of sitting on the Seine talking about the good ol’ days, they’re in the depths of the metro system trying to stay warm or kneeling on the Champs Elysees with their hands in their lap. And the lovers, they haven’t gone anywhere. Paris truly is a lover’s city. Walking around Paris without my husband has been a morose experience. It’s hard to escape the sights of couples strolling through the streets hand in hand, or the couples huddled closely together on the trains, not because it’s crowded but just because they’re in love. It’s hard to escape the stolen glances and discreet kisses, there is no shortage.

But for all that stays the same and is celebrated as history just as much has evolved and is equally celebrated. Parisians have an elephants memory of how things once were. You can’t avoid the history in the city, Notre Dame, 850 years old, still stands, looming over the city, demanding it never forgets. However Paris has modernized and embraced technology. But no one forgets how Paris once was, it’s impossible to forget when you walk through the catacombs and see bones from 6 million Parisians that once were. It’s impossible to forget when you walk through Sacre Coeur and see the stained glass that was meticulously blown by hand. It’s impossible to forget when you walk through the painfully narrow side streets that have cracked pavement where the cobblestones emerge.

Paris is no Canada. And the school system is just as different as the two countries are. There is nothing that could have prepared me for the ultra traditional ways of school here. Just like Montmartre hasn’t changed in 60 years, neither has the classroom. The children still sit at desks, in rows with a teacher who stands in front of a blackboard. The children still glue their worksheets into their cahiers. The children still run around the paved school yard with no play structure. The children still complete assignments one through five in their text books. I don’t know how to teach in this kind of environment. I don’t know how to respond when administration asks that I make a worksheet so that the children can label the body parts in English. I don’t know how to respond when administration asks that I teach Aesop’s Fables by covering the vocabulary. I don’t know how to teach in France. My readings did not cover the classroom intricacies! 

 French State Education - An Introduction

            The French Education system is becoming quite clear in what it values and where childhood fits into those values. The article states “The French education system is highly oriented towards structured learning, with emphasis on traditional teaching techniques designed to help pupils attain required standards and pass exams. With the French government’s concern that students acquire the basic literacy and numeracy skills before lower secondary school learning comes to an end, the emphasis on math, reading, writing, science and French language is unlikely to change.” Nothing could have captured the culture of the school I’m placed in more succinctly than describing the goal of education as meeting required standards and passing exams. On our second day of observation, my TAB partner and I observed children stand at the front of the classroom and recite a poem one after the next. Afterwards children walked to the teacher’s desk to collect their token in which, I assume, they exchanged for some reward after “earning” enough. Later on in the recitations we watched the teacher yell at her student, telling her that she wouldn’t receive her token because she was talking out of turn. Shortly after that we sat aghast as a teacher from another classroom barged in with a student and told him not to return to the classroom until he was ready to participate in a civil way, and then proceeded to leave him in our classroom. The children are expected to sit quietly in rows and complete their work in the prescribed amount of time. When the period is over, they put their work away and take out a new book for a different subject. It’s an orchestra of robots.

The article goes on to say “Criticism of the system from British parents tends to center around the rigidity of teaching methods and the lack of opportunity for creative self-expression when compared to some of the more liberal education systems adopted by the UK. Children are likely to encounter more homework and high expectations from teachers.” What the article doesn’t explain is what it means by “high expectations from teachers.” High expectations, in my experience here in France means, strict and rigid expectations. One teacher chastised her pupil for having his accompanying picture on the wrong page; it wasn’t adjacent to his work. What this leads me think is that “more liberal education systems adopted by the UK” aren’t liberal at all, they’re just not stuck in the Industrial Revolution. Learning is measured by rote work sheet completion, and “a personal booklet allows the pupils, their family and the teachers to chart the progressive acquisition of the competences.” Competences do not necessarily equal or mean understanding.

“Inevitably in a stricter learning environment it will be evident more quickly that some children are falling behind. It has been said by some that children who fall behind are not necessarily given as much time by their teachers although one should set against this the fact that most schools can arrange special learning programmes for children experiencing difficulties.” However what I’ve seen of special learning programmes is a room in the school, not even in the same hallway, that is void of windows and stacked high with out of date textbooks. Along with witnessing children who simply need a body break being punished for not being able to sit still in their wooden desk.

I assume my experience is not universal of the French education system but I do know that the prevailing French image of the child is still of a wild animal that needs civility, structure and strict expectations. Childhood is fleeting and not celebrated within a typical classroom. The French system has a long way to go in terms of honouring children as co-creators of knowledge and respecting the purity and sanctity of childhood.

Article found on frenchentree.com copy write 2003-2011, no author listed