So the past two school days (Thursday and Friday) I did something called fluency testing. What this amounted to was having students sent to me one at a time and me listening to them read a small passage from Shelley's Frankenstein, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hounds of the Baskervilles and Baum's The Lost Princess of Oz while making notation of their errors in speech. As they all read the same thing, over and over, this got very tiring. While I was happy to help the English department, I really have to ask: what does this establish? Why did we do this?
One thing I find very interesting however is that Shelley's piece came first. Distinctly the hardest of the three, many students struggled with the language here. Why set them up for difficulty right away rather than easing into it?
This segues into some more details about my own life however -- I have now changed my topic for my Master's Thesis. I am going to be writing about the use of language in schools (a subject I had intended to write on from the beginning) in the context of empowerment and dis-empowerment. I think this will be a stronger thesis and also something infinitely more practical than my old plan (talking about educational jargon).
...so on that note, does anyone have any good book recommendations about language and education?
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Fascinating topic area. Perhaps these might be relevant (am ashamed to admit I had to resort to Amazon, which has a less rigid search strategy than the average library catalogue):
ReplyDeleteUse of Language Across the Secondary Curriculum by Eve Bearne
Discourse and Language Education (Cambridge Language Teaching Library)by Evelyn Hatch
Discourse Analysis (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics) by Gillian Brown