Immalee’s diary of the day

Immalee’s diary of the day
Key Processes, Key Concepts, Primary
07 October 2008

I picked up Mel at 8. The fan on my car is broken and the windows steam up when it’s rainy, ugh horrid weather. I like driving in with someone to chat to. I had some disappointing machine hot chocolate. Why do I always think it’ll be nice?

Stephen gave us a handout outlining a process for teaching personal language histories; we read through it and discussed how it would be to teach it, if it would be useful, if it could be adapted for primary. I was sat with Fi. We thought it would be good to teach, people are always interested in themselves. Good to get kids to consider different backgrounds etc. The name task seems a good idea, especially if it is broadened out a bit to include nicknames, shortenings, what the name means from a name dictionary etc. The lesson could bring up possible sensitive issues. Would be really different depending on what the kids were like, what the area was like, etc. Could adapt the timeline task to make it a Venn diagram and discuss value judgments placed on language – put the events that happened in good, bad, or overlapping circles.

I got volunteered to be ‘teacher’, stand at the front etc. I’ve got to get better and less nervous at talking to a group, and I think the only way is through doing it a lot. Even after today’s brief stint I felt a little bit more confident about it.

Then we had ‘story-time’ – Stephen told us the story of the red-haired thief. I enjoyed it a lot! I love English; I think I’m going to love teaching literature! We retold it to each other, and then around the table as a whole group. We read a transcript of a pupil retelling the same story. Nearly all the women in the group thought the reader was a boy, but it was a girl. I don’t understand why I thought it was a boy, it sort of bugged me, and I want to work out what led me to think that it was a boy.

We discussed the differences between written and spoken language and the impact of these differences on learning in the classroom. In the group discussion other people said that children write as if they speak. I don’t think this is necessarily true – I think children understand very quickly and easily the need for different styles of language in different situations. I don’t remember ever being told that written language needed to be different from speech. I’ve noticed that other people don’t very often refer back to their own experiences as a child. I wondered why this is.

We also recorded a poem into a voice recorder thing as best as we could – what is Stephen going to do with these?

We learnt a couple of technical terms, endophora and exophonic. Word doesn’t seem to recognise them, I need to check them.

Stephen gave us a quote about written language enabling you to think, I liked that.

We learnt a bit about language acquisition. I want to read much more about it, I don’t why I haven’t thought of it before, but it’s a really interesting area. Although we were talking mainly about young children learning language I was thinking that this must have a huge impact on language skills later in life. I wonder what impact the way I learnt language has had on my development.

Stephen asked us to write this lesson as a diary for homework. I’d just been thinking that I would write up my notes when I got back, otherwise with my rubbish memory I’ll forget it all. Pre-empting homework, though, I’m such a nerd.

On the way up to Newton Park I noticed that I felt really excited about teaching and English, again - so far that’s happened every time I’ve been into uni!

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