Response to Jigsaw Article

The article, ‘Language Acquisition and the Teaching and Learning of Writing’ by Julia S. Falk, compares learning to write to the acquisition of language in children.  She says that children are exposed to language for a long time before they try to use it themselves.   She says that this must be true of writers as well.  They must be exposed to many different writings because “the best practical preparation for learning to write is to read.”  If you want  students to write an essay, they should have read many essays and discovered the structure of the essay.  These ideas make sense to me because typically my strongest readers are also my strongest writers, but it sounds very much like whole language to me.  I still feel there is a place for some direct instruction to take place. 

Falk says that children acquire language skills by being exposed to language and without being taught.  It seems that when a child points to something and grunts and the parents tell the child what that something is, they are teaching him/her.  I tried to teach my children words and names of things that were new to them, and I think most parents do that. In this age of technology, parents are talking to their children less and less, and it’s having an impact on their language development.  They don’t come to school with much of a  language background.   I found myself going back to look at the date on this article and found that it is from 1971, not that I would discount it for being old, but it was definitely written before texting, x-box, wii and all the digital distractions that have stopped some parents from conversing with their children. 

There are some good points about writing in this article.  Like Britton, she talks about moving students from expressive writing to transactional writing.  This can be done by having students’ writing viewed by a variety of readers, and by focusing on the writer’s ability to “convey meaning” rather than the mechanics of writing. 

She also expressed what Emig said in “Non-Magical Thinking…” that there is no one technique or strategy for good writing.  Writers need to find the strategy that is most effective for them. After our conversation in class about outlines, I laughed while reading this paragraph because she specifically mentioned the outline and how it isn’t effective for all students.  Some students can go directly to first draft.   

The thing I agreed with most is that students master writing at different rates and should not be expected to progress at the same rate as their peers.   They should not be punished for progressing more slowly because “to do so will only result in a hostility toward writing which in turn may lead to less writing by the student, and that, in the end, means that the student probably never will become a more effective writer.”