Child Writer

Child Writer

  October 29, 2018    Hole in the wall

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In this new post, you will a review which focuses on writing development skills. Hope you might find it interesting.

CHILD WRITER

 According to Emilia Ferreiro (1988), students who are acquiring writing development skills go through a constructive process that will allow them to appropriate this skill and subsequently master it.

The author mentions the duality that exists between the conceptualization of the oral and the written process. Therefore, Ferreiro (1988) describes two conditions within the varieties that can exist at the moment in which the child tries to transcribe a word from orality to writing: the first is the quantitative condition which refers to the number of spellings arranged by the learner to represent a word. And the second condition is the qualitative one which exposes the use of certain letters, their position and their combination that exists between them to form the mentioned word.
 

Then, Ferreiro declares that learner must be critical in order to select the words that he or she is about to produce so that he/she finds the meaning to it. Consequently, the author claims that writing is an act where the human being accepts the assignment of finding meaning and coherence to what is reflected in his writing. Therefore, we must bear in mind that writing must not only be an act in which the human being decodes graphic signs but also goes further, accepting the responsibility of searching for a sense of the text, transforming previous knowledge by recently learned knowledge.

Besides, Ferreiro (1988) manifests two important domain fields: interpretation of writing from phonological education and later a semantic education of the graphic word. Each field of dominion falls one on the other, reconstructing the knowledge previously acquired in such a way that it lends itself to a transformation of knowledge.


Ferreiro, E. (1988) “L’écriture avant la lettre.” En H. Sinclair (comp.) La production de notations chez le jeune enfant. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
    Ferreiro, E. (1988). “Introduction” as Guest Editor of Early Literacy, special issue

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Children Literature Program

Children Literature Program

  October 15, 2018    Hole in the wall

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Promoting reading in classes will develop literary appreciation and awareness. However, children need to experience the literature on their own instead of starting by analyzing the formal aspects of it. Furthermore, teachers are responsible for diffusing that enjoyment and pleasure that literature is able to provide, and they also must create innovative strategies to promote reading in their students. 

Instead of working on worksheets, children can develop various ways to enhance reading comprehension. Teachers should read aloud to kids and reread favorite stories to help them build that enjoyment that is pursued but always considering children’s needs. 

Providing real books in the classroom is a relevant aspect to create enthusiastic readers, students should be able to access the books of their interest when they need them, this environment is crucial if teachers want to create a life habit in their children.  

Connecting books in the curriculum are fundamental if the aim of the school is to promote reading as a lifetime activity. However, the problem comes when teachers try to evaluate the progress of students. However, literature should not be evaluated based on tests; evaluation should be based on the observation of each student’s process, and the abilities they demonstrate in the activities the teacher prepares for the class.

Kiefer, B. Tyson, C (2009) Charlotte Huck's Children's Literature: A Brief Guide. Planning the literature program.  McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

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Literary Education

Literary Education

  October 01, 2018    Hole in the wall

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This post takes as its point of departure the problems which Students of English Literature (or Spanish Literature in some cases) face when confronted directly with the reading of literary texts.


Certainly, diverse resources have been implemented nowadays in Literature classrooms in order to engage the student with literary texts, such as visual arts or audiovisual supplies.

Nonetheless,  this, when combined the difficulties posed by a very partial knowledge of the foreign language (and all the linguistic and cultural implications) still might represent a problem of understanding a literary text.  Besides, evaluation criteria implemented by some teachers focus on a literal understanding rather than an inferential reading that allows the students to be more reflective concerning the text.

Hence, teachers should be more contemplative regarding the evaluation criteria that are used to evaluate literary texts, creating more circles of dialog in which students' attention do not focus on an individual perspective, but, discussing among their partners their stands, allowing them to establish a cooperative way of learning.

In the next post, I will discuss the "literary competence" when is considered in terms of intellectual performance.

References

Colomer, Teresa (1996). El aprendizaje de la competencia literaria. Universitat Automa de Barcelona. Barcelona, España.

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