Angel wrote:
Could I put forward one more request? It would be helpful to me if you could
briefly summarize the different views on
genre-based/functionalist-grammar-based literacy in
Australia (e.g., Allan Luke's critique; Jim's development of it; I noticed
that in Jim's earlier message, he had one sentence mentioning the debate
and also introducing the Cope and Kalantzis book).
I know these positions must be rather complicated and defy simple
characterization, but a brief summary of the major issues of contention
would give me an "advance organizer" to the literature!
Angel
This is a difficult task. Obviously I don't want to give reductive accounts
of the views that other scholars have formulated carefully from within various
paradigms. But here are a few general observations:
- I agree with Jay that there isn't a bipolarity in literacy education debates
in Australia. This does make a difference to the discourse possibilities.
Genre-based approaches are used outside of school settings as well as within,
for example in tertiary education literacy development programmes (where they
have attracted a lot of positive attention), in the Adult Migrant English
Service and so on. For this reason it is not possible to position genre-based
pedagogy as simply oppositional to either 'phonics' or whole language.
- The only group which seems to take a hard-line phonics approach, in the
sense of regarding phonics instruction as the necessary basis of all literacy
education, is a smallish fraction of the Special Education group. It is not
aligned with the religious Right as in the US, though it is not without
political influence in attracting funds.
Some of the regions of critique are/have been:
- the absence of challenge to powerful but regressive/socially reproductive
textual practices in school literacy programmes
- the adequacy of modelling of variation in texts through accounts of
schematic structure
- the modelling of the structure of particular genres
- accounts of relations between linguistic and other forms of semiosis
- effects of explicit teaching about textual practices on individual
creativity etc. (The xmca discussion of Applebee's book and explicit
instruction was in terms very familiar to Australians.)
- within systemic functional linguistics, questions about the modelling of
relations between contexts and texts.
Some recent developments have been:
- new work (by Jim) on the textual realization of affect
- ways of building relations with the work of critical discourse analysts ( I
think Jay sees this relation-building as coming from the CDA people, but there
have also been many initiatives from the g-b people.)
- elaboration of descriptions of narrative, beyond the initial use of Labov
and Waletsky's model, which attracted a good deal of criticism.
- elaboration of various aspects of the initial proposals for pedagogy
- descriptions of different types of literacy, in some ways parallel to
features of Gordon's suggestions in this field
- use by young students of systemic functional grammar as a metasemiotic tool.
The early phases of genre-based pedagogy deliberately foregrounded stages of
text structure in description as the most immediately accessible aspect of
text variation to draw to teachers' attention. This has always been regarded
as insufficient, even in the first phases of genre-based proposals. The core
of the expansion is if that students can use functional grammatical
descriptions to reflect on text practices (actual situated examples of
language use), they have a much more powerful and subtle resource with which
to think about variation.
Many people are, of course, sceptical about the accessibility of the grammar
to students. (My analyses so far, with Joan Rothery, are that kids as young
as 6 yrs find many elements of the grammar accessible, and the development of
knowledge about this stratum of language really pleasurable. The adults are
sometimes more of a problem. For the kids, making language an object of study
seems to be as 'natural' as finding out about a bilby or potoroo. The new
metalanguage is no more of a problem than a functional technical language. A
key seems to be the specific relation of the grammatical description to
semantics in the sfl model, which is so different from traditional school or
formal grammars. (It has proved difficult to educate the NSW Premier
('Governor') about this point, as you may perhaps have heard.)
I hope colleagues will extend this limited account.
Geoff
--------------------------------------
Date: 9/5/96 4:18 PM
To: Geoffrey Williams
From: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Hi Geoff, Jim (and fellow xmca-ers)!
Thanks very much for your helpful leads! Could I put forward one more
request? It would be helpful to me if you could briefly summarize the
different views on genre-based/functionalist-grammar-based literacy in
Australia (e.g., Allan Luke's critique; Jim's development of it; I noticed
that in Jim's earlier message, he had one sentence mentioning the debate
and also introducing the Cope and Kalantzis book).
I know these positions must be rather complicated and defy simple
characterization, but a brief summary of the major issues of contention
would give me an "advance organizer" to the literature!
Thanks a million! :-)
Angel
----------
Angel Lin, Ph.D.
Dept of English
City University of Hong Kong
Fax: (852) 2788-8894
Phone: (852) 2788-8122
E-Mail: ENANGEL who-is-at CITYU.EDU.HK
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From: ENANGEL who-is-at cityu.edu.hk
Date: Thu, 09 May 1996 13:16:52 +0800
Subject: Re: Phonics politics- Angel's r
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