For my practicum, I visited Chenakesava Kannada Medium School. The school had classrooms on the ground floor and seemed smaller compared to the multi-storied Chenakesava English medium school nearby.

I walked around the classes to see what was going on inside. In the 6th grade classroom that I observed through the window, the teacher was reading the story aloud and the students were repeating after him, tracing their fingers along the written word. Girls and boys were seated separately and all of them were repeating the teacher’s words religiously, tracing their fingers across the written words in the book. The story was accompanied by a couple of pictures.

My classroom observation was that of the 3rd grade. The same ritual was conducted in the class. The teacher read even the chapter numbers and the students repeated it after him.

The story was about Raja Akbar. The teacher went into a monologue for about 10 minutes at the start. He introduced all the difficult words, gave 2 synonyms for Raja – Arasa, Chakravarthy. There was no interaction during this. As soon as he mentioned a new word Dodda which means big, the entire class, as if on cue repeated the word in one voice. Seems like a familiar word surely, but maybe it was the first time they came across it written.

He narrated the story by himself once. Then they all started reading, as in he led and the others followed. The students traced the letters with the fingers and pronounced the words exactly as the teacher did, copying even the intonation. The teacher went slowly so that they could trace the letters.

So the fun part for the students must be the intonation and the tracing because otherwise it seemed wholly mechanical.

After they are done, he asks closed ended questions and the children give one word answers in unison.

Then he asks them to read it by themselves in their minds, but they still have to whisper or murmur, and the room is full of the sounds.

Then he asks the students to stand up and read one by one. Some are good and some not so good. Some are at word level, while others are at sentence level. The teacher often helps, with pronunciation or in explaining difficult words and their meanings.

The tale is about how Akbar helps an old lady cross a river by carrying her on his back. The teacher advises everyone to learn swimming.

Once the teacher leaves I ask a child questions about notes he has made in his book. It was an exercise on opposites and he had answered incorrectly. When we asked him what the opposite of that word was he looked in the book and gave the same answer. But in general when we asked him what the opposite of the new word he learnt that day was he said easily Virudha of Doddadu is Chikkadu – opposite of big is small.

We asked the children to read arbitrarily from different texts. They were not able to do it quite well.

This is clearly a very bottom-up approach. The teacher’s attempts at whole language teaching didn’t seem to serve the purpose. There was something wholly ritualistic and mechanical even about the monologue he engaged in at the beginning when he used intonation and body language to tell the story. Why I say this is because of the way the children repeated every new word without prompting as if programmed.

I think one can learn decoding this way, through constant repetition, but in the long run, comprehension would suffer. This would be so because of a complete disconnect of the affective domain from the act of reading.

The next week I attended a class in a school for children with special needs, Baldwin Opportunity school. A trained story teller was reciting a story. The children sat in front of her and repeated the entire story after her, making the same sounds splish splash and imitating her facial expressions. The children were laughing and obviously enjoying themselves. The story teller was pretty good. When we interviewed her later she said that there was not much difference between such a school and others school except that the children were not exposed to many social experiences. But yes that was a big difference, because these kids would not have access to many concepts and words consequently, and hence the teacher would have to use simpler words.

She used a lovely method to make the students recite the story she had told in the previous class. She had made drawings, lovely ones, which followed the thread of the story. Eight children held each picture and using their memory and the cues in the picture the eight children were able to recite the story.

What is a better method. I am obviously not talking of literacy in the second case, but the students in the second school were actively engaged with the story and reading letters in the context of a story would make more sense after this because they have enjoyed stories and laughed and played with them, and reading would be a means to access this enjoyable experience.

Let me add a third experience to this picture to illustrate my learning. A child in my neighbourhood, Nitya, 12 years old and in the 5th grade, befriended me last semester. He is an albino and has a congenital eye problem. His dad is not around and mom works from 12 to 10 30. So from 4 months he stays at my house after school till 10 30 and all day on weekends. He speaks only Kannada which I and my parents do not. His white skin meant he changed 5 schools, he couldn’t befriend children easily in his neighborhood or school and his bad eyesight led teachers to believe he was dyslexic and he had turned to bunking school often.

So in the first months, when I discovered that he couldn’t read Kannada though he could understand the letters and that he couldn’t read English at all, I decided to try teaching him English. During all of the 3 rd semester we only managed to teach him small letters, big letters he already knew, and digits.

But at the same time, we had discovered a way of communicating which was a hybrid of English, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and a lot of gestures. Following my internship experience and courses this semester, I tried teaching him based on what he already knew and what he liked. Progress has been rapid this semester. What changed?

The first thing is that reading and writing this semester is floating on the sea of our creole talk. The second is that the child and I use phonics without actually trying to or realizing how it started. He catches on quickly to the sound of Sha, sh means sh. But c is not easy for him because it has so many sounds. ‘W’ is very difficult because for the wa sound he always prefers v. The vowels are difficult because they are not often predictable. He just can’t get over the fact that G does not sound Ja.

But I am not trained in phonics instruction and I didn’t even try to approach it that way, but what happened was that he would naturally try to break up sounds and associate them with letters in order to spell out what he loved so much, for example Bheem.

The difference between last semester and this has been my approach and also the fact that we have a shared vocabulary and experience to build on. In the past month, I have still stuck to some drills, which he hates but does for the reward of games. The drill has been to spell numbers. So he can now write from one to two hundred. But he doesn’t enjoy it.

But when I make a game out of it, and constantly talk to him through it, he learns quickly and incredibly.

I have attached a picture of one such game we played today. I write a word or a number that is a clue and he has to respond with a word or a number. He has specs now so that makes it easier. But for me what’s there in the picture is a lot of progress because he is reading comprehending thinking of what I would want and responding with writing. I think he gets through the task because all the questions are based on our shared experience.

Last semester I was volunteering at a local NGO teaching English to the community kids. The first day I was so messed up I came home and hid my face in a pillow resolving I’d never teach again. I just couldn’t connect with them. I tried for 4 more classes going very well prepared but although it got better and better it was exhausting and I made hardly any progress. It was only after my internship that I realized what a huge crutch it is to not know the child’s language. Because in the internship it was so easy, I could switch back and forth from Hindi to English and create bridges, it makes a tremendous difference.

In the case of Nitya though, we still don’t have a shared language. What we have is an understanding of each other, shared experiences, and bits of languages that we can share. But that in itself is making learning reading-writing so much easier.

When I compare what was happening in that Kannada medium classroom with the kind of reading writing we are doing the difference is that we are building on our talk and on our experience. Nitya goes to a similar Kannada medium school, lower middle class, and he hasn’t learnt much of Kannada through those methods. Even discounting the exclusion problem that he has, I would say that kind of method is not good, you may know all the letters, you may know how to make words or even sentences out of them, but the essential connect between letters on the page and lived experience would be missing. It may happen but that would be accident, given conducive social factors of the student, but the process as a whole seems designed to actually induce a disconnect between the printed word and lived experience, and of felt experience.

So all these experiences and what I have read in Lit Ped in unit one help me think that literacy acquisition can be very rapid if the facilitator is open to the experience of the child and builds on that. If the facilitator first builds a sea of talk and shared experiences, felt experiences, fun experiences in the language he wants to teach and then builds on those words slowly towards reading and writing. Reading writing are not innate definitely in the way speech is innate. There is room for skills instruction. I can see that a very systematic approach towards phonics instruction for example could speed up the process with Nitya. We are just stumbling upon it accidentally, but let me give this example to show how it saves time. I’d written ‘Game’ and he just couldn’t figure it out. First he said Jam, then when I got it through that the sound for g is ga he pronounced it something like Gimme.

Then remembering the basal books I’d seen in Lit ped class I started from Name which he knew and listed game, same, dame, lame, tame, fame etc. he pronounced them perfectly and also got used to the sounds. Meaning didn’t matter much in this exercise. What I saw from this is that there is room for everything, basals, phonics, bottom up too because he did have to learn the alphabet.

But what I’m pretty sure of is that what is most essential in this mix is talk and experience in the language and the realization that the written word is just a representation of and an access to experience.

Dimension Comments1. Is your assignment complete?

Check for the following before submitting: Description of context you were observing

in. Brief description in the main document of

salient points that came up during your class observations and teacher interview.

Brief description of your time with the child you were working with – what did you do with the child on each of the visits, and what did you learn from these?

Analysis and commentary based on readings and in-class discussions.

Reference List Fieldnotes pertaining to two class

observations appended to your assignment. Teacher Interview appended to your

assignment.

You have described the context. I am not sure whether this assignment is complete, because I see three different snippets of observations and analysis, not sure if you even made three trips to the classroom specified? I don’t see fieldnotes attached, or a teacher interview. Of course, the information you’ve provided is very interesting and shows your general engagement and interest in the topic, but not your ability to complete an assignment as specified…there is value in conducting sustained observations in a single context…

2. Have you adequately analyzed/discussed your observations/interviews in terms of our readings and in-class discussions? Possible ideas for analyzing notes:

Models of literacy instruction Teacher beliefs about how children learn to

read and write and how these fit/don’t fit in with what our readings have taught us.

Sociocultural/ideological model of literacy teaching and learning

Contextualizing the child as a sociocultural learner

Observations about script

I like your style of writing, and your attempt to link three discrete events into a coherent account of your understanding of literacy pedagogy. The narration is lively and animated and thoughtful. However, the concern is that I don’t feel that the analysis or connections to specific theories is deep or convincing. The sea of talk has certainly been absorbed – but where is this taken from? How has it been elaborated in theory? Where has the idea of systematic phonics come from – who has said what about it – for or against?

3. Have you cited and referenced your work? Have you gone beyond essential to demonstrate knowledge of at least two additional readings from Unit I?

No reference list or citations present. Additional readings have clearly not been referenced here.

Grade: C