Language learning and the media

1. Christophe and Yannick

3. The schooling context

An important fact is that both Christophe and Yannick not only created a text but also established an audience. They seemed to have a lot of fun writing together, helping each other or giving each other ideas. Also did the teacher herself play an important role in this situation. She was the one who made the young authors feel comfortable and who encouraged their exploration of a new language. Although she was not actually instructing in the sense of trying to transmit knowledge, she was nevertheless in some way teaching English. To many this subject would seem to have no place in school until many years later. For different reasons, the teacher did not pursue this further, although a lot more could have been done with and around these writings. Christophe and Yannick already had their own view of English and they were able to express themselves in this supportive environment. They could perform confidently because a frame was set where storying, autonomy and collaboration were considered fundamental for language acquisition and development. In this highly contextualized, and therefore authentic learning situation the children were in control of their learning process. "For it is the particular kind of shared life created by all those who work together in a school which determines how language will be used by teachers and pupils. It is the voice of this shared life which marks out the boundaries of possible discourse ... "What does this place say to me?" (the children) ask and look for the answer in every intonation of the institution. In finding the answer they also discover what it is possible for them to say." 4

4. The construction of meaning

Writing stories simultaneously in the way Christophe and Yannick did sets the frame for a dialogic construction of meaning, i.e. that meaning starts from and rests on a social base. The authors are not just putting down words or sentences, they are actually performing utterances while striving for social significance. They go beyond the personal context, negotiating with their audience the actual meaning of their thoughts. The social dimension of the learning situation provides the ground on which they build up their knowledge of a 'new' language. This stresses also the fact that a language cannot be taught in isolation from meaning or, as Bakhtin wrote, that "A passive understanding of linguistic meaning is no understanding at all (...)" 5 Here, writing must clearly be seen as an interpretative act, i. e. a constructive activity, nourished by the satisfaction of achievement and on comprehension manifested by 'the other'. "There are no isolated acts in consciousness. Every thought is connected to other thoughts and, what is more, to the thoughts of others." 6 The goal is to achieve shared understanding, and to establish an identity in a sociocultural context where literacy is highly valued. By reading or listening to their partners' text, they discover new words and their meanings. By reading their own text to an audience, (in the present situation it was a group of four children sitting together at their desk) and recording the listener's responses, they evaluate how far their mental narrative content has effectively been mediated to others. This mechanism seems to have governed the way in which Christophe and Yannick had decided to tackle their first English lesson. Their writings illustrate the "link between composing a text and composing a place in the social world" 7. Furthermore, children seem to explore language best through narrative or fictional prose. New words or even a second language, as in the case of Christophe and Yannick, are at once embedded in a familiar context. It is worth mentioning that Christophe and Yannick were used to expressing themselves in extended storytelling; they thus participated as second graders in a project called TEO8. This project demonstrated how children can learn a second language (in this case French), while creating oral narratives in collaboration with their peers, relying on their own knowledge of the second language or on the knowledge of more advanced peers. Through their creating stories, orally as in the TEO project, or in writing, as in the present case, children's own views on language and on their social world could enter the classroom context. Doubtlessly, imagination, nourished by the media and expressed through narratives communicating ideas or feelings, is a powerful means to gain access to an extended universe of literacy and culture. These English texts show the value of storying for language learning and for the construction of meaning. This clearly shows how important it is to encourage children to explore new language forms by using their resources in narrative structures. "As they gained experience in school, the observed children manipulated and connected the sometimes contradictory classroom worlds and their respective ways of using language. They brought themes, discourse structures, and styles from their unofficial worlds and used them to stake claims on - compose texts in - the official world. Conversely, they brought official school material into their unofficial worlds, de-privileging it by playing with it. Thus, their texts could function as crossroads; the texts were supported by and allowed children to take action in diverse worlds. That is, their texts had sociocultural depth - complex overtones that reverberated within and connected varied worlds." 9

5. The image of 'the child'

In a constantly changing society the gap between what children are and the education system's perception of 'the child' appears to be widening. Programmes and teaching methods are first and foremost shaped to fit an institutional frame rather than being designed to open a view on children. The ignorant child is a myth on which school likes to build strategies of learning. It is an institutional and social construct. Changes in methods, if changes there are, seem to be based on behaviouristic concepts of trial and error rather than on an understanding of social phenomena and evolution. If education is as much for the present as it is for the future, then the aim should be to see children as autonomous and responsible actors in the learning process. The corollary to this conception in teacher training is to see teachers as autonomous and responsible individuals, able not only to do a job but also to reflect on it and to make choices according to the constantly changing situations they encounter. The fact that Christophe and Yannick wrote their English stories at school is mainly due to the existence of a frame that validates the existing capacities of children thus exposing the weakness of a system which ignores these capacities. The misinterpretation of the concept of child-centeredness defines a pedagogical practice which leads to the production of increasingly sophisticated, but in many ways useless, new programmes. They tend to reflect what suits teachers and institutions rather than furthering an understanding of the context which children grow up in and valuing the potential they bring to school. Beliefs about what a child is, about what she is able to achieve at a certain stage of her life or her schooling, often determine how we teach. It is obvious that many of these beliefs are far removed from reality. Hence our judgements and choices are to a large extent disconnected from the sociocultural background of the children. I would not go as far as to say that every child of this age in Luxembourg could have written the stories we have been discussing, nor would it be right to presume that every child of this age has the same background, but there are undeniable discontinuities between home and school, between the linguistic context inside and outside school.

6. Summary and conclusions

I have tried to focus on the social context and on the influence of the media in a second language learning situation. Beyond the boundaries of the official curriculum and the teacher-controlled educational classroom contents, children are engaged in a learning process that is strongly connected to the linguistic and sociocultural background they live in. The two examples of Christophe and Yannick illustrate how children are implicated in a meaning-making process based on storying. Furthermore, the children's writings can best be evaluated with regard to the interactive learning environment the two boys have experienced at school. Finally, a second language is always learnt more effectively when present in the learner's linguistic environment. When all this is considered, it seems obvious that all literacy policies which ignore the fact that children have already acquired skills and knowledge outside school must fail to be effective. The example I have chosen involved Luxembourgish native speakers expressing themselves in English. They had had a similar experience when, in the TEO project, they expressed themselves in French, or when, in the first grade, they learned to talk, write and read in German. Their classmates were always about 75% children with whom they were used to communicate in Luxembourgish. One of our major concerns is about members of linguistic minorities, for instance Portuguese children or children from Ex-Yugoslavia. Especially difficult are the situations where they live and learn in a non-Luxembourgish speaking environment, so that in school they tend to use their mother tongues to communicate. Mostly we think that for those children there are not enough language resources available to learn for instance German as easily as do the Luxembourgish speakers. To some extend, major difficulties may result from significant differences in demographic situations or social and linguistic habits. Nevertheless, I would like to argue for a literacy curriculum in which a wide range of skills acquired for instance through the influence of the media, are considered and valued. For the daily work of teachers, the major sources of information about the linguistic background should be the children themselves and, of course, their parents10. The DECOPRIM 1 action-research project tries to respond to the increasing need to reflect on these problems in in-service teacher training. It is not enough to concentrate on creating attractive learning environments and writing opportunities. What needs to be added is that it is the responsibility of the teacher to engage in a dialogue with the children and their parents and in a reflection on their linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds. How do we learn a language? What is reading or writing? How do we create meaning? Why promote interaction in a classroom environment oriented towards acquiring literacy? These and other similar questions should be addressed in teacher training where a meaningful experience in the present should be of as much concern as the final outcome of education. "Effective education is developmental - It builds on the skills, knowledge, and experiences that young children acquire in their homes and communities prior to coming to school and while they are in school; it extends and broadens those skills and knowledge in developmentally meaningful ways." 11

THE LITTLE ELEFANT Jones, the littele elephant lives in the Jungle. His mother is dead. Jones is hungry He eats hundered bananas. And he drinks water. Afterwords he walkes around. He see a mouse, and a monkey Afterwords he eat two bananas. And going sleep. End Yannick

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