Is this proper English homework?

[optimist66]

My DS1 who is in Year 3 completed his "English" home work, last night. Sorry, it's not called "English" - it's called "Literacy". He is at a state school.

His home work was about the use of "onomatopoeia" words. These are the use of words whose sound suggests the sense of what is happening. DS1 had to design an advertisement for a cereal.

Am I wrong in thinking that this is a weak and namby pamby way of discussing use of sounds. Where is the greating traditional way of discussing the rules of Grammar - complemented by an indepth building of Vcabulary and Comprehension skills.

He is on the top table, and a level 3b

Am I expecting too much, as I always see homework of weak substance given to him?

Either you're mixing me up with someone else or you've misread me - nowhere do I suggest that one has an innate feeling for language.

I suggest that language can PROVOKE feelings - of course it can. If I tell you to fuck off, you're going to have an emotional response to that.

But that is not the same in any way as saying that anyone has a feeling FOR language except as the sum of learnt behaviours and experiences with language.

In other words - to come back to the OP - if I use onomatopoeia in a text it will, hopefully, produce a response in you.

But the only reason I (or anyone else) use onomatopoeia in the first place is not because of some "feeling I was born with", it's because I've learnt, formally and informally, that onomatopoeia is an effective linguistic and rhetorical tool - it wasn't in my brain until I was taught the language that I now call my own; and similarly I wouldn't be able to distinguish between onomatopoeia for literary effect and the sound it imitates if I wasn't busy decoding language every minute of the day.

Hope this helps.

MIFLAW Mon 14-Mar-11 18:44:25

"MIFLAW the rhyme was intended as light hearted fun nothing more."

Yes, but it's light-hearted "fun" that you sets itself up as the be-all and end-all - or, at least, a priority - in native language teaching.

"So when my Y2 class studied Macbeth last year and The Tempest this year they were decoding?" Well, yes. How else did they understand what it was about? Do you think we're born with a magic knowledge of a native tongue, like having Microsoft 2007 plugged into our heads? We all decode messages all the time. True, when we get very good at it in one or more languages we don't notice we're doing it, and we often start to call that reading or even appreciating a text. But of course you're still decoding it - that's why it makes you laugh (or cry) and not your cat!

A colleague of mine with a 1st in English from Cambridge has just given up a very lucrative career in advertising to be an English teacher. He used to get paid a load of money to use onomatopoeia and other techniques to create adverts. Now he gets paid not very much to teach such techniques to students. Find it very strange that anybody would think this task is problematic in any way. Maybe there is a debate to be had about standards and about teaching but this isn't it.

Hi

I have observed, with interest, the subsequent posts on this thread I started. It was not so much the onomatopoeia that bothered me; it was that almost any "literacy" homeowrk involves poster design.

DS enjoys traditional english work. In fact, we are fortunate to possess many traditional resources (complete with model answers). I think these will serve DS well.

PS not sure I agree with fivecandles who mentioned, "Maybe there is a debate to be had about standards and about teaching but this isn't it."

As someone who was brought up on First Aid in English-or similar- I find that DCs are much more knowledgeable today about English grammar. I got most of mine from learning a foreign language. As I explained earlier, I loved logical exercises, and could get full marks without having a clue how to apply it! By all means do the traditional exercises, if he likes them, but don't kid yourself that it is superior!

Dd is at an academic independent school and does this sort of work.

The use of language in this way is an important skill.

exoticfruits

I was brought up on First Aid in English; unfortunately, I have forgotten somne of it :(

I know the traditional work is challenging, and therefore........"SUPERIOR"! Leading academic countries such as Australia, India, South Korea and Taiwan follow the traditional approach. Google their results if you like!

Try looking at the Primary Syllabus at the campaign for real education. It might put NC Primary Literacy into some context.

But what is wrong with poster design? It requires linguistic and visual-spatial skills, just like more 'traditional' literacy tasks, surely? I'm not even convinced posters are particularly un-traditional.

Designing a poster for something is ok. I.e. With a design brief that it is advertising something, pursuading, using data visualisation etc...

But make a poster about the cell/a country/Macbeth etc.. Where it just means 'arrange some facts on a page' is woeful.

Arranging some facts, as in structure them, make a coherent explanation or argument and then communicate it - that's actually a pretty good activity. Like all learning activities, both you and the pupils need to know why they are doing it. Perhaps we should be telling parents as well

TFM - yes if there is a coherant question - compare, explain, argue, show ...etc...

But too often it is 'make a poster about Japan' etc...

It may well be that the teacher is setting homework that can be differentiated by ability, and my son (bright but not hugely motivated) is choosing to hear the lowest common denominator. But when we talk about HW he says that doing anything more analytical than 'putting the first facts you find on a piece of paper with a nice heading' would be way beyond the call of duty (and he gets good marks, so maybe he is right)

I think what is interesting here is that many are saying that this homeswork does support literacy...yet this was not obviously not conveyed to parent or pupil.

This seems to me to be a large part of the problem; there is little interaction often between school and home.

There is more than a little patronage I find with teachers here rolling eyes as if these things are obvious. Or worse, that we, the parents, have no right to question. Our roll is to simply follow orders and take on trust that there exists a plan.

If MN is reflection of what is happening in classrooms across the land it seems teachers need to do more communicating.
This would help we parents immeasurably in the early years and would, I feel, help older students feel more engaged in their own learning.

One of the problems amongst disaffected students is that they don't believe the work they are being given has any purpose.

The whole thing might have been easily avoided if a brief explanation had been given at the top of the prep no?

I think that the pupil does often see the point-it is the parent who doesn't. It is quite clear to me that the homework was given to show whether they understood and could apply the work done in the classroom. I can't actually see the point of coming home and doing more of the same.
If it had all been so wonderful optimist we wouldn't have had DCs failing years ago.

I'm dubious about these supposed wonderful results other countries get with their 'traditional' approach. If you set easily-measured goals and teach children to rote learn, you may get a high success result. But are they learning the skills they actually need? I know most people don't do English at school specifically in order to study at university, but I know university students from the countries mentioned above often have a lot of catching up to do when they try to adapt to our system. They're not necessarily 'ahead', they're just better at what they've been taught and ours are better at what we've been taught, as you'd expect.

This isn't just seen in English. My brother taught remedial maths for Indian and Chinese students a couple of years ago - these students were, on paper, brilliant mathematicians. But they were unable to think outside the box, and had never been taught to work in a non-linear, non-rote way. It meant that they had excellent qualifications to study Engineering, Maths, Economics and so on ... but they were totally floundering in the first year of university because they'd never learned the skills they actually needed.

exotic your dismissive attitude towards the parents is exactly what I'm talking about.

It's not enough to tell six or seven year olds what a homework is trying to achieve...they can't always be relied upon to a. take it in. b. listen c. remember.

A simple note at the top of the prep saying this is for the children to show they have understood today's lesson (wiht a brief explanation) and apply it would solve everything.

Otherwise, as you can see from posts here, many of us don't know what it is for and wonder what the point is.

Pop in and ask the teacher.

Mrz

Yes, it's as I thought - you didn't understand what I said.

To reiterate, language provoking feelings is not the same as having a feeling for language. I think that's fairly self-evident, to be honest.

To put it even more simply and wrap this debate up once and for all.

Language provokes emotional response.

The reason it does this is because you are able to decode it.

The reason you are able to decode it is because you are not a cat. You have NO innate "appreciation" of language or "feel" for sounds - at least, not outside a purely structural sense - you have LEARNT how language works as well as what the words mean and internalised these facts. If it was enough just to have two ears and a heart or an awareness of the big wide world, your cat would get it too. But you can decode - i.e. find the sense in - a text whereas, to your cat (or to a newborn child, for that matter) it is just a string of sounds or black blobs on a piece of white crinkly stuff.

exotic that's not really practical for many parents (those whose children take a bus, or are collected by GPs, childminders etc).

And one wouldn't want to be botheirng the teacher every two mins anyway.

I would just trust that the teacher had a reason.
In my case I would be grateful that it was creative homework and not a tick producing exercise. If it really bothered me I would ask.

MIFLAW meow!

Mif, I'd love to know if that's true - how would you know if we don't have innate feeling for language? It's possible our brains are pre-structured for language, surely?

It's more than possible, it's probable. MIFLAW huge amounts has been written about this - of course we learn to decode written language but as far as spoken language is concerned we are utterly hard-wired to receive it.

If you haven't already, read about Chomsky's nativism theory and the Language Acquisition Device he said we have from birth. Read Jean Aitchison's 'The Articulate Mammal.'

I'm not quite sure we do entirely disagree actually - the 'not a cat' stuff is of course true, but because humans are designed to learn language whereas cats are not. Babies babble in the sounds of the language they hear around them. If we weren't predisposed to learn language children wouldn't say 'I runned' or 'I drawed' - they don't hear that around them so they haven't 'learnt' it from us. That's their brain figuring out a rule and applying it (too much!) - it's also why they don't respond to us correcting it - their brain figures it out when it's ready. Ooh it's bloody fascinating.

Sorry if I've misunderstood you MIFLAW, hope that's shed some light on the subject RedDragon.

Argh!

I don't know what I am saying so unclearly.

I say, I think, that we DO have a purely structural sense of language hard-wired into us. "You have NO innate "appreciation" of language or "feel" for sounds - at least, not outside a purely structural sense -" in other words, the structural awareness is there. This is what Chomsky was talking about in terms of language universals, the awareness of how language, asa system, works, which is (he suggests) in us from the get go and which enables us to learn language as quickly and as successfully as we do. I am pro-Chomsky on this and do not think I have said anything contradictory to this.

My argument has been fairly consistently with one poster on one point - namely, that (as I read him or her) there is some difference between "decoding" and "appreciating" the works of Shakespeare. I am saying, quite consistently I think, that decoding a text is how we derive meaning, and therefore feeling, from it. He or she seems to be arguing that there is something mysterious outside the text. I'm afraid I can't be any more precise than this because I don't have a bloody clue what (s)he is on about but, perhaps hastily, I have assumed that this is some romantic ideal whereby the heart or the soul enables us to commune directly with dead authors. I disagree that there is such a thing - I think the text is all. I don't mean that a response to a text is soulless, emotionless or mechanical - only that these are a direct result of what is in the text and our own experiences in life. There is no mystery, no higher muse - just that we are so experienced in decoding and responding to texts that a powerful illusion is created whereby decoding becomes spiritual.

In other words, we do have an innate feeling FOR language, but we do not have an innate "spiritual" response to texts - that response comes from our learning ABOUT language. Yes, a baby will babble in a language, develop rapidly a phonemic system and over-generalise observable grammatical rules - but read a baby a Shakespearean sonnet and you'll get the same reaction as if you read her your Tesco receipt. The response to the text is learnt, and it is based on decoding it.