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?

Not sure I'd agree, but I couldn't prove my case either. I'm one of those bleeding-heart literature students, after all ... but I would love to believe that the reason things like great tragedy affect us so much is that we are hardwired towards certain emotional responses to art.

If you think about it, it's strange to be emotional about mimesis at all. Cats (your example) don't even seem to recognize themselves in the mirror - their concept of mimesis must be very different from ours. Is that because we're equipped to develop differently, or because we're innately different? I'm not sure.

Incidentally - and it this goes back to the original OP - I think we're saying similar things, that decoding a 'text' is much more complex than just reading letters or understanding grammar.

"Cats (your example) don't even seem to recognize themselves in the mirror - their concept of mimesis must be very different from ours." But nor do children! Nor do they recognise old photos of themselves. So that must be learnt, mustn't it?

"decoding a 'text' is much more complex than just reading letters or understanding grammar." Hear, hear!

"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."

IMHO discussing sounds is good. DD is in P3 (7yo) and they have been doing some basic poetry homework in the last few weeks. As someone who loves poetry and who thinks that it is a great showcase for the English language, I am happy. The actual homework itself is no great shakes- just really comprehension. But it gave us the opportunity to talk about onomatopeia, and these fabulous words that we have.

What I'm trying to say is that the homework given by the school is really just a jumping-off point, but one which allows the parents to go further into the parts that interest their child (and them! ) So although you might feel that the poster itself is of little value, surely the idea behind it is great, and can be explored further? And a poster/ any writing requires grammar, so that can be taught at the same time, with rules being taught as and when they come up, rather than by dreary rote.

I disagree that everything has to be "fun, fun, fun" But it does have to be interesting, and as a parent you can always get involved and help to make it so. Or, alternatively you can just whinge about it...

Fascinating research by I can't remember who says that we are hardwired to respond more to certain sounds and therefore words than others. It's why a lot of swear words end in hard consonants - it makes them satisfying to say. But you still need decode that fuck is different to duck.

Try getting a poem which 'sounds' beautiful and substitute phonetically similar words. It's still sounds beautiful, especially if you sing it - 'crinkle crinkle little car' still sounds pretty good - until you decode the meaning, which is nowhere near as poetic.

Snap

That sounds plausible - but, again, learnt structure must come into it too. For example, in French, most swearwords BEGIN with hard consonants because most word endings are silent. Clearly this difference is specific to English and French and cannot be hardwired because there is no genetic guaranteed which language a baby grows up speaking - in other words, this is part of the language itself. So we could posit that sound choice is hard-wired and known before birth, but sound position is specific to the language and therefore learnt after birth.

And, as you say, however many ducks you fuck, fuck is not duck.

True-ish. The hardwiring is that hard consonants are satisfying, rather than position. Bugger doesn't end in a hard sound but is one of my personal favourites.

Some language can't be universally hardwired - newborns cry with a specific accent attuned to their 'mother' tongue.

But MIF, babies respond to human faces, even to drawings of human faces, with smiles. Even from a very early age. They may not recongize their own face instantly, but they have a concept that a human face is something to respond to. As far as I know, we don't even think that cats are capable of recongizing their own adult kittens.

Gosh, this has got bizarre!

Snap - newborns have already hear the rhythms of their mother's language in the womb. They come out having learned it ... how cool is that?!

Grammar - or at least grammar the way the OP seems to be thinking of it - is such a tiny part of all the language and communication we can pick up.

True, although it takes them a while. And is that the same as having an appreciation of mimesis - yes, they recognise the image, but is that the same as appreciating it BECAUSE it is an image?

We shall never know.

It's interesting, though. What bothers me so much about the OP's response to this homework is the (possibly unintentional) implication that English/literacy is really just about grammar and rules, which are then applied to texts. I find myself thinking 'oi! Literacy is so much more than that!'.

But then, I am a bleeding-heart Lit student, as I said.

I absolutely agree. And I am also a bleeding heart lit student (and even a lecturer in it at one stage) - just a narratologist one. I hate, hate, HATE stuff like the OP (not the OP him or herself, you understand); this view that, if you learn a set of rules, you know all you need to know.

Of course, 90% of the "rules" of the mother tongue have already been internalised, extremely effectively, before the child ever reaches school, and whether or not they can describe what they're doing ("ooh, that's a noun, that's a verb) is, frankly, secondary. They can live and die not even hearing these words and still be fluent English speakers.

Also, except in very structural ways (e.g. some elements of prosody), such knowledge adds precious little to an appreciation of texts, whether it comes from the heart or from a decoding process ...

To LittleRedDragon and MIFLAW
Are we so use to the mediocrity of the present educational system (NC), and the ever-growing grade inflation which makes us think that educational standards are better than they actually are!

I see students at interviews, graduates too ? and standards of numeracy and literacy are not as great as those with ?rose coloured spectacles? would like us to believe.

It was never my intention to incite others with this posting, as I was simply concerned (over a period of time) as to the lack of quality of my child?s Literacy homework. And I still am!

It is interesting though that I seem to have rattled teachers and students ? and some pedants, too.

Anyway, we shall know the answers in some 20 years time when our children (Primary School ages in my case) have entered University and employment. I certainly aim to ensure that my children are educated better than I am. And I am certainly under no illusions as to the limitations of my literary abilities ? this is why my aim is to ensure they achieve better than I have. I am unwavering in my opinion that the NC, particularly, ?Literacy? is of a poor standard. I have seen it over the last 10 years when recruiting younger staff!!!

I don't mind little children doing posters in English.

I do think there's something amiss with English later on though: far too much emphasis on 'the reader' and 'the message' and what the writer wanted the reader to learn from it all.... which sort of undersells literature as a thing.

optimist

I have no real idea what you are talking aobut.

I can tell you, however, that, as a former university lecturer in language and literature, I would not have wanted students in my class whose awareness of language did not extend beyond being able to describe the parts of speech. I would be more concerned with their language use than their grasp of metalanguage, to be honest.

Also, in England, literacy standards have been very poor for years and it has nothing to do with the National Curriculum. I know people of my age and older (I am 37) who left school functionally illiterate and innumerate, before the NC existed. If anything, the NC has exposed this state of affairs.

I do know what the answer is, but suspect it has little to do with learning the definition of a verb or completing gap-fills. Those exercises are more suited to learning a FOREIGN language, where the rules have not yet been internalised - I mean, even then, they're bloody boring, but at least they fulfil a useful function.

Sincerely hope this helps.

PS if you would like your recent post correcting for errors of spelling, punctuation and grammatical accuracy, you only have to ask.

optimist, all I can say is that I see students at university whose grammar is not great, but whose real problem is that they've never learned to think outside the box or use independent thought. I can assure you this is much harder to correct than grammar! I have a student at the moment whose grammar is absolutely fine, and who is quite capable of telling me exactly what the parts of speech are, what rhetorical figures are in use in a text, and so on and so forth.

If I ask her for a reading, she is completely stumped.

I think an analogy with maths might help. Your focus on grammar and 'traditional' methods is good, and people need it, just as mathematicians need basic arithmetic. But it's deeply, deeply worrying if you think it's 'mediocre' to focus on other, arguably more advanced aspects of the subject. However good you are at arithmetic, you will never make a Mathematician, Economist, Scientist, Doctor, or whatever, if you can't upgrade to mathematics. In fact, you will struggle to live a full adult life if you never get beyond the basics.

Does that make sense?

This may raise a wry grin of recognition from MIFLAW, btw: I recently got my class working in grounds discussing a particular passage in a Middle English text. When I got to one group, I realized they were agreeing that the author was writing in very 'poor English' because his grammar was all over the place.

It took me some time to explain that, although we learn what is 'correct' grammar, this is only the result of a consensus, and at other points in history, the same consensus had not been reached. I ended up talking about the way in which (for example) some Northern dialects of modern English still have remnants of a dual form, like Old English, and American Southern dialects have a second person plural form (y'all), like Old English and like French. It's perfectly possible to describe these things using grammatical terms, and to explain how they fit into a coherent grammar system, whereas my students seemed to think that anything that was correct standard English grammar was 'ungrammatical'.

I mention this because you may be right it's a sign of mediocrity, but it looks to me like a result of grammar teaching done by rote.

'anything that was not correct standard English grammar', even.

"poor English" - brilliant!

I bet they'd have been even harsher on him if they were the sort (who I suspect the OP would love) who rear up like frightened horses at the sight of a split infinitive or a double negative!

MIFLAW

You come across as the teacher who can only defend yourself by vilifying and discrediting those parents who dare to question you!

I would send you a letter; I dare say you would correct it!!!!

I am not a teacher - I was a lecturer. I also taught English as a foreign language. The absolute bane of my fucking life was the students (often Turkish, for some reason - it probably says a lot about how language is taught in Turkey, can anyone confirm or deny this?) who arrived with a copy of Raymond Murphy's English Grammar In Use and told me earnestly that they worked through x chapters a night in the workbook. They promptly sailed through the end of class tests and rapidly got promoted to classes where they could not cope and dragged everyone else down, academically and in terms of morale, because they DID NOT KNOW HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH. All they could do was fill in multiple choice exercises. Ask them to order a milkshake or read out a piece of verse so it actually rhymed and, frankly, they were lost. Yet this seems to be exactly the sort of pointless hoop-jumping you are promoting!

I have neither vilified nor discredited you. You have discredited yourself by banging on about the importance of high standards in grammar at the expense of creative language use and then producing a wooden and poorly-structured text.

If I was a teacher and you were a parent and you sent me a letter I would do everything in my power not to respond as, though you have strong opinions, you do not seem to know much about the practice or goals of language teaching, and I would not want to get into a debate with you on it.

Frankly, question me all you like, as long as you know what you are talking about in the first place.

Ugh lit people.

I suspect I research/teach the kind of 'english' you approve of OP but actually when I started studying linguistics one if the first thing I had to unlearn was all the preconceived notions about grammar were rather irrelevant. There are many ways to view grammar and language, acquisition and response, changes in standards, reasons for meaning - and it's not just hardwiring, there are all sorts of socio-political reasons which affect our response.

LRD - my baby had better come out speaking English although that, evolutionarily speaking, would technically damage it's relationship with DH. I find newborns that cry in French much more irritating than anglophone newborns. Something about the rising intonation really grates on me. I wonder if, once out in a more balanced bilingual environment it will learn to cry in a new accent?

Although maybe I can capitalise on the fact DH won't know that this won't happen though... I can tell him that baby is crying in Fremch amd therefore wants him

Ahem its possessive rather than the contraction.

That I'm blaming on my iPhone.