Discovery of Competence - Blog 1

Comment on the authors' approach/orientation/philosophy.  What do you like? What seems problematic? What do you have questions about?  What principles or ideas might you want to include in your own teaching unit that you'll be designing later in the course?

The authors’ approach toward teaching composition is that students are in a process of language acquisition (the language of academic discourse), similar to how a non-native speaker seeks to acquire the English language. Second language acquisition happens best through absorption. That is, through practical, useful experiences with language rather than through rote learning of grammatical constructs and rules. In fact, a language is learned through use and need and in context.

The authors are pushing for a classroom practice that mimics language acquisition, through writing assignments that frame writing as a useful and relevant act. They further write that “an acquisition-rich writing environment reorients priorities so that meaning becomes the end of instruction and written attempts are simply the means to that end” (31).

The authors’ discussion of language acquisition is dead-on accurate, based on my own experience being thrust into a new language environment. I learned Italian through daily use, by needing to be successful in my endeavors (to buy meat from the butcher or get my daughter into pre-school), and in the context of my environment (I learned a lot of vocabulary and phrases by listening to other parents and children interact at the playground). It makes a sort of intuitive sense to me that the same would be true for writing. I know how to use a noun phrase appositive through use in my own papers and by having seen them in articles and books, but when told to “use three noun phrase appositives in this paper,” I’m like a deer in the headlights, frozen:  do what?

The theories brought up in The Discovery of Competence do push me to consider how I might make my classroom an environment that enables writing in terms of use, need and context, but as the classroom is itself a construct, I wonder how this might be accomplished. What writing tasks and specific assignments, or what classroom environment and culture, need to be set up for the students to experience useful writing in context?