Saturday, September 14, 2013

Discovery of Competence - Blog 3


How does The Discovery of Competence approach fit with Goen's principles and strategies for the SFSU IRW program?  

Surely Goen-Salter and the other faculty at SFSU who were designing the university’s FYC program had read The Discovery of Competence.

The IRW instructors at SFSU believe that the students they teach are fully capable of meeting FYC proficiency after a single year of remediation, and the students in these classes are viewed as members of the academic community already—two viewpoints that jive closely with Discovery of Competence.

The pedagogy underlying the IRW program clearly views students as acquiring academic language in the context of their own reading and writing, so the idea of “use” and “need” in language acquisition is being utilized. Writing assignments seek to build cognitive and metacognitive skill, and the IRW program teachers appear to read student work not as error-laden but as moving toward academic discourse. Indeed, the premise of the course is that students can be brought immediately into the academic community and will gradually acquire the skills to communicate within it. 

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