INSTRUCTION: Read the text and answer item.

THE TIE-BACK NATURE OF BECOMING LITERATE

For those of us who have come from mainstream homes where we were oriented to composition-centered tasks and academic uses of language from our earliest communicative experiences, the implicit rules of academic language seem natural to us. However, we have learned these rules in a rich context of numerous supporting, reinforcing activities. For most of our students, however, we have to make explicit the academic habits of using oral and written language which the school requires, and we have to provide social interactive meaningful occasions for repeating these habits again and again. Since we cannot know the specific first language socialization of the Indo-Chinese, Middle Eastern African, or Latin American students in our classes we can solicit from them as much as possible about their first language socialization through asking them to recollect and collect as much as possible. However, this information will not be sufficient to guide decisions about particular uses of language with which they may be unfamiliar. Thus, ESL/EFL teachers must incorporate into the classroom a variety of types of writing and talking about writing; furthermore the content around which these occasions of talking and writing focus should ideally be familiar. To complicate learning a new language by asking that new content be learned as well, is to make extraordinary cognitive demands on students. Thus we begin with what they know – their own language socialization – and we help them make explicit in their second or foreign language what it is they do know about their oral and written uses of language (see Vann 1981).

(HEATH, S. B. Literacy skills or literate skills? Considerations for ESL/EFL learners.

In: Nunan, D. (Ed.) Collaborative language learning. 1992. Glasgow, CUP.)

According to the text