English Pedagogy in Middle Schools

Essay by dazzlengUniversity, Bachelor'sB+, February 2012

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Research the following topic and write an essay, which discusses the application in the middle school English classroom.

˜The classroom context must support the acquisition of multiple Discourses while simultaneously providing the mechanisms for learning textual knowledge" (Campbell and Green: Literacies and Learners pg. 13).

How effectively does this explain literacy teaching and learning in the 21st Century Middle school English classroom?

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Introduction

Language acquisition has arguably become a socio-cultural contextual discipline in the dialectic discourse of education. Literacy is called upon to not only communicate information but also to convey social norms and cultural expectations within the context of each community regardless of specific languages spoken. In the sphere of English language speakers and learners the constraints are complicated due to its widespread use whereby each culture and/or community adopts their own deictic use of texts as a "dynamic representational resource" (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000 cited in Simpson, 2003).

The social dimension of language use requires more than text decoding skills and includes social acculturation represented by and through communicative texts in daily conversation, media advertising and television shows (Simpson, 2003). According to Simpson there is a need to have an analytical understanding of language as a functional model that can be included in English curriculum as part of literacy pedagogy. Simpson contents that language serves a community as a cultural deictic and texts used in slang have a semiotic value synonymous with that specific culture and/or community.

Textual knowledge if defined as a deconstruction of coded information within a textual structure will by itself reflect conventional English classroom pedagogy, however within the 21st Century ideology of multiple constructs in education there is arguably a requirement that textual knowledge is symbiotically linked to cultural context within a community and therefore there is a need to consider...