Cummins, now a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, has touched the life of many an English as a second language teacher, inspiring thousands with a thoroughly grounded iconoclastic approach to the pedagogy of language. He has shattered myths, developed new theories and concepts, promoted innovations in the classroom, affected policy, and arguably done as much to shift the paradigm of language instruction as Noam Chomsky 20 years earlier did to shift scientific thought toward a paradigm of innate universal grammar.
...Cummins laid out a case that what is happening now in the schools is not science but ideology [10% science; 90% ideology], with federal and state policies imposing a pedagogical divide in which "poor kids get behaviorism and rich kids get social constructionism." In practice, that means skills for the poor and knowledge for the rich. That ideologically based approach ignores and rejects research into the way students learn, particularly how they learn language and how to read, he said.....Cummins challenged educational practices resulting from federal No Child Left Behind legislation, with its emphasis on standardized tests and consequent teaching "to the tests.....more to do with teaching rats than humans.
[W]hen students’ identities are affirmed in the classroom, they feel comfortable investing their identities into the literacy activities and practices, and they learn more. When they are encouraged to share unique personal experiences, when use of their first language is not discouraged, when "decoding" techniques are not the end-all and be-all of instruction, when students feel they have a voice in the classroom and that people want to hear what they have to say, when "shared inquiry," "critical literacy," "grand conversations" and "social justice" are accepted parts of the teaching process, students learn better and become engaged with their own education. "I haven’t been able to find those terms in No Child Left Behind," he said.
• standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction; first language literacy is discouraged and undervalued;
• going against extensive research into reading, the NCLB focus is primarily on early reading (that is, "decoding");
• reading comprehension is neglected in the junior and intermediate grades, leading to fourth grade "slump." In effect, students don’t know what they are reading;
• there is no focus on the affective sphere or student identity in reading engagement, and for low-income and bilingual/ELL students, transmission approaches dominate to the exclusion of transformative approaches.
Two causal factors underlie the assumptions behind NCLB and Reading First, both of them profoundly flawed and contradicted by researchers.
1. Reading First - intensive phonics instruction – what they call intensive instruction – showed no positive effect on reading comprehension beyond the first grade for either low-achieving or normally achieving readers. ... For low-achieving kids, for normally achieving kids, any effects of phonics instruction washed out after grade one. That has not been broadly advertised by the Feds."
2. NCLB - a lack of accountability to obtain quality control, for which the NCLB-prescribed remedy is "tests, tests, tests."
Said Cummins, "Schooling has been reduced to the transmission of scripted skills and facts to the exclusion of inquiry, critical literacy, and social awareness. In schools across the country, instruction focuses relentlessly on teaching to the test. This is particularly the case in schools in low-income areas, which are considered most at-risk of failing to demonstrate ‘adequate yearly progress’." He cited an ESL Maryland public schools teacher who calculated that in the 2004-2005 school-year, English learners in a fifth-grade class took five different standardized tests, some of
them more than once. The consequences? "During the course of the year," the teacher wrote, "my students missed 33 days of ESL classes, or about 18% of their English instruction due to standardized testing."
Just how far off the mark the NCLB’s behaviorist approach has taken us is apparent when "many of the reading programs being funded require that all children’s literature be removed from classrooms." The rationale is that if students are exposed to texts for which they haven’t been taught the phonics rules, they will figure out that spending so much time on such rules is useless. Phonics instruction is important, Cummins agreed, but it should not be done "in a mindless way" that ignores the research into its efficacy.
Cummins offered an alternative to the NCLB approach – under which more and more inner-city schools are failing every day. That alternative is school-based language planning which instructs along the lines of what the research has shown. Boiled down to its essentials, Cummins said, literacy attainment is directly related to literacy engagement. Such engagement requires participation, and effective participation requires that student identity is affirmed, which means first language learning should not be discouraged because "new understandings are constructed on a foundation of existing understandings and experiences."
His alternative focuses on a four-element approach: scaffolding meaning, activating prior knowledge and building background knowledge, affirming student identity and extending language in a way that uses the students’ first language. One example of a technique for developing participation is the student identity text – a kind of "journal" that can be written, spoken, visual, musical or multimodal combinations of these, and which holds "a mirror up to the student in which his or her identity is reflected back in a positive light."
(Newark Post) reports ~
