The Fun Of Language

By Author: Ellen
Total Articles: 95
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I read students a poem at the beginning of every class. It's my routine. I choose mostly contemporary poems in which the poet has shined a light on some segment of living, poems that can be accessible upon hearing once. Contemporary poems feature some of the best language used in America today, voices such as those of Mekeel McBride, Ken Brewer, and Mary Oliver, scores and scores of others, poets well known, poets obscure. Such poems surprise us with indelible perceptions and precise, inventive language. When I read a poem to students before attendance, before announcements, before classroom business, students settle into our learning Tag Heuer Replica Watches environment, sharpen their listening skills, and experience poetry as meaningful and delightful. When I taught high school students, they did this 180 times a year.

For English teachers and their students, learning to delight in language is crucial. Toddlers show us the way. My two-year-old granddaughter peers through the glass of the storm door where her family's German shepherd customarily ...
... surveys the street. "Look, Mom," my granddaughter announces, pointing at the window, "finger-paint" Leah Mae is involved in the deep fun of language acquisition. It's not idle play. It's not casual observation. It's definitely not merely "cute." Language acquisition is natural, inevitable, creative, playful, and brilliant. Her linguistic sense making is a genius of the species, critical to becoming fully human.

There is another critical delight in using language, too, one that's indispensible for negotiating the world: Using language compels us to think. Actually laying down one word after another is generative, not just communicative. When we talk or write, we discover, associate, and realize. One of the stalwarts of our tribe, Donald Murray, maintained that he wrote what he did not know he knew (Crafting 47). We teachers often overlook Murray's profound and simple insight as we devise assignments to prepare students to take proficiency tests in writing by fitting their voices and visions into a formula.

In Ohio's book of academic content standards for K—12 English Language Arts, there are plenty of standards about writing. Most are sensible, some rigorous, a few trivial, some absurdly complex when broken down to their component parts. No standard, however, comes close to identifying language as generative of thought. Without that fundamental truth, written communication would be anemic Breitling Replica indeed, and writers would find it devilishly hard to compose anything of worth. An academic standard about writing I'd like to see would read something like this: "Students will learn to be writing warriors, producing words expansively with faith and fearlessness both in drafting and revision, trusting the language in them to lead to surprises of meaning and insight."