perspectives in Education and Deafness

Language Experience

Leading from Behind

Language Experience

Students work on a project over several days. Students dictate a story or experience and the adult translates the student's expression into written English. The adult uses that text for reading instruction.

The Language Experience Approach (LEA) is more exciting than ever, as it is now implemented in child-centered, inquiry-oriented learning environments. The LEA is not just teacher-planned fieldtrips, teacher-concocted in-class experiences, and concomitant primary language charts for "teaching" reading. Instead, we now associate LEA with student-initiated experiences and reflective inquiry that better afford us the opportunity to facilitate more authentic language and literacy learning.

	ABOVE: Language experience is inquiry oriented, Photos by Jana Lollis

For me, this is often realized by "leading from behind" (Wells, 1986); working within student's proximal zones of development (Vygotsky, 1978); being sensitive to students' varying "ways with words" (Heath, 1983); and sharing power and authority in the classroom (Cummins, 1994 and Wells & Chang-Wells, 1992). Using these principles, teachers and students jointly construct meaning around issues that really matter to us.

ABOVE: Students define the issue and research it.

Prospects for utilizing spontaneous experiences to develop language abound. Last week, there was the mighty little mischievous mouse that showed up in elementary school and the mystery of the pregnant fish in the middle school. There was also the desire to have a special pal like the one Beth, Jesse, Kevin, Jared, Rey, Ricky, and Mary read about in their detective story. Then there were the events that led to the students' dream of adopting a stray dog. This dream became quick and natural fodder for using LEA in a series of inquiries that might be known as "the dog dilemma."

The Dog Dilemma

1. As is often the case, an experience occurs which prompts an inquiry. This, in turn, generates invitations for learning. In the case of the dog, it was a warm sunny afternoon and the students began by speculating about how much fun it would be to have a dog. They emphasized the value of a dog as "man's best friend." They also noted how a dog would make them feel more at home, and how they could learn responsibility by having a dog. In essence, they laid it on thick! "Hmm, interesting," I thought to myself. It was the first time any students I'd worked with had taken such a position. "Where will you go with your ideas from here?" I queried. "Who needs to give you permission to have a pet?"
2. A flood of questions and concerns then came from the group, "If we get permission, where will we get a dog?" "How much will it cost?" "Well, how do we know how much it will cost if we don't even know what kind we want yet?" With so many questions at hand, different pairs and groups of students decided to explore and collect needed information.
3. Beth and Jason decided to draft a letter to the superintendent seeking permission for the four-legged friend. Mary suggested it might be a good idea to forewarn the dorm supervisors. The pros and cons of that notion were bandied about for a while. Perhaps Mary is a politician in the making, I pondered, as she seems to be aware of the possible value of lobbying for her cause!

	ABOVE: Research can mean working together.

4. Two other teams, one for the girls' dorm and one for the boys' dorm, begin researching types of dogs. This took some time as students worked on developing a questionnaire to give to all students in the middle school. Information about various kinds of dogs along with a picture or drawing adorned each survey.
5. When the groups reassembled to share progress, new questions and concerns arose. For example, the class had ascertained that it probably could get a dog for free, but money would still be necessary for items such as shots, boarding when the dorm closed on the weekends and holidays, and food. After establishing this, the group was off again to inquire about each of these little hurdles.
6. Kevin called a vet or two to see how much the shots would cost and how often most dogs have to get them.
7. The two teams working on the questionnaires tried to figure out how much food each kind of dog might eat and how much that might cost for a week, a month, or a year. The figuring-math in action-seemed like great fun as well. Ray even decided to figure out different food costs, depending upon whether the dogs would be fed dry or canned food!
8. Questionnaires were then amended to include monetary concerns and the students were ready to see how their fellow residents would vote. Of course this was done knowing that the official "ok" had not yet been granted.
9. After all the hard work, the class collaboratively recounted efforts and we wrote them down. In this case we had at least two or three sentences for each step in the process. With our whole experience written up, read, and reread in unison, each student took parts of it, and we compiled a class book. Nowadays pictures are taken via our new digital cameras, enabling artifacts to be assembled and kept throughout LEA experiences.
10. Sometimes we make additional small copies of our language experience stories to keep for ourselves or to share with our families and friends. Other times, we may make wall stories or put a series of our LEA experience stories on video as a reminder of some of our more notorious moments in school. On still other occasions, students have wanted to send one of their favorite experience stories to a pen pal or they have continued to talk about their experiences in a dialogue journal entry.

ABOVE: Sometimes research means a phone call.

In the end, the reaction from the superintendent is cautious and the students decide that school dorms should be only for kids. The experience, however, is successful in terms of the skills and language learning that occurred. In this sense, like all LEA stories, this one ended happily.

The Language Experience Approach provides fodder for working on concepts about print, text-to-life and life-to-text connections, sense of story, phonics in context, vocabulary development, and beginning authorship to mention but a few. Perhaps most importantly, LEA can be highly motivating and builds confidence.

Not bad for one small part of a total approach to literacy learning!

Special thanks to Jana Lollis, High School English teacher, for her photography and helpful feedback, and to Janet McDaniel, principal of the Elementary School for her input and willingness to work with prospective students every semester. The pictures are of children who currently attend the North Carolina School for the Deaf.