Language arts foundations and practices

Language Arts

There is a trend among some colleges and universities recently to cut back or eliminate their humanities major and courses, which includes language arts as well as history and philosophy. This has created a controversy over the importance of these areas of learning. It is not that the decision to include language arts in education is new. Appreciation of such learning stems back to the earliest humans. Among the earliest pieces of prehistoric sculpture is from 30,0000-25,000 BCE. The woman, who had exaggerated female parts, is believed to be a fertility symbol perhaps carried by a male hunter/gatherer as a reminder of his mate back home. Many here have heard of or seen the paintings on the caves in France from 15,000 to 13,000 BCE. Early humans struggled to survive against natural forces, animals, and one another. One of the most essential ways of survival was to pass down knowledge acquired from culture and education from one generation to the next

As is well-known, Ancient Greece and Rome emphasized the classics that have been a part of learning for over two millennia. Studia humanitatis, or the study of humanities, began in the Middle Ages and consisted of all disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Studia humanitatis consisted of five major disciplines drawn from the classical educational curriculum, grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. These became known as the artes liberales, or "liberal arts," or the skills and knowledge necessary for a human being to be truly free. Today, educators use the term "language arts" to describe the curricula that traditionally include listening, speaking, reading and writing. Most recently, visual reading has also been added to this list. Language arts, although recognized as a separate area of teaching, is naturally integrated with all subjects that require these skills. It has become a major part of elementary- to high-school- learning.

Strong proponents of teaching the humanities and, more specifically language arts, state that these studies are indispensable to everyone in a modern, democratic, and technologically dominated society. The humanities provide students with a foundation of languages, symbols and signs that allow them to think, express their thoughts, and act. Language arts further the brain's functioning through associative learning and interpretation. It is the basis for the cognitive, thought pattern and attitudinal parameters with which people interact with the world. The growing complexity of medicine, law, business, technology and the sciences exist in environments that extend way beyond the specific skills and concepts of curricula basics. Given today's global, highly competitive and progressively flat world, this is essential.

Albert Einstein, a connoisseur of the arts, offered one of the best understandings of the purpose of the humanities.

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values... He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions and their sufferings, in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to the community... Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

Over the years, three primary models have been used for languge arts instruction in Western learning: The long-used "heritage model" believes that the goal of language arts is to transmit the cultural values and traditions of the culture through an agreed-upon body of literature. In addition, it uses modes and genres of writing that are learned through guided writing experiences. Instead, the "competencies model" is aimed at producing a mastery of language-related skills, especially in reading and writing. This model normally follows a predetermined sequence of learning through basal readers and graded language arts textbooks (Wood).

The third model of language arts instruction called process model, supported by such known educators as Nancie Atwell in her book In the Middle, vaies considerably from the other two more structured approaches. Instead of being led by specific texts and agreed-upon curricula, this model focuses on encouraging language processes that lead to growth in the written and oral language competencie in addition to broad content. The interests and needs of the students and knowledge, strategizing direction and interests of the teacher, determine the curriculum. Therefore, reading materials, writing topics and forms, and discussions vary among classrooms and even students within a classroom (Wood). Referring back to the importance of language arts, this approach furthers the students' ability to integrate what is learnied into their own world situations. This is done through involving the students directly into the learning process.

Jim Burke, whose approach on writing is used religiously by teachers, notes how teachers serve as role models for student reflection on literature. Teachers can demonstrate the ways in which they, as readers, work their way through particular texts, and give students identifiable ways of approaching texts generally. It is this need for models, instead of any inability on student's part of students that may cause reading problems, especially in relatively difficult texts. He states, "I occasionally hear teachers complain that students can't read a certain text....however, we forget that this text is different, more challenging than others they have read" (44). While this may seem readily apparent to educators, Burke suggests that this task is framed not only by the expectations of what students "ought" to learn as required by state and national standards, but also by the teacher's own understanding of the students' location on a "Continuum of Complexity" -- "from simple understanding to confident interpretation of multiple texts" (43-44). He emphasizes that all levels of students can be helped to understand difficult texts, but only if "we... scaffold and sequence their reading so that we develop their ability to successfully read a series of increasingly challenging stories" (43).