For my practicum, I visited Chenakesava Kannada Medium School.

The school had classrooms on the

ground floor and seemed smaller compared to the multi-storied Chenakesava English medium school
nearby.
I walked around the classes to see what was going on inside. In the 6
th
grade classroom that I observed
through the window, the teacher was reading the story aloud and the students were repeating after
him, tracing their fingers along the written word. Girls and boys were seated separately and all of them
were repeating the teachers words religiously, tracing their fingers across the written words in the
book. The story was accompanied by a couple of pictures.
My classroom observation was that of the 3
rd
grade. The same ritual was conducted in the class. The
teacher read even the chapter numbers and the students repeated it after him.
The story was about Raja Akbar. The teacher went into a monologue for about 10 minutes at the start.
He introduced all the difficult words, gave 2 synonyms for Raja Arasa, Chakravarthy. There was no
interaction during this. As soon as he mentioned a new word Dodda which means big, the entire class,
as if on cue repeated the word in one voice. Seems like a familiar word surely, but maybe it was the first
time they came across it written.
He narrated the story by himself once. Then they all started reading, as in he led and the others
followed. The students traced the letters with the fingers and pronounced the words exactly as the
teacher did, copying even the intonation. The teacher went slowly so that they could trace the letters.
So the fun part for the students must be the intonation and the tracing because otherwise it seemed
wholly mechanical.
After they are done, he asks closed ended questions and the children give one word answers in unison.
Then he asks them to read it by themselves in their minds, but they still have to whisper or murmur, and
the room is full of the sounds.
Then he asks the students to stand up and read one by one. Some are good and some not so good.
Some are at word level, while others are at sentence level. The teacher often helps, with pronunciation
or in explaining difficult words and their meanings.
The tale is about how Akbar helps an old lady cross a river by carrying her on his back. The teacher
advises everyone to learn swimming.
Once the teacher leaves I ask a child questions about notes he has made in his book. It was an exercise
on opposites and he had answered incorrectly. When we asked him what the opposite of that word was
he looked in the book and gave the same answer. But in general when we asked him what the opposite
of the new word he learnt that day was he said easily Virudha of Doddadu is Chikkadu opposite of big
is small.
We asked the children to read arbitrarily from different texts. They were not able to do it quite well.
Comment [u1]: Use pseudonyms.
Comment [u2]: Shared reading, of sorts?
This is clearly a very bottom-up approach. The teachers attempts at whole language teaching didnt
seem to serve the purpose. There was something wholly ritualistic and mechanical even about the
monologue he engaged in at the beginning when he used intonation and body language to tell the story.
Why I say this is because of the way the children repeated every new word without prompting as if
programmed.
I think one can learn decoding this way, through constant repetition, but in the long run, comprehension
would suffer. This would be so because of a complete disconnect of the affective domain from the act of
reading.
The next week I attended a class in a school for children with special needs, Baldwin Opportunity school.
A trained story teller was reciting a story. The children sat in front of her and repeated the entire story
after her, making the same sounds splish splash and imitating her facial expressions. The children were
laughing and obviously enjoying themselves. The story teller was pretty good. When we interviewed her
later she said that there was not much difference between such a school and others school except that
the children were not exposed to many social experiences. But yes that was a big difference, because
these kids would not have access to many concepts and words consequently, and hence the teacher
would have to use simpler words.
She used a lovely method to make the students recite the story she had told in the previous class. She
had made drawings, lovely ones, which followed the thread of the story. Eight children held each picture
and using their memory and the cues in the picture the eight children were able to recite the story.
What is a better method. I am obviously not talking of literacy in the second case, but the students in
the second school were actively engaged with the story and reading letters in the context of a story
would make more sense after this because they have enjoyed stories and laughed and played with
them, and reading would be a means to access this enjoyable experience.
Let me add a third experience to this picture to illustrate my learning. A child in my neighbourhood,
Nitya, 12 years old and in the 5
th
grade, befriended me last semester. He is an albino and has a
congenital eye problem. His dad is not around and mom works from 12 to 10 30. So from 4 months he
stays at my house after school till 10 30 and all day on weekends. He speaks only Kannada which I and
my parents do not. His white skin meant he changed 5 schools, he couldnt befriend children easily in his
neighborhood or school and his bad eyesight led teachers to believe he was dyslexic and he had turned
to bunking school often.
So in the first months, when I discovered that he couldnt read Kannada though he could understand the
letters and that he couldnt read English at all, I decided to try teaching him English. During all of the 3
rd

semester we only managed to teach him small letters, big letters he already knew, and digits.
But at the same time, we had discovered a way of communicating which was a hybrid of English,
Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi and a lot of gestures. Following my internship experience and courses this
semester, I tried teaching him based on what he already knew and what he liked. Progress has been
rapid this semester. What changed?
Comment [u3]: Is it? Or, is it a rote-recitation
method, without even adequate attention to
phonetic elements?
Comment [u4]: Which were these attempts? I
didnt notice
Comment [u5]: One can, but many cant
(Deliberately misunderstanding your comment to
make an important point.)
Comment [u6]: Why is it important to be able to
recite a story? Why is recitation itself not being
subject to greater questioning?
The first thing is that reading and writing this semester is floating on the sea of our creole talk. The
second is that the child and I use phonics without actually trying to or realizing how it started. He
catches on quickly to the sound of Sha, sh means sh. But c is not easy for him because it has so many
sounds. W is very difficult because for the wa sound he always prefers v. The vowels are difficult
because they are not often predictable. He just cant get over the fact that G does not sound Ja.
But I am not trained in phonics instruction and I didnt even try to approach it that way, but what
happened was that he would naturally try to break up sounds and associate them with letters in order
to spell out what he loved so much, for example Bheem.
The difference between last semester and this has been my approach and also the fact that we have a
shared vocabulary and experience to build on. In the past month, I have still stuck to some drills, which
he hates but does for the reward of games. The drill has been to spell numbers. So he can now write
from one to two hundred. But he doesnt enjoy it.
But when I make a game out of it, and constantly talk to him through it, he learns quickly and incredibly.
I have attached a picture of one such game we played today. I write a word or a number that is a clue
and he has to respond with a word or a number. He has specs now so that makes it easier. But for me
whats there in the picture is a lot of progress because he is reading comprehending thinking of what I
would want and responding with writing. I think he gets through the task because all the questions are
based on our shared experience.
Last semester I was volunteering at a local NGO teaching English to the community kids. The first day I
was so messed up I came home and hid my face in a pillow resolving Id never teach again. I just couldnt
connect with them. I tried for 4 more classes going very well prepared but although it got better and
better it was exhausting and I made hardly any progress. It was only after my internship that I realized
what a huge crutch it is to not know the childs language. Because in the internship it was so easy, I
could switch back and forth from Hindi to English and create bridges, it makes a tremendous difference.
In the case of Nitya though, we still dont have a shared language. What we have is an understanding of
each other, shared experiences, and bits of languages that we can share. But that in itself is making
learning reading-writing so much easier.
When I compare what was happening in that Kannada medium classroom with the kind of reading
writing we are doing the difference is that we are building on our talk and on our experience. Nitya goes
to a similar Kannada medium school, lower middle class, and he hasnt learnt much of Kannada through
those methods. Even discounting the exclusion problem that he has, I would say that kind of method is
not good, you may know all the letters, you may know how to make words or even sentences out of
them, but the essential connect between letters on the page and lived experience would be missing. It
may happen but that would be accident, given conducive social factors of the student, but the process
as a whole seems designed to actually induce a disconnect between the printed word and lived
experience, and of felt experience.
Comment [u7]:
Comment [u8]: Not even a little, after the Lit
Ped class?
Comment [u9]: I can imagine.
Comment [u10]: Yes.
So all these experiences and what I have read in Lit Ped in unit one help me think that literacy
acquisition can be very rapid if the facilitator is open to the experience of the child and builds on that. If
the facilitator first builds a sea of talk and shared experiences, felt experiences, fun experiences in the
language he wants to teach and then builds on those words slowly towards reading and writing. Reading
writing are not innate definitely in the way speech is innate. There is room for skills instruction. I can see
that a very systematic approach towards phonics instruction for example could speed up the process
with Nitya. We are just stumbling upon it accidentally, but let me give this example to show how it saves
time. Id written Game and he just couldnt figure it out. First he said Jam, then when I got it through
that the sound for g is ga he pronounced it something like Gimme.
Then remembering the basal books Id seen in Lit ped class I started from Name which he knew and
listed game, same, dame, lame, tame, fame etc. he pronounced them perfectly and also got used to
the sounds. Meaning didnt matter much in this exercise. What I saw from this is that there is room for
everything, basals, phonics, bottom up too because he did have to learn the alphabet.
But what Im pretty sure of is that what is most essential in this mix is talk and experience in the
language and the realization that the written word is just a representation of and an access to
experience.

Dimension Comments
1. Is your assignment complete?
Check for the following before submitting:
Description of context you were observing
in.
Brief description in the main document of
salient points that came up during your
class observations and teacher interview.
Brief description of your time with the
child you were working with what did
you do with the child on each of the visits,
and what did you learn from these?
Analysis and commentary based on
readings and in-class discussions.
Reference List
Fieldnotes pertaining to two class
observations appended to your assignment.
Teacher Interview appended to your
assignment.
You have described the
context. I am not sure
whether this assignment is
complete, because I see
three different snippets of
observations and analysis,
not sure if you even made
three trips to the classroom
specified? I dont see
fieldnotes attached, or a
teacher interview. Of
course, the information
youve provided is very
interesting and shows your
general engagement and
interest in the topic, but not
your ability to complete an
assignment as
specifiedthere is value in
conducting sustained
observations in a single
context
Comment [u11]: Citation?
Comment [u12]: Citation? Do cite appropriately
from class readings.
Comment [u13]: What about exposure to good
literature as well to facilitate the talk and higher-
order thinking?
2. Have you adequately analyzed/discussed
your observations/interviews in terms of
our readings and in-class discussions?
Possible ideas for analyzing notes:
Models of literacy instruction
Teacher beliefs about how children learn to
read and write and how these fit/dont fit in
with what our readings have taught us.
Sociocultural/ideological model of literacy
teaching and learning
Contextualizing the child as a sociocultural
learner
Observations about script
I like your style of writing,
and your attempt to link
three discrete events into a
coherent account of your
understanding of literacy
pedagogy. The narration is
lively and animated and
thoughtful. However, the
concern is that I dont feel
that the analysis or
connections to specific
theories is deep or
convincing. The sea of talk
has certainly been absorbed
but where is this taken
from? How has it been
elaborated in theory? Where
has the idea of systematic
phonics come from who
has said what about it for
or against?
3. Have you cited and referenced your work?
Have you gone beyond essential to
demonstrate knowledge of at least two
additional readings from Unit I?
No reference list or citations
present. Additional readings
have clearly not been
referenced here.

Grade: C