Discussion Post #2: Ways with Words

Response to Heath's Ethnography

         In Ways with Words, Shirley Brice Heath studies the language acquisition and use of the member in two communities, Roadville and Trackton. Throughout the book, Heath continually affirms that the children of Roadville and Trackton’s different language use are a result of different cultural practices: family structures, community members’ roles, socialization, religious practices, and more. Implicit under this argument is that all children’s language use is shaped by the language patterns of their community, and as such, these cultural language usages need to be taken into consideration when teaching literacy. Literacy does not occur in a vacuum; the history, both of the individual and of the socio-cultural landscape of that individual, impacts learners at the attempt to acquire literacy.

     In Chapter 5, I was particularly interested in the focus placed on storytelling, and on the role storytelling had in literacy practices.  Heath maintains that storytelling is an important part of socialization in both Trackton and Roadville; however the function of language use differs between the two communities and children’s language use reflects these differences. In Roadville, stories adhere to factual elements and linearity. The stories in Roadville often end with a moral or proverb. On the other hand, in Trackton, stories often strain credulity by embracing exaggeration. The exaggeration can be seen a connection to universal truths. I find the stylistic differences between storytelling (their interaction with oral language) in the two towns interesting because they directly reflect the print literacy practices.

          As I mentioned in class last week, I found Heath’s article, “What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School,” much more digestible, even though the details of the book are just as pivotal to my overall comprehension of the social practices model of literacy. At the end of the article, she provides concrete suggestions for educators dealing with the mixed populations of Trackton and Roadville. For students of Roadville, Heath recommends that they need an “extension of [the skills they learned at home to extract meaning from printed text] to other domains” and clear “distinctions in discourse strategies and structures,” as they also need to “be reintroduced to a participant frame of reference to a book” (72)

For students who hail from Trackton, Heath suggests that they need to learn the “skills of taking meaning from books” but they should also be taught in such a manner where they can “retain their analogical reasoning practices” so that they may “learn to adapt the creativity in language, metaphor, fictionalization, recreation of scenes and exploration of functions and settings of items they bring to school.” (72) These are all incredibly specific recommendations for the students of Roadville and Trackton, and these solutions can hardly be blinded applied to other areas. Heath concludes her article with a call for more ethnography, in the hopes that placing social practices model at the forefront can produce similar results in other areas. However, I wonder how well this type of ethnographic research can be applied to hugely diverse cities like New York. What would an update to this approach look for a shifting, increasingly globalized classroom?