Learners & Acquisitions - The Current Purpose of this Blog

I struggled for weeks to come up with a snappy name for this blog--a place where I plan to both report and reflect on my sabbatical reading and research over the next four months.  This is what I came up with:  Learners & Acquisitions.

Why this name?  In James Paul Gee's article, "What is Literacy?" he borrows a few concepts from Stephen Krashen and makes a distinction between Learning and Acquisition:

Acquisition is a process of acquiring something subconsciously by exposure to models and a process of trial and error, without a process of formal teaching.  It happens in natural settings which are meaningful and functional in the sense that the acquirer knows that he needs to acquire the thing he is exposed to in order to function and the acquirer in fact wants to so function.
  

Learning is a process that involves conscious knowledge gained through teaching, though not necessarily from someone officially designated a teacher.  This teaching involves explanation and analysis, that is, breaking down the thing to be learned into its analytic parts.  It inherently involves attaining, along with the matter being taught, some degree of meta-knowledge about the matter.

As a teacher of language and literacy and as a Writing Center professional, I think a lot about these two processes and how they interact--for me, my students, and my tutors.  For example, as a native English speaker I acquired most of my knowledge about how English works, but in my training to teach ESL, I had to consciously "learn" the rules so I could develop lesson plans and create clear explanations.  As a person who grew up in a literacy rich home environment--reading constantly and writing for myself a lot--I acquired quite a bit of knowledge about how texts worked.  This knowledge helped me connect to more formal lessons in my middle and high school English classes.  Did this make me smarter than students who struggled in these classes? No, it just showed that I had had more exposure.  Acquisition has everything to do with exposure and exposure is something that is not distributed equally in the U.S. educational system. This inequality is made salient to me every day in my work as a community college teacher.


So, as you can see, these two small words bear a lot of meaning in the professional worlds in which I travel--Composition/Literacy Studies, TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and Writing Centers.  That makes them a good fit for this blog.  Finally, I liked the vague financial echo of this phrase (close to "mergers & acquisitions") because there's a strong connection between the work I do and capital--social capital, academic capital, financial capital, etc.

For the next few months, this blog will focus mainly on multilingual students and issues but after that, I will continue to explore issues related to learning and acquisition for all the students/readers/writers/tutors I work with.