Blog 6: Learning vs Acquisition

During this activity, we looked for different characteristics in learning/word recognition and acquisition/sociopsycholinguistic points of view using the following characteristics to guide us.

 

Learning/Word Recognition	Acquisition/Sociopsycholinguistic
Identify words to make meaning	Use multiple cueing systems
Phonics based	Graphophonics based
Examine parts of words/text	Start with whole, learn skills needed
	experience/fact-finding based

For the most part, we were in agreement of most of our answers and when we had a disagreement on the task it was easy for us to see how some tasks are not easily categorized into one neat category.  We all agreed that round robin reading was a terrible task no matter what category it is in!

 

One the groups big questions was about pre-teaching vocabulary.  The text says that pre-teaching vocabulary is an attribute of word recognition.  However, the sociopsycholinguistic model also discusses the importance of activating background knowledge prior to reading.  We felt as a group that this certainly could be either based on those criteria.  Pre-teaching vocabulary offers an element of exploration which is in keeping with the sociopsycholinguistic model.

Another a-ha we had was on the item that says “correct peers when they make a mistake during reading”.  Initially we all said that this was a learning/word recognition view.  As we talked about it as a group though and as a class we came to the conclusion that it could really be both.  Because the teacher was not doing the correction, it was more of an exploratory process akin to what sociopsycholinguistic view would expect.