Wednesday, May 20, 2009

"En Los Dos Idiomas"

By Teresa Espinosa

Where There's A Will, There's Lirico

The first part of this article talked about the course of the ethnographic study of Compadrazgo which means Compadre in Spanish which is translated as Godparent. The relationships of the 45 people consisted of family, friends and compadres. Their socio economic status were working class with limited or no formal education. Some had elementary (primaria 1-6th) and middle (secundaria 7-9th) school education while others had to work immediately to help support the family. What did this say about literacy? Well, some were taught literacy in school while others took th initiative to learn on their own. They called it lirico (lyrically). These are men in their mid thirties who learned literacy as lirico, which means they, "picked it up" informally from others (470). Farr called this a bare bones approcah which makes sense since the people were teaching themselves simply by copying the letters from a cigarrette box or by asking questions along the way and no formal schooling.

What I found very interesting was how some men were able to read and wrote poorly and one particular person was able to write but had to have someone read his response letters to him. Farr says, " that neither learning reading first nor writing first is more natural" (473). This study proves that both reading and writing can be learned without formal schooling. I supposed from this we can infer that when learned in this manner, literacy is bare boned and not mastered until there is formal schooling. The people who write lirico say that they know they will probably never write write properly since they don't know punctuation. However his belief that he didn't read well, he scored considerbly high on a fromal test of English literacy. Farr believes that learning lirico literacy is effective.








No comments:

Post a Comment