Pleasure Reading & Language Education Theory O

One of my strongest interests is art, so for this assignment I elected to read several books and magazines having to do with my interest in visual things. For the purposes of this paper I plan to tell what I learned about my reading skill and to relate that with what is known in language education theory.

Three of the books I chose you could call picture books. Two of those are instruction books on particular ways to draw--one on how to paint clouds and the other on how to draw humorous weird cartoons. The third book I chose is a book about interesting buildings that have been converted into homes, and the last one is an art magazine.

It seems that in order to be comfortable reading, one has to be unafraid. I find that when I am studying something that is difficult or I think it is going to be difficult or I am going to be tested or something, my reading processes do not work as well. This shutting down makes it difficult to concentrate, to remember the ideas, and to learn anything new. However, when I am reading for fun, I feel a freedom to skip around and not worry about doing anything correctly. Stephen D. Krashen writes about the Affective Filter Hypothesis in Fundamentals of Language Education. He says that if the language acquirer is anxious or has low self-esteem it will be difficult to easily learn the language (Krashen, 1992, p. 6). When I read for fun, I can go backwards or forwards in the book, not pay any

. . .
ause they are mostly pictures. I can get the main ideas from the pictures and jump around in the written part, looking mainly only at the bold headings, and feel comfortable with that level of skill for the time being. I do not expect to read a book on art theory for fun. I do not expect to write a book about art. This is true because I am at a lower level of the learning process. If I would gradually build on the simpler skills, spend years on it, and gradually become a little better and even better, then after millions of times of doing things within the area of reading and writing, I might be able to create something at a higher level. I can't skip there from where I am now (Moerk, 1992, 7). Sharon James describes language theories in a different way. She groups them into five groups--behaviorist, nativist, cognitive, social/communicative, and connectionist (1990, p.163). The cognitive and social/communicative methods are similar to what I have already described, that language has to do with thinking capacity and the environment in which it takes place. For myself, the behaviorist hypothesis doesn't seem to really apply. This idea says that people can simply be trained to do what is desired by giving them rewards, mu
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Language Skills, Ernst Moerk, Education Theory, Language Education, Noam Chomsky, Sharon James, Incremental Acquisition, Matter Teaching, Rumelhart McClelland, Bach Mozart, moerk 1992, language education, art books, subject matter, krashen 1992, pleasure reading, james 1990, model skill learning, language skills, learn words, learn moerk 1992, workbook language, moerk 1992 3, workbook language skills, fundamentals language education,
Approximate Word count = 1846
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Pleasure Reading & Language Education Theory O