The Morning News Genre  

Oleh:

Christie, Frances

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language and Education (Full Text) vol. 4 no. 3 (1990), page 161-179.
Fulltext: Vol. 04, no 3, p 161-179.pdf (1.13MB)

Isi artikel

This is the second of two papers published in this journal arising from a study into aspects of early writing development in a population of 50-55 children in the first three years of their schooling. It was found that the morning news genre is one of several examples of curriculum genres that can be identified in early childhood education, where a genre is defined as a 'staged goal-oriented, purposeful activity'. The morning news genre is of interest for the light it throws upon the ideologies of early childhood education operating in many schools. Such ideologies, it is suggested, are worthy of closer examination, in the interests of improving the general quality of much early childhood education. Using Halliday's systemic functional grammar (1985), the writer argues (i) that there is indeed a morning news genre, having a distinctive schematic structure of its own; (ii) that in the 'middle' element of the morning news genre, another genre or genres will be found to be embedded; (iii) that one example of an embedded genre is the 'interview genre'; (iv) that the primary responsibility of the child/interviewee in the morning news giving role is to proffer information drawn from personal experience, while that of the teacher/interviewer is to praise or reward the giving of such information; (v) that a principal justification of morning news is that it develop 'self expression'; (vi) that such a justification needs some re-examination for at least two reasons. Firstly, the nature of the roles and relationships taken up by teacher and students tends to induce dependence in young learners rather than independence. Secondly, at least in the interview genre, the teacher and students do not enter with equal knowledge into the experience(s) dealt with, and in this situation the teacher is less able to assist the children select appropriate language with which to construct text than would be the case where the experience(s) were shared. There is an apparent inconsistency between the espoused ideological commitment of morning news to the development of self expression and the actual ideology that too often applies. Appropriately sensitive linguistic analyses can help to expose such inconsistencies, opening the way to a revision of early childhood educational practices.

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