Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute

Street Language and Learning, by Delci C. Lev

Guide Entry to 86.04.10:

In this paper, I discuss students whose life style and resistences to learning have interfered with their language acquisition and skill in expression. What may be a weakness at the early grades has deepened into severe inadequacies in and deterrents to learning at the upper grades. Thus students in grades 7-12 who read and write (if they do at all) at grade levels 1-4 no longer have the language skills to deal with age-level information and subject—except in terms of their street language.

This unit offers a strategy which will: 1) help students reverse their direction and become receptive to increasing their formal vocabulary; and 2) build accumulative skills in language use out of the beginning stage of word acquisition.

Thus as students progress through stages of development, each stage will build on, contain and advance beyond the previous stage.

The stages of development in the unit are predicated on the idea that language growth and development is cumulative in effect.

Stages of development involve clustering, creating a street term dictionary, learning proverbs, idioms, and popular quotations and, in the last stage, exploring the use of imagery.

(Recommended for English classes, grades 4-12)

Key Words

Basic Skills Writing Instruction

To Curriculum Unit

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