Adaptation depends upon acquisition, and acquisition leads to adaptation--

Both are necessary for learning and life to be successful.

The object of this brief paper is to focus upon the problem of instructional context development for literacy and its relationship to the development of comprehension skills through a structured dialectic of reading and writing that is consistently mediated through graphic-contextual organizational frameworks. Success of sheltered approaches to the teaching of language and knowledge skills demonstrates the importance of building consistent context in lesson planning and implementation. Context is here defined as the sum total of the meaningful relationships that can be established between an effective and enriched environment and the knowledge set that the student is attempting to learn about. This context can include shared background experiences of the teacher or the students, alternative activities associated with a knowledge set, hands-on realia or tangibles, the physical setting of the class-room itself or other physical environments, or the alternative texts or other forms of media that may be available. It is the contention of this paper that to the extent that context can be developed in effective instructional context in a manner that is rendered relatively explicit, available and disambiguating for the student and consistently and continuously built upon within a scaffolded and multi-thematic framework, then there will be a general improvement in the overall writing and reading comprehension skills. A variety and multiplicity of graphic and contextual organizers that serve to structure contextual knowledge provide a bridging technique to the facilitation of this process.

Both reading and writing are complementary processes in literacy development, and they are the main components of what I have called the literacy learning loop. This cycle is simply depicted as "Read it, Write it." What is read is at first written, so therefore we may reverse the loop and say "Write it, Read it." I will depict this process as follows:

Thus, literacy represents a basic learning dialectic between the processes of decoding and encoding important graphic cues and signs within an environmental context. Reading and writing are complementary parts of this dialectic, and in a larger sense that emphasizes the holistic integrity of the student and the effective learning environment, includes multiple levels or layers of symbolic signification and information that may be more or less embedded within the larger life-world context.

Any additional or intervening systematic activity that extends and enlarges this dialectic cycle will serve to make more extensive and intensify the literacy learning loop, leading to greater differentiation, articulation and elaboration of symbolic knowledge through literacy development.

Thus, if between "Read it, Write it" we place any of a number of activities such as "Say it, Think it, Draw it, Do it, Touch it, See it, Do it, Play it, Act it, Make it" we serve to enlarge the learning loop and thus enlarge the "sphere of comprehension" that comes with experiential involvement and acquisition within this loop.

Within this framework therefore I define literacy comprehension as the "holistic integrity of the phenomenological field of symbolic experience." It is important to understand that both reading and writing are complex multi-level, multi-area, and multi-skill activities the integration of which results in the achievement of sophisticated gestalt pattern recognition within the environmental context and the frustration of which will result in the noetic-symbolic disequilibrium of these patterns. Consistent frustration as the result of an ambiguating context will serve as a negative feedback or resonance dampening mechanism in this developmental cycle, resulting in regressive development and lack of attention-retention.

Thus, when we read any given text, there are multiple levels of meaning and understanding upon which we may and must operate if we are to achieve full comprehension. I would extend the significations of any text, whether written or read, to a larger environment of "context" which would include the ability to read signs and clues in the environment, to perform other kinds skills of analysis and application (for instance, typing or key boarding, dialing a phone, reading a thermometer, painting a picture, etc.) that are predicated upon understanding and symbolic function.

It is clear that however partial comprehension of any particular pattern in a child's environment is not the same thing as the development of the skills necessary for such comprehension. These skills are more than just the mechanical acts of reading and writing, and involve largely Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive skills and something akin to Gardner's own taxonomy of multiple intelligences, as well as a relative degree of stylistic integration of important personality characteristics and linguistic competencies. It implies within an instructional framework a form of curriculum integration but upon a level that moves beyond the thematic framework of organization.

It furthermore entails understanding thoroughly and in a coherent manner the structures of implication, or the implicatures, of the text or the symbolic processes with which one is involved, for it is clear that cultural-symbolic meaning is like an ice-berg, with the portion that is visible on the surface being only a small fraction of what is hidden beneath. Implicature in any linguistic and cultural idiom can be said to be systematic and rule-based, as well as to be semantically embedded in a body of knowledge that has a history.

In this regard, it is evident that the dialectic of symbolic comprehension builds upon and reinforces complex memory structures, which structures appear themselves to be stratified and functionally differentiated, and which in turn depends upon the availability of these memory structures for proficiency of performance.

It is important to recognize as well that signals are not by themselves information, and information is not by itself knowledge, and knowledge is not by itself comprehension and understanding and comprehension by themselves are not the activation and application of knowledge to the general experiential problem of adaptation. But it is clear that comprehension is a main goal of the acquisition process, as it is the culmination of knowledge and the starting point for application and behavioral adaptation.

There are some caveats to emphasize at this point. We may say in general that active, participatorial learning is better than passive learning. Multi-modal learning is better than learning through only a single acquisitional modality. Creative, productive learning is better than mechanical and merely replicative learning. Instruction that engages the whole child is preferable to instruction that only involves a part of the child. Contextualized learning is far superior in effect and long-term retention than decontextualized learning. It is clear therefore that a holistic, organismic model of instruction construes the child as a complex, integrated being who is a natural part of a larger effective environmental context, and this is to be distinguished from analytical forms of instruction that see that child as a separable bundle of parts and pieces, to be surgically operated upon, one piece at a time, utilizing knowledge that is to some extent literarily abstracted and thus decontextualized symbolically from its naturalistic or logical contexts.

It is clear therefore as well that there is a significant difference between adult or secondary learners and child or primary learners in the consideration of these central processes. We cannot presume that the primary child learner has a sufficient foundation in language or knowledge upon which to build internalized structures or to effectively utilize their environmental context. On the other hand, we must presume that the secondary adult learner has a sufficient foundation in both language or knowledge, but that this foundation may result in acquisitional or adaptational inertia or even psychological resistance due to the dislocation and displacement or the change of context. This leads to a different pattern and different modalities of instruction in context development and management between the child and the adult learner that must be taken more completely into account.

There is a special case of acculturative situations in which children have learned what can be called primary foundations of language and cultural-symbolic knowledge, only to be challenged through subsequent structural and institutional settings to adopt alternative frameworks for language and knowledge. Primary, largely tradition-bound foundations of language and culture may be reiterated and reinforced in domestic contexts that may be found to be discrepant to the requirements of larger institutional frameworks of modern society. In this case what is clinically expected to occur from the standpoint of the anthropology of knowledge is referred to as the rise of discrepant symbolic realities to the extent that these realities are objectively reified in the environment, subjectively internalized through processes of identification, and linguistically and behaviorally reiterated through processes of the conversational apparatus and cultural sanctioning and constraint of behavior. The discrepant symbolic realities will entail a break down in acquisitional-adaptational processes that were based upon previous enculturation and socialization in the primary linguistic and cultural context. Acquisition and adaptation requires therefore a basic frame-shift and reevaluation of this foundational framework as a largely accommodational strategy. Most children by themselves cannot be expected to know how to handle this kind of situation by themselves, nor can their parents provide adequate role or mediational models, and unless an intervention strategy is implemented by a significant other who can mediate this process, the consequences are liable to be destructive of learning rather than constructive. It thus becomes incumbent upon the teacher, who is the second most significant mediator of the child's life next to one's primary care-takers, to effect this functional process of linguistic-symbolic mediation.

For children who have this kind of situational dilemma especially, instruction must be rendered as non-threatening, interesting and challenging as possible. It is expected that there will emerge a temporary acquisitional lag that can be referred to as a kind of situational or environmentally induced learning disability. This period of temporary (and sometimes, prolonged) impairment of the learning apparatus or what can be called the child's symbolic acquisition device will have to be gradually worked through, and it is is clear that it can be minimized and relatively amelioriated under the best of circumstances.

In other words, these are enculturative processes, as are all acquisitional process in human beings. Children depend upon the sense of order and structure provided by significant others within an effective environment by which to make sense and order their internal worlds, and to learn to respond to their world in an effective manner. They cannot be relied upon to self-organize their worlds in a reliable or adaptive manner that will lead to their social success and maturity in life, as they lack either the internalized or external frames of reference by which to coordinate or evaluate and modify these efforts in a consistent manner. It is evident that most educational programs developed for children with limited English as a second language fail to take into account completely the cultural and symbolic or the psychological factors that underlie these acculturative processes.

I believe that graphic organizers provide a key to the facilitation and mediation of this adaptational process, but I believe that the general concept of graphic organizers as these have been conventionally used and construed in schools has been "work-sheet" bound. I would make a case for extending the definition of graphic organizers to what I would call systematic means of contextual-environmental organizers, or what one might refer to as "organizers" writ large in real terms that include temporal as well as spatial dimensions of organization. These can be settings as simple as bulletin boards and class-libraries, but the concept of this can be extended in virtually an unlimited number of directions and can be elaborated to a relatively high level of systematic integration and sophistication. Allowing children the time and space to use the chalk board in a structured but self-expressive manner is one example of a way of taking something conventional and "convention-bound" in a class-room and redefining it as an effective means of enlarging the child's sense of what a classroom is and what it can do and the purposes it may serve in the name of education.

It is clear in a basic sense, for instance, that appropriate class-room management techniques are critical to the learning success of students in that class, but elaboration of the linkage between learning success and class-room management has rarely if ever been systematically developed in a concerted manner. Elaboration and differentiation of these contexts in a manner that would facilitate these adaptational processes for all students would be critical to the success of a program aiming to build comprehension and skills literacy, fluency and proficiency in English It is achieved through experience and trial and error, but, except through the mandating of standards and frameworks, it otherwise proceeds in a self-organizational manner in most school settings.

I would make a strong case therefore, in keeping with my own involvement in natural systems theory and metasystems science, that redefinition and enlargement of class and school wide organization in a systematic manner can be done in such a way as to promote and facilitate greater reading-writing comprehension skills, and to thus systematically enlarge the literacy learning loop upon which development of these skills depend. Beyond providing generalist formulae and curriculum cook-book recipes for instructional planning and development, it becomes incumbent for each teacher to reflect upon themselves and to achieve some sense of transcendence and liberation from their own built in and internalized socio-cultural constraints and psychological repressions. They need to find those stylistic features and strengths of their own personalities upon which they can build and develop and by which means they can come to redefine and reconfigure their own instructional contexts. No instructional cookbook can do this, nor can any administrator or law mandate or manipulate this.

In relatively administrative authoritarian schools, a degree of uniformity and conformity of this structure will be imposed, such as lines painted down walkways (why not zig-zag lines, waves, curly-cues, or maze-ways?), frequent uninvited and unannounced intrusions into the classroom by notebook and pen wielding administrators (why not unannounced visits by clowns or "mystery" persons who invite questions and curiosity from students?) prescribed, school-wide classroom organization, removal of recess periods for punishing hyperactivity in children (why not "punish" hyperactivity by structuring such activity out of doors, like "run the obstacle course"), making kids march in straight even lines (why not teach them how to "march" Mardi Gras style in fluid formations?) and making them stand against a wall when they have been naughty or broken a rule (why not have them assume some more constructive responsibility such as erasing the chalk board or emptying trash cans?).

In a more relaxed and non-authoritarian framework, there is greater tolerance for error and natural deviation of children, and greater accommodation therefore for those children whose behavior falls at the extreme of definitions of normality and appropriateness. Within such settings children have a wider comfort zone in which to operate, explore and run amok, and greater margins of tolerance for variance. Within such contexts, mistakes become a basis for a new lesson to be learned, rather than the basis for the threat and fear of punishment. This is not to say that in non-authoritarian contexts there are no rules or structures, and that these rules and structures are not reinforced. Reliance is rather upon indirect constraint and implicit sanctioning processes, as well as upon the encouragement of appropriate and productive behavior within appropriate and constructive behavioral settings.

I wish to conclude this paper not by suggesting that classroom discipline and management strategies are the key to improving reading comprehension and writing competency, but to suggest that there may be an indirect linkage between these general instructional problem sets in terms of the total academic contexts in which both of these problem sets of embedded and articulated. In the total school context, everything is interconnected to everything else. Therefore, if we wish to gain improvement in areas like writing and reading comprehension, which are dialectically complementary symbolization processes, then we must seek the larger field of interrelationships in which these processes are normally articulated and construed and then we must work consistently within the directive frames of reference that this larger academic context provides for us.

Contextualization strategies that articulate with the total and extended school environment, upon multiple levels of integration, and that utilize and build upon students skills in critical-hermeneutical evaluation of problem sets and relational complexes in knowledge-skill based activities, in the encoding and decoding of context-bound cues and signals within a human systems framework, provide the necessary bridgework for enlarging the literacy learning loop.

Because kids in general tend to be hyper-suggestible, and because their sense of ego is still relatively plastic and malleable, and their reality-testing skills largely underdeveloped, it makes sense to conclude with one last caveat. Anything which appeals to and builds upon the child's active imagination, even if in only a partial or imperfect manner, and that encourages in a fun and non-threatening way the adaptive deployment of the child's imagination, even if only in playful jest, as well as tapping upon their sense of innocent wonderment and innate curiosity in their world, is bound almost by definition to be good for their symbolic and cognitive development, and therefore as well for their behavioral and psychological adjustment, both now and later on in life. And if only their parents can be bought in upon this grand project of their child's future development and achievement, and positive, constructive resonance developed between the domestic and school environments, then can we expect to see tremendous strides in education.