Pedagogical Directions on Language Difference in the Classroom

In reading Lisa Delpit's chapter "What Should Teachers Do? Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction," I returned to a topic that was one of my introductory exposures to linguistics, and the notion of affirming students' language seemed like a rather simple idea that only had the complexity of convincing others about the existence of prejudices that are widely accepted norms in pedagogy. After teaching composition for two years, which is not in my area, I find myself struggling in finding appropriate ways to talk to my students about linguistic performance without stereotyping groups of people typically associated with a language variety.

Delpit refers to Heath asking her students to observe language varieties through interviews and the media, which  appears to be a useful technique in introducing students to observing languages as they exist rather than simply prescribed. However, the result of this kind of analysis can fall under the expected problems in contrastive rhetoric, so with students receiving introductory knowledge regarding language varieties, this may not be the best method. The puppet show as an example of how some variations are more appropriate for certain genres is a better technique to bring linguistic differences to light, but can still carry prejudices. One of the issues regarding attributing varieties to genres is that the standard will mostly appear in genres that are interpreted as "important," "formal," and "serious" while some varieties may be associated with genres that are either dismissed or disliked because of the variety employed in them. The study of genres can reveal a lot about linguistic differences but can also reinforce many of the same misconceptions that linguists try to correct.

Seeing texts in school written in varieties from early grades seems to me like a necessary approach. It is difficult to suddenly convince students that the form in which education has delivered information to them has been extremely one sided. This is unlike questioning the approach to a specific topic that primary and secondary education takes, and asking students to consider an alternative view. Language is a tool through which the material itself is communicated, so to question the apparatus and to learn to be actively aware of its shortcomings is a wholly different process and goal. When Delpit points out that student competence is often misinterpreted because teachers sometimes do not distinguish between learning to read and learning a new language form, it brings to mind that school space or the general space of education are locations where speakers of other varieties are always catching up. Perhaps the necessary approach here is not always in teaching about varieties but presenting them, allowing them to exist in educational contexts. 

Ways With Words and "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography"

Heath's "The Madness(es) of Reading and Writing Ethnography," the presentation of the reader who is also aware of being read frames a response to the readers of Ways With Words. Her use of Terra Nostra  and its knight, falling victim to reading, provides a literary lens for her work.  The impact of reading is exaggerated in claims that writing about oral cultures destroys them. The significance of the past experiences of the people Ways With Words contains is observed by the readers of the text but is rather unimportant to those being read in the work. Heath's description of her data collection taking place during her wanderings called to mind the dérive. The dérive (also referred to as the “drift”), a technique for exploring spaces, is employed by situationists to understand the environment’s psychological impact. The dérive takes place without previously formed notions about the environment, and the flâneur is the individual who studies the terrain using this method. The one who practices the drift is aware of the environment’s effect on one’s behavior, and such alertness to psychogeographical components of the drift separates the flâneur from the casual wanderer. With this article, Heath makes it evident that the environment of her research had a profound effect on her, not just as an academic studying groups of people, but as a person living what she calls a schizophrenic existence. This particular article pointed out a relationship between my work and ethnographic research that I had not seen before. I never collected ethnographic data outside of visiting English 101 classrooms during my first semester at ISU. I wonder what could have been different about how I wrote my notes and what conclusions I made if I saw a connection between the "wanderings" in the dérive and writing ethnography. Ethnographers always seemed to have too many tools for recording their data and too many restrictions about their interactions to participate in the dérive, but Heath's engagement in the communities she writes about clearly indicates that this is inaccurate. When discussing the personal information Heath should have included in the appendix of Ways With Words, she expresses some of the direct engagement in the communities she worked in (264). She relates he personal history to her comfort level during her research instead of turning directly to the scholarly analysis of her place as an ethnographer. As she reflects back on her wanderings, she offers new insight that helps readers understand her research, and ultimately, she is self reading as she walks back through her dérive.   

Culture and Spoken Discourse

In "Learning How to Talk in Trackton" and "Teaching How to Talk in Roadville," Heath brings to the forefront traditions often observed but seldom discussed in a detached manner. Seeing the rituals having to do with children described in this book is reminiscent of our class discussions regarding making the normalized "weird" for students by asking them to take a closer look at social practices that are taken for granted. The decreasing celebration of every expected newborn, names of items considered necessary,  and introducing the child to members of the family are examples of accepted practices (113-117). One type of communication between children learning how to talk and adults consists of an exchange where the child unknowingly reciprocates a form of teaching language. When the child repeats a term but misuses its meaning or mispronounces it, family members imitate the pronunciation back to the child and may even use the new extended meaning of the word in their household. Heath uses many examples of this throughout the chapter, and in becoming a less normalized convention in the reading, the terms of children and their use in families began to connect to and resemble collaborative learning. The extended meanings and new pronunciations of terms are not only reflections of the child's attempt to mimic their caretakers and learn to effectively communicate with them, but also reflections of the adults' effort to engage with the child's efforts. When family members and others who spend a significant amount of time with the child begin to incorporate the child's speech into their own everyday speech, it is (perhaps subconsciously) a gesture that a child contributes to what is considered acceptable speech in a household rather than just being the one who must learn. The words and phrases that are used within a family as a part of that "teaching" drop out of the family's vocabulary soon after the child is perceived as too old for "baby talk." The temporary language does not appear to have a long term purpose in the family outside of perhaps a nostalgic memory that is associated with the terms the child brings into their environment. I do not want to make a sudden leap to the classroom environment, but I will for the purpose of this post. I found myself wondering how the speech the child brings into the family relates to what students bring into the classroom. Students tend not to find their speech appropriate for academic purposes and have the expectation of education as a way to rid them of their nonstandard language or to help them mask their use of the nonstandard in academic settings. The relationship between the history of collaboration in a child's upbringing may connect to students bringing in baggage about their speech as something that is not valuable. 

Educational Ethnography

The concept of teaching as a political act in Canagarajah's "Critical Ethnography of a Sri Lankan Classroom: Ambiguities in Student Opposition to Reproduction through ESOL" gives historical context to much of what we talked about this semester. It may be too early to start looking back at much of what we have discussed so far in class, but this article stood out to me because it looks at TESOL through the (at the time) current perspective of the theory in the 80s and 90s. Given that my only exposure to TESOL from a theoretical perspective has been in this course, seeing previous references to criticisms of methods in this field provides me with historical context alongside that of colonial power, which I am far more educated in considering its importance in my field. All semester we have discussed the double edged sword that is English, which is difficult to reconcile with the benefits of speaking, reading, and writing in English for socioeconomic mobility. Such mobility, regardless of where it is in the world, is often talked about in ways that are problematic. The reference to Kandiah's challenge early in the article looks at how "the dreams encouraged by the English are illusory (as English learning does not challenge but in fact perpetuates inequality) and its ideals are suspected by students of resulting in cultural deracination" (604). The universality of the idea that English, as a language, provides what Canagarajah calls dreams (in the U.S. context, this is certainly the American Dream) is not popularly presented as debatable despite the long, problematic history of disillusionment with opportunities and stability. Turning to the role of ethnography in considering cultural contexts and working within them, the surroundings are impossible to escape while attempting to discuss what occurs in the classroom since the classroom is in no way an isolated space. The attempts to treat it in such a way when it comes to the study of language indirectly asks the students to turn a blind eye to society. When  Canagarajah mentions fighter jets and bombs in the background of the students taking the English placement tests, the conscious social experience is at the forefront and the classroom cannot escape it. Inside the classroom, daily, perhaps subtle activities emphasized their identities as students in the larger social context. The example of correcting pronunciation, which revealed the distinction between standard and nonstandard Sri Lankan English (616), comments on the global, multiplying prejudices within a "single language."

Literacy Debates

Gee brings power in society into the discourse about literacy, and the political atmosphere he describes  encourages the types of approaches to education in place due to economic gaps. The basic skills centered learning and what Gee calls a more innovative approach depends on the attitude formed toward students from different economic backgrounds. From what I have observed, school districts with more funding tend to focus on the education of the student, tend to trust students, and students who excel are encouraged to take on more challenging tasks and coursework. School districts with less funding focus more on discipline than education, are suspicious of students, and students who do well are as neglected as students who need more guidance in certain subjects. Additionally, the students from the latter category are often accused of cheating when they accomplish tasks with more ease than expected and are asked to "show their work" in situations where the students from the wealthier districts are simply assumed to be "gifted." From Gee's perspective, this is a matter of education failing to democratize. There is also the component of lowered expectation for the districts and schools where students are not expected to do well. One example from my own experience deals with a standardized writing test that was designed to determine how students will place into high school English classes. We prepared for this test in our English class before entering high school, and our class happened to have a particularly enthusiastic and innovative teacher (from this you can safely assume that she was new and ended up leaving education after a few years). She informed us that our school had a lower set of standards than others for assessment and that she refused to grade us based on those lower standards because she found them patronizing. It was perhaps the first moment in my education when a teacher interrupted her performance to give us information about where we, as students, stood in society. Subsequently, the recognition of situations where the expectations of different kinds of literacy were apparent to me allowed me to analyze my own circumstances, or as Gee states: "One does not learn to read texts of type X in way Y unless one has had experience in settings where texts of type X are read in way Y" (41).

Methods in Intercultural Rhetoric: Focus on Discourse Analysis and Text Linguistics

In “Social Languages, Situated Meanings, and Cultural Models” Gee refers to language varieties as social languages (registers) and discusses speaking as an act that reveals who we are and what we are doing. Different social languages express different versions of the speaker, which is in conflict with the notion of a stable and constant self with a central identity. This observation in linguistics appears to me as a shift away from the sense of self in modernism. Theresa Lillis’s article “Ethnography as Method, Methodology, and ‘Deep Theorizing:’ Closing the Gap Between Text and Context in Academic Writing Research” contains moments of this struggle with postmodern identity. In example 7, a writer states that when writing in English, one has to imagine how an English person would write. The insider perspective demonstrates the identity split that is on the surface for non-native speakers as opposed to Gee’s example of Jane, who did not recognize the difference in language she brings to various situations. The writer in Lillis’s example composes while aware of the identity that is temporarily taken on in order to produce writing that fits in as the work of an English-speaking person. As an outsider, one’s social identity is easier to make conscious, for everything in the environment is a reminder of this status. As the social identity interacts and intersects with the writing identity, the writer brings many complexities to the composition. How much a non-native speaker of English brings in his or her social languages into speaking and writing depends on the context. In some communities, practices like code switching are acceptable, but if the student is isolated from that environment in their personal, academic, and/or professional life, one identity shifts to make room for a new one. The new identity hopes to communicate more efficiently within its present environment. The language constructs not only identity but self-perception. Given the privileged status of English on a global scale, self-worth is directly connected to how well a student imitates that idea of an English person in Lillis’s article. The speaker or writer measures up his or her own identity in society based on the ability to adjust in communicating with an audience that views him or her as an outsider. 

From Contrastive Rhetoric to Intercultural Rhetoric

In “From Contrastive Rhetoric to Intercultural Rhetoric: A Search for Collective Identity,” Xiaoming Li offers alternatives to dominant discourse. I found it interesting that she initially wanted to establish her position through her language identity, describing herself as feeling more Chinese than American based on her effortless use of Chinese and need to have her articles in English proofread. I don’t know if writing is ever effortless unless she is referring to non-academic writing. In the case she was referring to non-academic writing, the comparison to her need to have articles proofread when she writes in English is not necessarily fair. The tie between language and identity certainly has many arguments that can be made for it, many of which I do not disagree with; however, relating what people do with their first language to their general identity is where I see the issue with contrastive rhetoric. She seems to set herself up as an author who has adapted to the essentializing and stereotyping as the Other while asking the reader to do none of that work with his or her own first language, probably out of consideration that many readers will have English as their first language. The treatment of English as such never asks the speaker or writer to construct that language based identity, and discussing some general features of English writing (the most popular of which seems to be “directness”) is only for the sake of establishing a norm against which other languages are measured.

In response to what she observed in her research on writing in school in China, she argued against the notion that “given the fluidity of the postmodern world, culture as indicating a bounded notion is no longer a useful category” (15). She constructs a belief to argue against and states that China has not lost its cultural identity, creating the impression that fluidity is somehow completely neglectful of culture. The problem she fails to address is that naming distinct qualities about one culture ignores similar trends happening in different forms in other cultures. For example, when she borrows Chaim Perelman’s definition of argument as attempting to change the state of affairs (16), she connects this to why argument is not taught in Chinese writing, for the culture does not welcome threats to social and political stability. She contrasts “democracy” to “dynasty.” As a reader, I wonder why she chooses not to address how the US population and government react to threats to stability. No matter how much we ask student to make an argument in writing classes, the status quo is powerful and change causes great anxiety. She reinforces the dominance of the English speaking “democracy” by not questioning its relationship to stability the same way she addresses that of China. And while I do not altogether disregard the observation she makes and its possible relationship to writing, it is an example of a generalization I find to be damaging ad have previously come across in non-academic areas of the institution.