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."