“Language Diversity in Teacher Education”
Growing up, I was the victim of an ‘old school’ English teacher mother. To this day, any time I utter something that is less than perfect American English I can see her right eye twitch although, she manages to suppress the urge to correct me now that I am approaching thirty. Growing up this way gave me a taste of what it is like for students from non-dominant cultural groups when they have their individual variations of English taken from them in the English classroom and replaced with the supposed “standard English.”
This is a topic that I struggle with. I see the value of teaching and learning a standard form of English. Let’s face it, we are in the business of training our students to become good workers in our society. To do this they must be able to communicate in a clear and standard way, both in writing and speaking. However, I also think that forcing students to adopt standard English, in the way that it has been done previously, devalues their cultural connection to their form of English. Their language is part of their identity and it is wrong to strip students of their identity or make them feel that it is not as good as the standard. I think that writing would be incredibly uninteresting, boring even, if everyone wrote in “standard English.” It is the original uses of language by different cultural groups that give student writing and discussion a more authentic feel–especially in creative writing or narratives.
This is a topic that seems to have come to the table in most of my Rhetoric classes. We have discussed code-switching, language as identity, and Oprah all in the same conversations. In an ideal world, we as teachers would be able to give students an outlet for using their own dialects and show them that those dialects are culturally valuable resources while they learn to communicate in standard English. I had a creative writing instructor that once told our class that we were not allowed to break any rule of written English unless we knew the rule inside and out and misused it to further our story. I think that code-switching, going from standard to non-standard English, is the hallmark of a well educated and intelligent person. A person that does this very well is Oprah. I thought of her immediately after reading on the opening page the statement by the student that “‘The richest, most intelligent and generous person in our country would be ridiculed if she/he did not speak standard English’” (Smitherman 1). Oprah goes from what might be considered lower class southern dialect to a very refined standard English very easily and purposefully. She uses her dialect so that she seems more like a normal person–not a fabulously wealthy, intelligent, and powerful icon.
For those teachers that are the last bastions of strict regimes of “standard English or else” for their students, I think that they need to be reminded that to the original English speakers, the British, feel that almost everything spoken across the Atlantic is non-standard and disgraceful to the Kings English. Or at least that was what one of my British instructors in London was fond of telling our class of Americans.
“Rearticulating Articulation”
David R. Russell and David Foster
This was probably the most thought provoking article I have read this semester and it brought forward some new, at least to me, and interesting questions about composition instruction in the United States. First of all, it hadn’t occurred to me that most other countries, including those of Europe, don’t have composition studies in higher education. From the reading, I gathered that students, by the time they reach higher education, are being taught the writing of the discipline that they have chosen. The writing instruction is very narrowly focused on the discipline and they don’t do a general overview of composition. In the questions posed by the authors on pages 39-40 they look at this issue based on early or late specialization. American students make the most of their college career, prolong the experience as long as possible, and find their academic niche late. Students from other countries find focus early and their writing reflects this. The only criticism that the authors make of our late specialization is that it is costly.
This brought my first question to mind. In typical American fashion, I could assume that our way is the best, but after reading this I find myself wondering if students need a more general overview of composition or if they are served best by selecting a field early and thus focusing their studies? In the United States we believe as a culture that students need to be “well-rounded” and this is part of the justification for the variety of classes they take. Well, is it best for students to be well-rounded? I think that at a certain level, a high level, being well-rounded is best. However, at lower college levels it might be best to learn to do one focused style well rather than to do a general style in an average way.
Another part of the problem here in the States that the authors lightly addressed is the issue of teaching across the curriculum. I found it very interesting that abroad teachers from all subjects assume the role of writing instructor. The students are learning writing in the content areas and as such it is more relevant and interesting to the students because they have chosen that focus or subject. Here, I know that I have heard many students complain that they shouldn’t have to take general composition courses because they cannot see the practical application of it. The more I write and think about this, I like the European model better.
On a different note, they touched on the subject of the different educational goals of secondary and higher education. I graduated high school in 1999, not too long ago. While there I yo-yoed back and forth between honors English and regular English courses. My mother, a college English teacher, was horrified when I was assigned only 4 essays my senior year. The number alone was not the problem, it was that three of them were “group” essays. It is incredibly difficult to teach writing in high school when one has 5-6 periods a day with classes of around 40 students of varying writing and speaking ability. Secondary and higher education cannot really compare much–let alone educational goals. Especially today when in secondary school success is measured with state testing.