Here's an interesting news story related to our discussion of Canagarajah's “The Place of World Englishes in Composition." Written by Naush Boghossian, "Students Struggle to Leave Dialects at Home" is about the "Standard English Learner" (SEL) program in California schools, which aims to help minority students code switch between their vernacular dialects spoken at home and Standard English used in schools.
Boghossian discusses many issues of language poltics in education related to Standard English and national dialects. Boghossian points out that a big part of the SEL program is professional development for teachers aimed at instilling cultural sensitivity to the home langauges and helping students recognize the differences between their dialect and Standard English.
Boghossian treats the subject pretty fairly, recognizing the political and social complexities of language learning in a diverse, multi-cultural environment. He points out that we still don't know much about why students from minority households struggle to learn Standard English and that dialects persist as a form of cultural identity. He also recalls the 1996 debate over Ebonics in Oakland schools. There's also a few comments to the article.
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2 comments:
some of the comments were a little disturbing, especially the comment by a committee asking why they were having students read something that reinforced non-standard English. I had to comment with the question why then do we have students read Shakespeare or any of the classics. We do not speak that way. I disagree that students should not use their dialect. I do agree that they should incorporate standard English (for college prep) as the one person stated in order to make any advance in this world you need a good command of standard English. sad but true.
I really enjoyed this article, I think that not enough attention is focused on students who don't speak standard dialects at home. Many schools are recognizing the need for ESL training, but seem to ignore this. This article made me wonder if many secondary and primary education programs have classes that instruct teacher to recognize problems arising from non-standard dialects and methods for helping these students.
While reading this I was reminded of a conversation I had with a Hawaiian friend of mine. She said that one of her professors recognized repeated grammatical errors she had made as being common among students who speak HCE (Hawai'i Creole English, or pidgin as it is commonly called). The professor worked with her to recognize and correct these lapses in the future, and my friend's writing improved as a result.
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