Notes on Session 1 of Understanding Language Acquisition

Notes on Session 1 of Understanding Language Acquisition: What is My Speech Community?

Peggy Estrada: "Classrooms should function with both individual responsibility and interdependency (mutual responsibility)." (1-7)

Policy makers should take note of the following:
Jean Clandinin: "What a teacher knows and can do determines the quality of the child's educational experience."

Richard Tucker: "Within 30 years or so 50% of all children in American public schools. . . are going to be minority students."

"Teachers have to be prepared to understand who these students are, what are their needs, how do we help them to develop to their full potential?" (1-8)

More interesting quotes:
Annela Teemant: "We have cultural capital and linguistic capital but we may need to develop critical language awareness." [A comma is needed after "capital."] [Are we aware of how we ourselves learned language and how we use language? Can we step back and look at the varieties and uses of language? At how language interacts with culture and self?]

See below for explanation of critical language awareness.

". . . your language. . . is intricately tied to who you are and who you want to be. Your language expresses identity." (1-9)

Our language, or someone else's can make us feel
superior
inferior
dominated
discriminated against

Standard and Non-Standard Varieties of Language

"Standard language is associated with being an educated, mature user of language.
"Non-Standard. . ., if people's home language, can be their language of social identity." (1-10)

Descriptive and Prescriptive Views of How Language Ought to be Used

Descriptive school: focuses on how language is actually used.
Prescriptive school: provides rules, based on grammarians' views of how language ought to be used. (1-10)

Critical language awareness: focuses on the relationship between power and language, since language conveys superiority or inferiority, indicates discrimination and perpetuates inequality. (1-10)
Critical language awareness: involves questioning the status and power judgments of language use. (Corson, 1-13)

"Having critical language awareness means understanding that our language use is dynamic, changing, and flexible." -- (Teemant, 1-10)

Speech Community: a group of people who share usage norms for at least one language or language variety.

Linguistic Capital: language use skills of value in certain sites. "When we move to a new site, our language use is valued differently."

Linguistic Capital is valued differently based on age, gender, social and educational status, formality of situation, regionalism, historic time. (1-11)

Usage: linguistic etiquette -- study of forces in language that determine correctness, quality, rightness, appropriateness, and goodness. The forces that determine this are outside of language. (Don Norton, 1-11) [He tells about NBC English.]

Dialect: a variety of a language. "Dialect features . . . are regular and rule governed." (Donna Christian, 1-12)

"Language change is central to understanding it." -- (David Corson, 1-13)

"Teachers are responsible for classroom language policy. We should ask:
Are our policies informed, enlightened, inclusive, and fair?" (Teemant, 1-13)

Do we allow for multiple voices in the classroom?

Do all kids get access to knowledge that allows them to see themselves as knowledge producers not just knowledge consumers? (Robert Bullough, 1-19)
How often are children asked to speak with authority? (Carolyn Temple Adger, 1-20)

Reflection: I've understood since my undergraduate days at BYU (many years ago) that we have different ways of speaking (varieties of language) depending on the circumstances we are in at the time. I acknowledge that with my junior high students. However, it seems to me that that are losing what used to be an automatic response -- to switch from degree of "standardness" to another according to the situation at hand. I encourage them to become comfortable with more than one "language" -- for instance, "talk with the principal language" vs. "talk with my best friends" language. The second language learner is learning not only a new language, but, as time goes on, various kinds of the new language.

The question about whether my practices match my beliefs has been asked before (including in our school accreditation process), but I need to be reminded of it again and again -- to look closely at how I am functioning in the classroom. For instance, in a reading class I teach, two Hispanic girls were wasting their individual reading time -- talking together instead of working. I believe in providing students with what they need to achieve, and in begin aware of and responsive to learning styles and what works best for various cultures. But I was just frustrated until I realized that for those girls -- even more than for many of my other students, working together with peers (especially peers who share a first language) can facilitate learning. So during their time to practice individual reading, I put them together reading short, high-interst plays. Now they're actually reading -- and doing the brief writing assignments about the reading.