RE_5539

I can honestly say I have never thought so much about the effect of differing dialects/languages between home and community versus school and “formal” society.
Growing up, I had, and still do to some extent, a very strong Southern accent. This never affected me in a truly negative way until adulthood, especially in college and since beginning my teaching career. I can, in some aspects, relate to Ernie Smith (author of chapter 2 in our text). One particular instance I experienced in which my accent was not in synch with “Standard English” was during my student teaching. The school that I interned at was in a fairly wealthy beach community, in which many of the families had moved to North Carolina from up north due to cheaper cost of living down here. I was giving a spelling test to my fourth grade writing class, when I realized that my students were utterly confused. I had given the words “are” and “our” and, while they sounded different to me, my students thought I had said the same word twice (quite a problem on a spelling test, as you can imagine). I tried explaining to them the difference between the two words without giving away the spellings, but eventually had to pull another teacher from the hallway to say the words for me in a way my students could understand. It amazed me that something so seemingly simple had been such a barrier to our communication. In the same way, I found chapter 2 very difficult to read. I constantly found myself flipping to the footnotes in the back of the chapter so I could begin to piece together my vague idea of what the writer was trying to convey. I think the author intended for this to be the case. I believe he hoped the reader would struggle with reading his written expression, much the same way he struggled to understand the necessity of switching between two different “languages”, or dialects, throughout his youth.
I often find this same struggle in my classroom. My students, many of whom do not speak Standard English, sometimes say things that I just quite frankly do not understand. I frequently correct their use of grammar and other elements of Standard English. I still strongly believe that children in the United States should learn to properly use and speak Standard English. However, I am not naïve enough to think that they will always use it when they leave my classroom. I cannot require them to speak the way I do at home or at the mall or anywhere else for that matter. Of course, if they speak like I do they may not pronounce “are” and “our” correctly either, but I suppose that is another issue for another day . I completely agree with the author when they stated that we should teach, and expect, students to successfully use Standard English, while at the same time appreciating and validating their home language, or their “language of intimacy” as Joanne Kilgour Dowdy calls it. The question is: How? I hear so often from Americans who were born here that immigrants from other countries should learn to speak English if they want to live in our country. While I definitely believe that immigrants should be able to appropriately communicate in English, I think we often forget to respect, appreciate, and recognize the culture and languages they bring with them. The United States has often been called a “melting pot” in which citizens of the world freely travel here and share their unique experiences and ways of life. However, I’m afraid we tend to squelch many cultures, often without even realizing it. I hope that through this online discussion and the texts we are reading, I can gain a better understanding of how to accomplish this level of appreciation for other languages and dialects while teaching Standard English in my classroom. ~Allison Reese