What students bring into the classroom from outside is integral to their educations; how teachers respond to this culture external to the school domain is equally vital. If educators make efforts to incorporate the signs and symbols important to the students’ identity into the curriculum, the classroom culture will be that much richer and conducive to learning for everyone. However, everything from preexisting prejudices to school district demands can prevent teachers from making these important connections. I will explore the role of alternative cultures in this week’s readings, and place it in the context of teacher resource and classroom necessity.
Mendoza-Denton (2008) describes the youth gang culture in the Bay Area as consisting of a several various semiotic systems extremely important to in-group members. These systems (colors, clothing, makeup, and language) can be too subtle for outsiders like the police or school administration to decipher and differentiate between gangs. Misinterpretation of where students come from linguistically and culturally leads to a classification system (Limited English Proficient) that prevents many students from achieving college entry requirements. Several students labeled in this manner could perform perfectly on oral examinations, but were detained due to their literacy skills or behavioral issues (p. 34). To an outside observer like the author, it seemed apparent that cultural disconnect was responsible for the students lack of traditionally defined success.
Osborne (1996) reviews over 70 classroom ethnographies dealing with similarly marginalized populations, and shapes their findings into nine assertions for teachers in multicultural classrooms to use as a heuristic for improving their teaching and empowering their students. “Culturally relevant pedagogy” should aim to actively and critically engage students’ in their own learning processes and eventually lead to a redistribution of power in society (p. 287).
An example of an educator moving forward from assertions comparable to Osborne’s (1996) was Wallace’s (2008) study conducted in two West London schools. Here she describes the four identity resources that immigrant children seem to draw upon when engaging in guided literacy talk. Whether choosing the “back home,” “I come from here,” language, or religious identity strand, the students were able to engage with wisely chosen school texts in a meaningful, literate way (p. 67). They were not only able to bridge the divide between cultures, but perhaps even enjoyed an advantageous viewpoint from atop this bridge.
Returning to the story of T-Rex and her homegirls in Mendoza-Denton (2008), it seems clear that their cultural backgrounds have aided them in acquiring fluency in a variety of “secret literacies” (p. 189). Their skill at clowning, or the Sureña’s skill at writing community poetry, proves they are capable of profound, prolific communication within their own in-group. In my own school experience I’ve often been amazed by the witty and irreverent insights of “at-risk” third graders made only in the hallways and lunchroom, away from authority’s ears. If students like these are ever to be fully served by our education system, we must make those “out” classroom moments “in” moments, and foster a new generation of culturally relevant educators.
References
Osborne, B. A. (1996). Practice into theory into practice: Culturally relevant pedagogy for students we have marginalized and normalized. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 27(3), 285-314.
Wallace, Catherine (2008). Literacy and identity: A view from the bridge in two multicultural London schools. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 7: 61-80.
Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
The Continua model demonstrates that there is no finite line between literacy in one language and literacy in two languages, as languages themselves are not so clear-cut. Demarcating individual languages is a politically loaded act; Garcia quotes Mühlhäusler as saying, “the very concept of discrete languages is probably a European cultural artifact fostered by procedures such as literacy and standardization. Any attempt to count distinct languages will be an artifact of classificatory procedures rather than a reflection of communicative practices” (2009, p. 24). Instead, communities involve themselves in languaging tasks, multiplistic, multimodal forms of communication (Garcia, 2009). It is this discursive languaging that develops transnational literacies. Yet, as Bloch and Alexander (2003) note, neither translation nor fluid code switching is valued (or assessed) by most education systems. This missing validation is troublesome, and I argue that a student is unprepared for the complexity of our globalized world unless they engage in translanguaging in education.
In reference to bilingual education in Wales, Baker (2003, p. 71) has advocated a mode similar to Garcia’s model called translanguaging, purposefully extending multimodal communication in education across two or more languages. He draws on research done by Williams to assert that learning is fuller when two languages are not only both involved, but are used strategically to enhance students’ competency in both modes (2003). Content learning is deeper when a student has a wider range of available resources that are employed equally in problem solving. Bloch and Alexander’s (2003) case study in South Africa additionally supports this claim, demonstrating that students learning in both Xhosa and English will have a more profound understanding and begin to break down the concept of the “vernacular” and the “literary.” In contrast to this success, Basu (2003) argues that in Delhi, due to the languaging practices they engage in, Hindi speaking students struggle with acquiring English. Opportunities to make meaning in Hindi (cinema, radio, peer-talk) are abundant, while English is prestigious but scarce (2003). This scarcity of cultural artifacts leaves little opportunity for students to engage English in languaging, and this lack of engagement prevents them from being able to draw on multiple literacies in their learning, precluding transnational literacy.
Transnational literacy is important because globalization continues to blur boundaries, and identities are built on cultural practices that are no longer territorially dependent. Students can engage in digital literacy practices outside of school (McGinnis et al, 2007), and these borderless spaces are filled with complex languaging; administrators and “…educators need to consider the role transnationalism plays in the literacies and identities of their students, and view students as knowledgeable and active members of this fast-changing global culture” (p. 302). The circulating models of transnational student identity will “thicken” over time (Bartlett, 2007) only if the languaging practices they engage in the digital world outside of education are purposefully incorporated in the figured world of the classroom. Otherwise, standardized literacy and the illusion of finite modes will conserve the emphasis placed on the privileged ends of the Continua.
References:
Baker, C. (2003). Biliteracy and transliteracy in Wales: Language planning and the Welsh national curriculum. In N. Hornberger (Ed.), Continua of Biliteracy (pp. 71-90). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Bartlett, L. (2007). Bilingual literacies, social identification, and educational trajectories. Linguistics and Education, 18(3-4), 215-231.
Basu, V. (2003). ‘Be quick of eye and slow of tongue’: An analysis of two bilingual schools in New Delhi. In N. Hornberger (Ed.), Continua of Biliteracy (pp. 291-311). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Bloch, C. & Alexander, N. (2003). A Luta Continua!: The relevance of the Continua of bilteracy to South African multilingual schools. In N. Hornberger (Ed.), Continua of Biliteracy (pp. 91-121). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
García, O. (2009). Languaging and education. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective (pp. 21-41).
McGinnis, T., Goodstein-Stolzenberg, A., & Saliani, E. C. (2007). “indnpride”: Online spaces of transnational youth as sites of creative and sophisticated literacy and identity work. Linguistics and Education, 18(3-4), 283-304.
Nothing like a good article from my favorite news source, The Onion. Below is a short piece from April 25, 2008.
“WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation’s sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. “This, is an unsettling trend,” columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. “We’re seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries.” Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…”
Here’s a link to the original article.
The Good Grammar Book: With Answers, Michael Swan and Catherine Walter, Oxford University Press, 2007
I chose to review this book on my blog as I currently teach from it in my Beginning Grammar course at the Drexel University’s ELC. It is meant for adolescent to adult “elementary to lower-intermediate students of English” (p. vi). The age of the student is not explicitly printed and the authors indicate that it is for all learners, however, it is extremely long, the text is dense, and the pictures are tiny, so it was not published with children in mind. It is also apparent that the text is for academic purposes, weighted slightly towards writing, as it includes less information on verbally producing forms. There is one section devoted to more informal language, but the rest is a litany of rules (conjunctions, possessives, modal verbs) meant to bolster command of the English pen.
It is implied that good grammar is essential to gaining fluency in English, and that procedural knowledge comes from declarative knowledge. Grammar explanations are short and precise, and exercises under the same heading are copious and build slowly. For example, to learn the simple present, the student completes a cloze, then transforms sentences in and out of questions, negatives, and affirmatives, then produces their own sentence (p. 2). The authors also believe strongly in learner independence, and that English teachers are not required for language learning. This is apparent through their emphasis on self-guided study, which includes numbered instructions for systematically using the book (p. vi). Add to this an answer key, and it makes an extremely learner-centered text.
The built-in assessment facet is also learner-centered (and helpful for instructors as well, as I have found). Each section begins with a simple pre-test to determine which aspects of the form the student struggles with most. The results of the pre-test direct the learner to rules requiring more study, and forms they can skip. At the end of a section is a longer “test yourself” assessment that enables the learner (and teacher) to determine competence of a specific form. In these paired quizzes, questions echo the structure and content of the book’s exercises. They additionally enforce the author’s belief that descriptive knowledge will lead to greater communicability in English.
The authors stick to this conviction tenaciously; the book is 274 pages of exercises, and does not include a single paragraph-length reading. Each section contains the pre-test, several units of exercises with explanations, and the post-test. Perhaps the authenticity of these exercises would be more readily apparent if there were readings to demonstrate their use in longer, deeper contexts. As the authors planned them, they are quasi authentic, since many of the phrases will be helpful to students in future use, but are mostly devoid of circumstance. For example, in the section dedicated to determiners, there are several short exercises involving changing expressions and filing in the blank. It is possible that if the students had to read a longer excerpt and circle all the determiners in it, they would have a greater understanding of how frequently these words occur.
Added to the lack of readings is the disadvantage that the book is about British grammar. While Standard American English is extremely similar, enough rules differ for it to confuse the learners (at the weekend versus during the weekend, the team are versus the team is, and the spelling of several words). The text is also extremely clear cut and dry, which does not allow for exploring the ambiguities of language, and projects a false picture of English as unequivocal forms and functions.
Despite these weaknesses, the textbook is strong overall. It is exhaustive, and does not simply provide grammar rules that beginner or intermediate learners should know, but is inclusive of all nearly forms. Additionally, the book is versatile and may be used with or without a teacher, as it contains it’s own answers and explanations, and a clear and detailed table of contents for navigating its pages. Finally, the organization is hierarchical, beginning with the simplest and most imperative rules, but each section is independent of the one prior, giving the more serious reader flexibility and control.
The development of policy, practice, and research in bilingual education has been controversial and fraught with issues as each facet attempts to inform the other, and different programs are measured by dissimilar standards. Reading about the program at Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle School (Freeman, 2000) prior to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is remarkable, as I taught in the neighborhood after the policy’s implementation, and saw how research was misread and practice distorted. As Anderson and Irvine (1993) quote Freir, “…if teachers help students from oppressed communities to read the word but do not also teach them to read the world, students might become literate in a technical sense but will remain passive objects of history rather than active subjects” (p. 82). NCLB is an example of a policy that enforces the objectivity of non-English speaking students, and co-opts enrichment bilingual programs and requires transitional methods instead.
The implicit rationale for the program at Julia de Burgos was the creation of an empowered, literate student (Freeman, 2000, p. 203). Put in the context of Jeon’s (2003) findings at a Korean-English two-way immersion program, the PORTAL program in Kensington (Freeman, 2000) hopes to, “promote secure majority and minority students and a collaborative power relationship between them” (p. 140). While the program encountered some resistance, it was successful enough to influence feeder schools Lewis Elkin and Bayard Taylor Elementary, where I worked. At the time Freeman published her research, there was still hope for bilingual education as NCLB was still a glimmer in the government’s eye.
The 2001 Act favors the convergent scripts of the media of biliteracy (Hornberger, 2005) and similar to what Ruiz discovered in 1981, student voice in bilingual schools is excluded even as subordinate language is a medium of education. The emphasis I saw at Taylor was on drilling “at-risk” students with meaningless readings to enhance phonemic awareness and oral fluency. The bilingual classroom, one per grade, was seen as temporary and transitional, and a handicap to the PSSA. When a biliterate third-grader was moved by her mother from an English classroom to a bilingual classroom, the entire faculty and administration was shocked that her mother forced her backwards. This move to divergent scripts was misunderstood and criticized.
Garcia (2009) has responded to similar confusion regarding bilingual education by positing that the plural end of the continua is essential. She argues that research, policy, and practice have all found that, “bilingual education is the only way to educate children in the twenty first century” (author’s emphasis, p. 5). Language development, cultural pluralism, and social autonomy and the contextualized content of biliteracy (Hornberger, 1991, pg 223) are epitomized in her moon buggy metaphor of bilingual education (p. 8). Contrasted with this, NCLB has taken advantage of the controversy surrounding bilingual education and has been a tool in redirecting funds “away from enrichment and maintenance of bilingual education and toward transitional and even non-bilingual programs” (Hornberger 1991, 234). The rigid bilingual education resulting from NCLB must change again; Garcia (2009) argues it must adapt and pertain to the lives of children in a multi-lingual world.
References:
Aderson, G.L.,& Irvine, P. (1993). Informing critical literacy with ethnography. In C. Lankshear & P. McLaren (Eds.) Critical Literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern (pp. 81-104). Albany: SUNY Press.
Freeman, R. (2000). Contextual challenges to dual-language education: A case study of developing middle school program. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 31(2), 202-229.
García, O. (2009). Introducing bilingual education. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective (pp. 3-18).
Hornberger, N. H. (1991). Extending enrichment bilingual education: Revisiting typologies and redirecting policy. In O. García (ed.), Bilingual Education: Focusschrift in honor of Joshua A. Fishman. Volume 1. (pp. 215-234). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hornberger, N. H. (2005). Student voice and the media of biliteracy in bi(multi)lingual/multicultural classrooms. In T. McCarty (Ed.), Language, Literacy, and Power in School (pp. 151-167). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Jeon, M. (2003). Searching for a comprehensive rationale for two-way immersion. In N. Hornberger (Ed.), Continua of Biliteracy (pp. 122-144). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
I just have a quick thought today regarding yesterday’s Advanced Pronunciation lesson.
We spent an intensive hour working on the 24 standard English consonants, specifically, /l/, /r/, /p/, /b/, /v/, and /f/. But even as my students were producing nearly perfectly some of the most difficult English sounds, my heart was kind of sinking at the pointlessness of such a lesson. Honestly, most intensive English students don’t want to learn how to pronounce their words perfectly; they want to learn how to pronounce them like Americans. And Americans (in all of their dialects) follow a completely different set of pronunciation rules. We flap our /t/s, “I’ve hit rock bodom.” (IPA /bɑɾəm/). We reduce two words into one word, “gonna,” “wanna,” “hafta,” “hasta,” “didja,” “doya,” “wouldja,” and on and on. We even eliminate ending sounds so that we pronounce “can” and “can’t” nearly identically. The only difference is the vowel sound, which makes no sense to a non-native speaker, as it’s represented by the same letter.
It’s a good thing I still have eight weeks left in the class, because I’m going to need to get over the futility of yesterday, and dive into teaching them the sounds above. If they’re not all saying, “didja,” and “wouldja,” by the end of the semester, only then should I let my heart sink.
While reading Language: Its Structure and Use by Edward Finegan, I was shocked to discover him referring to the syllable structure as onset and rhyme. Not only does it contrast with what other linguists in the field use (Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct), but it contrasts with what everyday literacy instructors employ in their training, and it’s incorrect and confusing. When I was being coached to work with kindergarten students, the syllable was described to me as made up of an onset and a rime. Now, this may look incorrect, since we’re familiar with the word rhyme, and most dictionaries don’t even have the linguistic definition of rime in their pages, but the distinct spelling is very important and should be adhered to. Here’s why:
When the first sound in a word is a consonant, it’s considered the onset. For example, the onset in the word “bear” is /b/. Following this we have the word family, or rime, -ear. Now, the term rhyme is audial and refers only to the sounds made by this word family. For example, the words “bear” and “pear” rime, buy they also rhyme. That is, after the onset they look the same and sound the same. However, what if we use the words “pear” and “care”? These words rhyme, that is, they sound identical after the onset, but they do not rime. Their word families, -ear and -are, are different. This is important because it’s extremely hard to explain to a beginning reader why words like this are spelled differently but sound the same. Using rime gives the literacy instructor mental categories to use, and a solid place to start from with his or her instruction.
The English sound-spelling clash makes the use of onset and rime important, and rime and rhyme should never be conflated.
The entry below is a response to the book Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance, written by my sociolinguistics professor, Dr. Nancy Hornberger. It is an ethnography of language policy written during the eighties while she was living and researching in Puno, Peru. I used an article by Martin-Jones as a lens for understanding Dr. Hornberger’s work.
The schools of a nation can be seen as stages where the society’s larger power struggles are enacted. In a review of research practices and discourses on bilingual education, Martin-Jones (2007) writes, “The commitment to developing a critical approach arose out of a shared concern with the ways in which educational policies and classroom practices contribute to the reproduction of asymmetries of power between groups with different social and linguistic resources” (p. 171). Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance (Hornberger, 1988) is an example of this critical approach in a postcolonial setting. While language can be cast as a power commodity, Hornberger’s research finds identity and language inseparable and, in some cases, interchangeable. Within this context, I argue that bilingual education could be used as either an agent for positive change and affirmation of usually subordinated identities (immigrants, minorities), or as an agent for maintaining the status quo of the white, western face of the world.
Quechua speakers, a marginalized Andean identity, are strongly tied to their communities, and their communities are represented by the Quechua language. Much of Hornberger’s book (ibid) is based on the premise that the language, community, and speaker form a circle of identity (p. 75). Just as their identity is permanent to them, the Quechua language is seen as permanent to its speakers. However, as Hornberger concludes, the future of the language is ambiguous at best, and must be actively maintained through extra-linguistic sources like media and societal roles in order to survive (p. 225). Otherwise, the Quechua identify, along with the language (or vise versa) will be subsumed in the dominant colonial identity. Education can potentially prevent this, but as seen below, it depends on the method employed.
In Peru, the general model of education used for Quechua speaking children was one of Spanish submersion. If successful, this type of model leads to what Martin-Jones (2007) discussed as subtractive bilingualism, “A shift on the part of the learner to his or her second language and subsequent loss of his or her first language” (p. 167). While the student is gaining access to the tools of power, she is using a traditional and transitional channel to achieve her goal, and her fist language and identity are abandoned. The PEEB, a bilingual approach, was an attempt on the policy level to both address this devaluing of Quechua and to improve educational opportunities for the rural poor (Horberger, 1988). However, the greater use of Quechua in the classroom could be a factor in the overall phase-out of the language, as it was a means to an end. Spanish fluency was still the overall goal, and access to the roles of the dominant society were still emphasized.
The conclusion of Bilingual Education and Language Maintenance (ibid) instructs that a language-as-resource policy and a two-channel approach will lead to a beginning of new power discourses. As an ESOL instructor, to use methods that do not, “reproduce existing relations of dominance” in the bilingual classroom, I must ensure that the subordinate language is valued by the curriculum (Martin-Jones, p. 174).
Martin-Jones, M. (2007). Bilingualism, education, and the regulation of access to language resources. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach (pp. 161-182). New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Hornberger, N. H. (1988). Bilingual education and language maintenance. Providence: Foris Publications
The entry below is in response to two pieces on Asian immigrant identity in the United states:
Hones, D. F., & Shou Cha, C. (1999). Educating new Americans: Immigrant lives and learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
and
Lee, Stacey J. (1994). Behind the model-minority stereotype: Voices of high and low-achieving Asian American students. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 25(4), 413-429.
On the shoulders of immigrant children are placed the hopes of generations, and their response to this burden is by no means uniform in nature or shared cross culturally. Asian immigrant children are forced to straddle both the world of the communal and the individual, an uneven ground on which to carry any load. Their parents, like Shou Cha (Hones & Cha, 1999) and those of the students at Academic High (Lee, 1994), expect them to uphold the traditional, family-based values of their culture, while at the same time doing nearly whatever it takes to be successful in school, and eventually their chosen career. Such expectations may not always lead to student success in America, though it has the potential to foster a keen awareness of the hybridity of identity.
Asian immigrant children are cognizant of the expectations they carry, and they respond to this pressure in a variety of ways, as Lee has found in her research in Philadelphia, and we see more deeply amongst Shou Cha’s seven children. Asian immigrants, in the words of Jerry Lee, “want their children to do better,” (Hones & Cha, 1999) which has the flavor of a very American value, one that Toqueville described when he observed, “They have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal” (qtd p. 172). Immigrant parents, who feel themselves ignorant in a land where their indigenous intelligence is of seemingly little use, hope their children will lead them forward and pass back the knowledge they gain while in the field. They are forced to consider their children experts in a role reversal many native families are never required to enact on such a large scare. It has the potential to lead to a strong cross-generational trust (demonstrated by Jerry Lee’s sermon and the community parents’ openness to it’s tenets) and a conduit for generativity (pg. 135). Alternatively, it can lead to a world-view shift that has led some children to eschew family and responsibility for peers, such as the “new wavers” of Academic High (Lee, 1994).
Just as the immigrant children in Philadelphia broke from the “model-minority” stereotype in a variety of ways, even within the Hmong community and one family, the reaction to pressure is heterogeneous. Paj Huab responds to her parents in an obedient fashion, and even makes sacrifices for her brother’s happiness (using her movie choice awarded by Shou Cha to pick out the one her older brother wants to see) (pg. 118). Sammy, on the other hand, seems to his father to have an air of indifference, and absents himself from family activities more as he ages. Shou Cha recognizes that if endowed with greater trust and given a chance to lead as his own father did with him, Sammy may more readily shoulder the weight he is expected to carry and become the ideal Hmong-American that Shou Cha has envisioned for all of his children.
I wanted to post a link to a synopsis of a speech given by Jim Cummins at CATESOL a few years ago. The content was brought to my attention on the first day of class with Dr. Nancy Hornberger, a prominent researcher in the field of bilingual education.
Ever since my term of service with City Year, I have had a keen interest in the effects of No Child Left Behind. During a portion of the corps training, I, along with five other service leaders, had to prepare curriculum on the topic for a full eight hours for 200+ corps and staff members. It was a daunting task, but the intense research it provoked could not have prepared me better for entering the classroom at my service site, a bilingual elementary school in Kensington that had repeatedly failed to meet AYP.
What struck me most while reading the content of Cummins’s speech was his critique of both NCLB and Reading First. The entire year I served in Kensington I worked in the Reading First program as a literacy intervention instructor, and the entire time I thought I was doing good, working with third grade ELL students on blends and sight words. In the midst of the program and my service, I didn’t question the passages we were given to read: ridiculous, wooden compositions that made little sense to me, and absolutely no sense to the students. But the macro level was not important in the program. It was the phoneme, the blend, and the digraph that held meaning for us. Our scope was so narrow, I never once considered identity as a resource, nor did I ask students to translate words in and out of their L1. I do not feel a sense of failure regarding that year, but I’m amazed at how easy it can be as a teacher to detach yourself from your intuition and follow a script that you’re told works. If the entire purpose of reading is for comprehension, then why was I giving my students passages that made no sense, just for the sake of the /st/ blend?
Please give the excerpt a read and let me know what you think.
"In a multilingual world it is obviously more efficient and rational to be multilingual than not, and that truism increasingly applies to the whales, as well as the minnows." Joshua A. Fishman
