"It is a reflection of an understandable bias in certain circles that the black vernacular is permitted, glorified in certain composition circles, but WE is not tolerated in academic writing," writes Canagarajah (603). This is but one extremely interesting, thought-provoking quotation from this week's readings. There are numerous times when reading a piece of literature written in the African American dialect in the classroom is perfectly acceptable. Yet, until this semester, I thad rarely even heard of about World Englishes and the different dialects that come along with them--and I can't remember one literary work written in such a dialect. I find that extremely sad and wonder now what glorious works written in those other dialects of English I have been missing and have not been allowed a center place in any classroom that I have been in.
Still, I don't think that we can dismiss the AAVE has having an easy time of it, either. I believe that students need to be exposed to numerous different kinds of works and authors that speak to them, that they can see themselves in. However, I do wonder about allowing those different dialects to transfer onto the written page--specifically in the high school formal writing context. I can see creating writing assingments which allow the students to utilize their own vernaculars--low risk assignments I believe they are called. Yet, allowing those students to bring in those same differences into a formal writing paper in an English class would simply be doing them an injustice unless the implementation of those dialects somehow was neccessary for their topic. That is not to so that I am all for keeping the standard dialect of English in the classrooms--far from it. However, the students in the secondary context are going to be continously judged on their ability to write standard English when they leave my classroom. My short-term goal would be to make sure that they can do that--and not be judged by some as having a lack of ability for bringing in a piece of their identity. I think that this implementation in a high school classroom can take place as long as the students can also successfully write in that standard english dialect-because I know that the students will be judged if they cannot, and I would never want that of a student.
I am also extremely intrigued by the concept of code meshing, of the teacher Tom in the "Multilingual academic literacies" article who encouraged the students to speak in Spanish in order to negotiate the meaning in English. The fact that he is privileging the content knowledge over English while still allowing the students ample opportunity to learn the language is fantastic. Unfortunately, a classroom like that is somewhat unrealistic for most second language learners in the United States--especially those at the secondary level in content-area classes. We want to avoid the "English-Only" movement in the classrooms, yet that movement may sometimes be inevitable if the teacher cannot understand the first language of the child. I would be up for allowing my students to use their first language in some assignments, but I would always worry what they were writing if I couldn't actually understand any of that. And truly, knowing high school boys, they may just write something extremely inappropriate knowing that I couldn't read it. So-- I ultimately see a problem here. We want students to be multilingual in the classrooms and utilize both L1 and L2, yet we also have most teachers who then could not understand or create scaffolding for them when working in this multilingual arena. What to do?
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