I found it interesting to consider what it means to be academically literate and culturally literate, and how damaging it can be to a student if a teacher refuses to recognize a community dialect as ever being correct. Students associate their community dialect with friends, family, and their own personal identities as well. If a teacher is constantly correcting how a student speaks as well as whether what he/she is saying is correct the student may develop an anxiety with the way he/she speaks as well as dislike the teacher for always correcting typical conversation.
It seems that there is a fine line between how important a community dialect and academic English both are and which is more appropriate in certain situations. Although it is true that academic English is needed for economic success in the future, knowing one’s identity in a community and among peers is also important. Students will sometimes choose to speak in a dialect rather than Standard English because they would rather identify with peers than a teacher constantly correcting their speech.
I never considered the fact that teachers can confuse the teaching of reading to be the teaching of a new dialect. If students read a sentence and pronounce certain words with their community’s dialect, that does not actually take away from the fact that they are reading and comprehending. These students do not have a reading problem; they are using a dialect other than Standard English. However, to be able to do this a student must be able to read in Standard English before switching the pronunciation, which is actually pretty impressive.
Kelly, I really like your argument here. I agree teachers should not force their own Standard English dialect onto their students because it will only lead to the student hating the teacher. Of all of my campers this summer, I had one girl who would literally beat herself up if she went away from speaking Standard English and switched to dialect. Apparently her dad would force her to practice “Speaking white” after school so that she could grow up and be a respectable lawyer one day. This girl was 11 and it was hard to watch her struggle through trying to put a sentence together. Especially when the camp counselors, myself included, would switch to the camper dialect.
Something like this came up in our class discussion on Tuesday. I mentioned that “Standard English” is only putatively standard; I backspaced a long discussion of why this version is standard (dictionaries, history, power), which doesn’t even matter. I’ll just say that there’s really no reason at the lexicographical level for a preference of “color” to “colour”. (Why not “culur”? Why not “quler”? Why not call it “licorice” or “xylerz”?) There doesn’t even have to be a standard. (Oh, come on, John; we need to have some standard.) Nuh-uh! What if we were all taught to decode individual phonetic spellings very well and never taught to memorize/spell “Standard English” words? We’d read and write differently, surely, whether for better or for worse. I don’t want to get too deeply into this either,
because I still need to casually drop that I’m training for a half marathon.I’m actually an awful runner, which is why running is going to be an apt analogy. I mentioned in class that we our society arbitrarily selects for people who can—we’ll just broadly say—act “academically” or “professionally” or however you might describe acceptable intellectual or powerful behavior (to save yet another long and nuanced discussion). About fifteen minutes into my run this morning: I’m pleading with myself to stop early, some Pitt sports team is running past me on both sides, and a certain Pitt professor is plodding along just in front of me with a Starbucks coffee, speeding up briefly to cross the street against the blinking orange hand; as I pass him by on the opposite side of the street, I notice that he is out of breath from his crosswalk pace (so am I, but I’m “running”). One of the athletes smacks his teammate’s butt as he passes. I do not smack the professor as I pass him. What if the athletes were the professors? I mean to say: what if the athletes were still the athletes but they were athlete-ing in a professional capacity. What if the professors were academic-ing in an on-the-side capacity? The New York Times prints something every day about out-of-shape, unhealthy Americans, and they run a state-of-the-intelligencia piece at least as often. We treat one as “higher” culture, I guess, and one is “lower”, but as any tenth grader on tumblr can tell you, we’re getting both fatter and stupider, on the average. Athletics and academics could (have) easily be(en) swapped. Couched in a broader sociocultural flip, running could (have) be(come) a potentially full-time-with-tenure gig, and economics could (have) be(come) the hour-after-work gig. This isn’t even a radically new inequality-mitigating ontological structure—it’s the exact same one, re-oriented. Things would be different than they are now, for sure, although athlete-academics would remain in place to watch as everything pivots around them. Worst case scenario: we’d all still be fat and stupid.
This kind of thinking is like a rip current at the confluence of arguments on all sides of center—with nothing to show at the end because you’ve torn up all of the rescue options, and now you’ve drowned.
I’ve noticed the spelling and grammar errors in this comment; I didn’t know that you can’t edit comments once you’ve posted them. Sorry.
This post really made me think like a teacher. At my daycare I work with a boy who is learning to read and he is obsessed with reading like a “big kid…like you Miss Elyse” Well thanks little man it is appreciated that you see me as just a big kid. But anyways I debated for a long time with coworkers how I should go about working with him on his reading because I didn’t want him to end up hating me for being strict on his pronunciation but I also didn’t want him to sound stupid. My plan was telling him that every time he was unsure of a word to ask me and I would work through it with him. So he ended up asking me for 8/10 words. I felt this was the best method for his learning style at least because I knew he would be asking me questions. For someone without as much drive to “read like a big kid” this approach might not be the best. Anyways your post inspired me to mention this moment I had as a teacher struggling with this subject.