NOTHING FANCY THIS WEEK.Use this space to post this week's reading response. No worries if you arrive to class and haven't posted. I didn't make this space available until today.
24 Comments
Ashley Merola
3/29/2022 12:21:02 pm
The readings for this week stress the significance of linguistic diversity as a term that writing teachers must understand in order to improve their instruction and foster student success. While Klein recognizes the reality in which individuals who use nondominant systems must adjust their language to accommodate Mainstream U.S. English (MUSE), Charity-Hudley and Mallinson take an actively anti-assimilationist stance on the topic. They demonstrate how teachers can adopt a more additive attitude toward linguistic diversity in their classrooms, offering creative opportunities to celebrate difference instead of trying to change it. In agreement with their pluralist perspective, I argue that an authentic approach to multicultural pedagogy must aim to modify the societal structures that define language differences as drawbacks - not the students who pose a threat to those in positions of linguistic privilege.
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LT
3/29/2022 04:43:40 pm
You and (Melissa and Shawna--the three I've read so far), point to something that also connects to Cultural Studies: colonialism. There is a real difference in the positionality of the authors of our two texts. Kein really does speak for a colonial position, as Shawna will point out, she spends half the chapter talking about SWE and then proceeds to talk about other dialects. Just that very organization is colonizing. It's positioning the dominant culture first and then "others" varieties of language that don't fit within the dominant culture. I don't think she is maligning these varieties, I'm saying her organization does the work for her. It's a kind of unconscious bias. It reminds me of some of what we talked about last week--who do students imagine when they imagine their teacher as their audience? It's someone who Klein's work embodies.
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Sarah Bond
3/29/2022 04:47:06 pm
Yes, Ashley! This takes me back to when I taught that novel (love it!) and heard similar reactions. Interestingly, I used those conversations specifically to prepare us for our venture into Shakespeare, then poetry -- where again, what we wonder about language is part of what builds our understanding of the perspective overall.
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Melissa Batty
3/29/2022 02:38:33 pm
Charity-Hudley and Malinson’s “We Do Language,” resonates with me as someone learning about language, with the hope of one day teaching language. If as the article argues, there is diversity within one language, then how can students ever achieve a level playing field when it comes to academic writing –– especially those outside the colonial cultural context. The text asserts that students gain a cultural competence which serves to teach them how to accomplish tasks within the English language while expressing, interpreting, and understanding the intentions that English linguistically puts forth in a functional capacity. This may be especially challenging for students whose social spheres fall outside the “normative” White ideal (which is the basis of our current educational system). As a class, we continue to learn that America’s educational system holds bias, whether implicit or explicit, against populations who historically and presently suffer from marginalization, mainly students of color and those from lower socio-economic classes. Therefore, the suggestions for an equitable educational pedagogy in “We Do Language,” seems moot from the beginning. How do educators employ models of writing in classrooms that intrinsically ignore multicultural equity?
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Brian Seibert
3/29/2022 03:01:31 pm
This week’s readings focused on the different types of English spoken and written. It also was geared towards the changing of the English language. In college and in the K-12 schools, teachers and students mostly aim to speak and write according to Standard Edited American English (SEAE). That has been the standard for proper or correct English in education. However, it is unclear as to exactly what SEAE entails. According to Charity Hudley & Mallinson in “We Do Language,” “There is no single agreed upon and canonized standard variety of English”(20). Therefore, “proper” English is somewhat subjective, mainly due to the many changes to the language over the years.
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LT
3/29/2022 04:37:52 pm
Two things: the article Megan just put in the chat connects to this idea of white people monitoring, or having an opinion about, black and brown people's behavior. Also, there is a real connection here to what we talked about earlier: language is a product of culture. As C-H & M discuss, teachers are on the front line of language ideology. So to create a classroom that makes transparent this fact, that language is a product of culture, is a deep dive into cultural studies--for us and for our students.
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Shauna Briggs
3/29/2022 04:25:06 pm
Sharon Klein discusses the ever present assumption that students should speak and write using only Standard English and attempts to cover the varying complexities of the argument in her writing (362). She then goes on to discuss linguistic diversity and variability in pidgins, creoles, dialects, and even in AAVE (the newer and more accepted term). Klein then goes in depth with the grammar and syntax associated with AAVE and what she refers to as MUSE “Mainstream U.S. English.”
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Alyssa Campbell
3/29/2022 04:35:48 pm
In Clark's chapter on language diversity, I found myself going back to the ideas discussed on students at the college level and their admissions into programs as well as how they think about the language systems they must adhere to while in the constraints of that institution. Clark writes that "Admission and recognition require some level of control over the means of exchange-- language" (p.382). I though this was interesting because I remembered very similar wording from my own experiences in school especially with state testing. The rubrics we were graded on for our writing, for instance, was on our ability to control our writing or whether it took on a life of its own and ran away from us. Likely not without good reason, that is a super colonizing mindset; in order to be successful, you have to control something.
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Matthew Cutter
3/29/2022 04:38:57 pm
As somebody who has to look at rubrics, the control of writing and grammar thing triggers me. It's hard to define what control of writing and grammar is. Particularly when we're dealing with students of different cultural backgrounds. I feel like it's hard to standardize that as much as teachers try.
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Alyssa Campbell
3/29/2022 04:55:04 pm
It's one of those things that no matter how much we like to pretend or believe that it is completely and inarguably objective, is so subjective. What I think is good and proper may not be what someone else does, and they could dock points off for something I would leave as it is. Crazy too that this wording that ignores subjectivity is so rampant in our testing world, too. That affects the abilities of writers that do not write the very same way that the MCAS (or insert other state testing here) want them to.
LT
3/29/2022 04:52:53 pm
Nice Connection to Inoue.
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Matthew Cutter
3/29/2022 04:36:05 pm
What I appreciated most about both of these articles is the approach to language that acknowledges that every language is different and that there is really no "proper" way to speak it. Take English, for example. There are different dialects and forms of English that it makes the idea of a "proper" English almost laughable.
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Maura Geoghegan
3/29/2022 04:44:24 pm
Matt, I also appreciated how both articles discuss the fact that it's so unrealistic to attempt to identify a "proper" way to speak a language when not only are there so many varieties within a language, but languages are constantly changing as well. I agree that because of this it's so crucial to bring in a variety of voices and texts within our classrooms to try to help students see this as well and acknowledge their own language varieties. This would also help to give students some skills for navigating diverse language situations in the real-world as Hudley and Mallinson discuss on page 36.
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Megan G
3/29/2022 04:36:13 pm
Hi everyone! Similar to Sarah I only have some bullet points/notes for today, I will include them below.
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LT
3/29/2022 04:46:07 pm
When I say that writing is hard instead of saying that students are bad writers, C-H & M's comment that language difference is not deficit is at the forefront of my thinking. I think that this very much shifts how I teach and mostly assess student writing.
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Maura Geoghegan
3/29/2022 04:36:18 pm
The arguments presented in the readings this week stress the importance of acknowledging language diversity and make arguments as to how this will benefit teachers of writing especially. These articles are in line with Inoue’s thinking about valuing students’ local diversities and the varieties of languages they speak. I also noticed a connection to Inoue when Hudley and Mallinson when they broke down the definitions of standard English vs. standardized English. Hudley and Mallinson avoid the term “standard English, because it implies homogeneity and oversimplifies linguistic realities” (20) which is in line with Inoue’s discussion of the white racial habitus. I think Inoue would appreciate their discussion as to how power and privilege dictate what’s valued since “political, social, and cultural privilege has often been determined which language varieties of English were deemed to be more prestigious, socially acceptable, or “standard” than others” (Hudley and Mallinson 20).
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Melissa
3/29/2022 04:43:18 pm
Hi Maura,
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LT
3/29/2022 04:51:59 pm
I want to bring us back to the idea about technology and connected it to two points: what C-H & M say about language is always changing is best demonstrated in how we write in electronic spaces like text. My students make fun of me for using periods in texts. But, also, I hate exclamation points, but I use them in texts a lot so that people get my tone--that I'm not mad or bored or whatever. That I'm happy and excited. The use of emojis too, that's a language. And so, to connect that to our work in cultural studies, we need to see language shifts due to technology as another product of culture. How do we make that useful in the classroom? That's something I think about. How do make it possible for students to learn to write school English while not devaluing the texts they produce in non-school settings?
Brian Seibert
3/29/2022 04:49:12 pm
Hi Maura,
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Ashley Merola
3/29/2022 04:53:27 pm
Maura, I completely agree with your statement that the linguistic expectations for education at all levels has (for the most part) stayed the same. It's a trend I can see from both an individual and sociological perspective - while there are teachers who try to incorporate activities that raise awareness and appreciation for linguistic diversity, they often face systemic barriers to such change (e.g. standardized tests, district policies, etc.) that prevent them from decentralizing SEAE as the dominant discourse and, in turn, decolonizing the composition classroom.
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Sarah Bond
3/29/2022 04:40:30 pm
Throughout the articles, there is noticeably more comfort with linguistic diversity when spoken than when written. Perhaps this is because "no student's language corresponds completely to the language of writing" (Klein 359), so even the "greatest" of compositionists allow for a deviation from the academic norm.
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Melissa
3/29/2022 04:48:29 pm
Hi Sarah,
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Kayleigh Holt
3/29/2022 04:52:28 pm
The term “Standard English” is one that the articles we read this week seek to examine and challenge. When we hear about standard English it is often referring to the type of language that is considered to be “proper” or “formal”, but it at its core “implies homogeneity and oversimplifies linguistic realities” (p. 20) as Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson explain in their article We Do Language. Every year, when students enter the classroom, they bring with them a vast array of experiences and skills, to believe that all students will have the same level of familiarity and experience with the “Standard English” is shortsighted. Instead we as teachers need to expect and embrace that our students will be coming to us with a variety of linguistic differences. As Matsuda says, “teachers need to reimagine the composition classroom as a multilingual space… where the presence of language differences is the default” (p. 649).
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Olivia L
3/31/2022 09:25:06 am
In "Language & Diversity", Sharon Klein says that the relationship and awareness of how language, thought, and writing interact, help teachers to understand "linguistic diversity" and work with students more effectively. The interesting thing is that we relate writing and speaking. The way we speak with our body movements and facial expressions is part of this relation. Written language has a different way of expression. When Klein discusses the understanding of "grammar", it interests me that most never think of it as a linguistic mental system. I never would have.
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