Language,+Culture,+Teaching+11-07-08

11-07-08 =Language, Culture, Teaching =  I was at [|Yale-New Haven Hospital] on Wednesday. Just outside the main entrance are two parks on the corners of a T-intersection, and up and down both sides of the intersecting street are food carts featuring all kinds of food—from Chinese, Italian, and burgers and dogs carts, to Japanese, Thai, Moroccan, and Ethiopian. The benches in the park were thronged with doctors, nurses, janitors, receptionists, and construction workers. And people were from everywhere—doctors from India, African-American receptionists, Central American construction workers. The guy working the Moroccan cart was Peruvian, and the couple working one of the burgers and dogs carts was Chinese. While my wife and I ate our hibachi chicken, three construction workers seated behind us were talking in Spanish about wages and taxes. One of them was not a native Spanish speaker. My wife, who teaches Spanish, was facing the guys, so I asked her what the non-native speaker looked like. “Big burly Irish guy,” she said. “His badge says he’s the contractor.”

I love experiences like this, being awash in culture and language. I remember a trip Amy and I took to New York for her aunt’s birthday. We were eating in this Italian restaurant in Manhattan. It got warm inside so I stepped out. On the sidewalk I became enticed by the smell of incense from a Jamaican vendor’s table, and as I walked in his direction I began to hear a man singing a call to prayer from the steps of a mosque. I stood on the corner listening and smelling as I watched men rush into the mosque, literally holding their hats and scarves to their heads as they ran through the doors.

On election day I was in [|Shelton], working with the English Department. A new superintendent is pushing a back-to-basics agenda for the English teachers, which means an emphasis on traditional grammar instruction. I talked about structuralist grammar and transformational grammar. We discussed Patrick Hartwell’s article “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” and played a game I devised that is based on Hartwell’s recommendations about the teaching of grammar. They were a great bunch of teachers and we had a fun afternoon arguing good-naturedly about how to punctuate sentences and how to best teach our students to write well and know grammar.

Part of the discussion dealt with cultural differences and students who are learning English as a second language. We talked about how first languages and even significant cultural differences among English language speakers present challenges to us as teachers of English. I shared a couple of funny and interesting stories about my experiences working with Chicano and Southeast Asian students at [|Humboldt State University]. I told them about the girl who came to the writing lab asking for help determining when to use vegetable and fruit. She had written a paper about her grandmother’s stroke, and had written that she had become a fruit. Her teacher wrote in the margin, “No, your grandmother is a vegetable.” The woman wanted to know what the rule was in English for the difference between people-as-fruits and people-as-vegetables. I don’t recall my explanation.

I was interviewing many of these students for my thesis on teaching writing to basic writers and at-risk students. Among the students I interviewed, perhaps the most helpful was a Japanese student who had been very successful at learning English despite being a recent immigrant. He said that he succeeded because he had learned to have two identities, a Japanese one and an English-language one. Each one thought differently, and if he wanted to read and write successfully in English, he had to think the way English-language speakers think. It wasn’t enough to just learn the words and mechanics of the language.

I have often thought about this interview. I think about [|W.E.B. Du Bois]’ //[|The Souls of Black Folk]// in which he says that to be black in America is to have “double-consciousness,” a bifurcated identity of “two souls, two thoughts.” I thought, too, of my wife, who is multilingual. Some say that multilingual people experience different emotional states in different languages, and that their personalities shift as they shift from language to language, culture to culture. Having traveled throughout Europe and Latin America with my wife, I can attest to the fact that she is a different person when she is immersed in Spanish or Italian cultures. Not radically different, but different.

So how do we get our students from different cultures, whether they be from different language groups or just from a lower class with a different set of values, to learn to be effectively bilingual and bicultural? I thought about the [|NWP] model, that teachers of writing need to be writers to be able to share their own experiences with the processes of writing. In order to effectively teach students our language, do we need to be speakers of a second language? Do we need to have some sense of double-consciousness? If we can only teach writing effectively if we have grappled with the same difficulties our students encounter, is the same not true for language acquisition? If this is so, how sad and even frightening that language programs are so in jeopardy. At my wife’s school, second languages are not studied till middle school, and then only part time. The current superintendent has talked of terminating French and Latin after the retirement of two veteran teachers.

How ironic at a time when we have elected a biracial president with parents from Kenya and Kansas, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated in California, Massachusetts, New York, and Chicago, that biculturalism should be so uncommon, and that foreign language instruction should be facing elimination. In the latest draft of the proposed high school graduation requirements, the [|Connecticut State Department of Education] has abandoned foreign languages. This will increase marginalization of English language learners and insularity of native speakers.

My afternoon in [|New Haven] would have been a lot less beautiful if we were all eating baloney sandwiches and speaking Standard American English.

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