Creating Inclusiveness: A Cultural and Linguistic Stance

Linda Christensen's article touched on many important subjects, including the use of “The Linguistic Tea Party.” I really enjoy the idea of having students critically engaged in an exciting activity that will get them interested in a specific topic, while also teaching them an important lesson. In the case of the Tea Party, the students get to feel exactly what their personal character felt; whether it be shame, humiliation, loss of language, or what have you, the students themselves get to express what happened to their character. I think that allowing students to read work from all different languages is extremely important. There is no better way to oppress a certain culture or language than to leave it out entirely. Maybe a good way to bring in languages and writings into the classroom is to not only encourage students to write in their mother tongue or home language, but have them express what that language and culture is so that the teacher can pick literature that pertains to their students.

Some challenges with bringing inclusivity into the classroom is the lack of resources teachers may have, or lack of literature from certain languages or cultures that teachers can't get their hands on. It might be difficult to bring literature in from cultures that don't have as many writings or don't pertain to the course material in any way. A way to get around this is like I said before, letting the students write in their language and share their culture, and maybe even share their literature with the class so that their identity is known. Christensen's article deepens my fear for leaving students out. One of my biggest wants as a teacher is to bring inclusivity and bridge the gap between students that some might feel is there. Whether the gap is between wealth, class, gender, race, etc., I want to help bridge it as much as I can because I know how it is to feel like an outsider due to reasons I couldn't control; I don't want any of my students feeling that way [complex sentence: dependent clause first, followed by a comma and the independent clause for emphasis]. The article really makes me think deeply about the culture in every single person and how there is so much more going on in life-in the world-that we don't even know about and can't even begin to understand. It's not until we literally take a step inside these people's shoes that we can only begin to dip into the feelings and anguish they felt as they had their identity ripped from them. I can only imagine some students feeling this way as well when they read American author after American author, never seeing someone from their native home.

I think this article helped me imagine what I want to do with my project. The article got me really interested in the idea of privilege and oppression; I just can't believe class power gives people the right to steal someone's identity and force a new identity upon them. I think this gives me the urge for my project to explore the idea of class and privilege as it relates to language, specifically code-switching. The idea that people have to switch their natural languages to fit the social norm and hold jobs is just amazing to me. I can see both sides of language and power-some languages do sound more educated, smart, and therefore business-like-but that may just be because I was born and raised into this society that values a certain language over another.

To Implement or Not to Implement: DOL in the Classroom

I think an important place to start when thinking about grammar use is the quote by Crovitz that reads: “language is learned through a process of experimentation, error-making, and self-correction” (32). It's important to remember that students wouldn't make an error on purpose, but rather, there is something else going on. The importance of explaining the correction and why the students error didn't work was shown throughout this article, especially with the underlying learning opportunities teachers face with these errors. I think parts of the article went too far in depth on these errors, sort of making something out of nothing, but other errors definitely needed to be seen, depicted, corrected, and explained [compound sentence joined with a comma+FANBOYS/Coordinating Conjunction]. An important notion explained in this article was the fear of failure after receiving too many corrections; it's extremely easy for a student to feel unmotivated after being shut down. Turning corrections into a lesson and learning opportunity is a great way to bring students together to help each other and for the teacher to help the student, rather than having the authoritative voice, with a sudden correction.

The idea of DOL was foreign to me before reading this article. DOLs seem like a good intro to grammar teaching and learning at face value but lack many aspects that are needed to learn the depth and complexity of the English language. Studying a sentence alone is a great way to pick out pronouns, punctuations, capitalization, helping words, etc., but how often do we really write just one sentence down? Reading and correcting sentences, passages, student's work might be more applicable in the teaching of grammar because then students can see writing as a whole and understand why certain things do and do not work. Instead, the best alternative would be the “discuss contextual differences between similar statements with different registers” that Crovitz talks about on page 37 [conjunctive adverb +, used to transition between two sentences]. In this exercise students would compare and contrast languages used in different discourses to learn grammar for different situations. This is great because students are usually thought what is right, what is wrong, what needs to be changed, but what they don't understand is that it's only wrong in the setting they're in-school.

Teaching contextual differences could happen in a number of different ways. For instance, if I were teaching students to write their own short story about an experience in their life relating to a book we were reading-lets say Frankenstein for the purpose of this Blog Post-I could have them incorporate home language and standard English in their writing. Both of these would be appropriate and could be shown in a number of different ways: they could write in standard english and have dialogue in their home language, they could write half in standard english and half in home language, etc. The goal of this exercise would be to show the students what is correct in academic writing and what is correct in other situations and that they can co-exist in certain circumstances. The students may choose to write about a time when they had too much knowledge about something (a theme in Frankenstein) and how it was fine and maybe even fun at first, but how it became out of hand and some point. In my editing portion of this lesson/exercise, I would correct the essays and point out parts where they correctly used standard english or home language and explain why it was correct. Students could also share with the class and have their classmates explain the different elements of the writing as well. I like the idea of a collaborative editing because I think it brings more opportunity of growth and development for all of the students instead of just one student getting one set of feedback. I'd hope this experiment would be a good lead in for more experimenting with different types of writing and editing/feedback.

I incorporated the patterns-of-the-week after I wrote my blog post because I had a lot to say on this topic and didn't want to stop to construct these sentences. I found that it's easy to write a compound sentence, so I didn't need to change any of my writing to use that pattern. I think my difficulty may be more in identifying the pattern rather than writing it. The other sentence pattern I used was the use of a conjunctive adverb. I thought both patterns I used were pretty self-explanatory and are kind of used in every day writing.

Sentence Diagramming: Pros and Cons

Source: Alway

http://1aiway.com

Date accessed: 2/7/15

Sentence diagramming can be a great visual for students and the teacher to work with while trying to understand the aspect of sentences. It has great learning strategies integrated into it, but like many other strategies, it has its shortcomings. The chapter in Grammar Alive! That talks about diagramming sentences explains how the process should be taught and used from then on, is great for visual learners, is an opening for good debate and discussions, and that it can be used as an analogy of a spine and back bones to better connect with the students.

I, myself, think sentence diagramming is a great way for students to visually see what is going on in sentences [reflexive pronoun to show emphasis on how much I love sentence diagramming!...]. It's not a foreign process to them because they write sentences practically every day. The process of sentence diagramming might be tedious and, of course, confusing at some points, but in some ways I see it necessary in figuring out what each word does to each sentence. The chapter talks about how this process of sentence diagramming might be tailored to visual learners, which I see as being truthful, but I also think it's important to students who process things in their head to still see the visual aspect. Sometimes students think they know what each word does, but there are some aspects of sentence writing that just need to be visual.

If a student for some reason doesn't learn well with the sentence diagram, I think it would be effective to have them write out their own sentences and explain what each word does for the sentence without the diagram. Although it seems this is the same thing, it gives the student freedom to pick what word they want to depict first, and it will maybe somehow show them that the sentence diagram might be a little bit easier and organized.

In my experience as a student, we actually used sentence diagramming as well. We would do the exact process that Grammar Alive! talks about and then have the chance to discuss our findings with the rest of the class. I always thought this was a great way to learn the sentences, especially since we had the chance to debate and discuss our findings with the other students and the teacher. I didn't think about it when I was a student, but it's important to be able to differentiate the assignments and give work for all different kinds of learners. I don't think the sentence diagramming hits every single type of learner (definitely not the hard-to-keep-on-task student), but I think it is vital to the learning of how sentences work [an aside set off by parentheses; use of parentheses to add in a side note, added humor in a way, because the parentheses adds a sort of "whisper" to writing]. This way of teaching definitely hits verbal and visual and interpersonal [list with all ands and no commas to emphasize how many types of learners this type of activity hits]. If other learners have trouble with this teaching, there could be other ways to integrate their learning styles in (i.e. giving students parts of sentences on paper and having them form sentences with their bodies [like we did in class]).

I chose to use all three of the sentence patterns of the week because I need more experimentation with my grammar; feel free to correct me or give feedback on any of them! I think my use of the parentheses to set aside part of the sentence was used in a good way, showing the type of student that may be opposed to using this sort of sentence learning. I actually really don't like using "and" too many times in a sentence, especially with lists, but in some cases I think its a great and effective way to show emphasis. In the sentence I used the excessive "ands" in, it works, but I think it is better with the commas. The use of the reflexive pronoun is a bit out of place in the way I used it. Saying I, myself, usually emphasizes that you're really pro-something, or it adds emphasis where it wasn't really needed in this sentence.