Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

Reimagining the Teaching of English

Published in The High School Journal (May 1951) by Dorothy McCuskey, a review of Lou LaBrant‘s most comprehensive work on teaching English, We Teach English, concluded: “In short, this is no ‘how to teach’ book. Rather, it is a book which will cause the reader to re-examine the bases of his [sic] teaching methods and the content of his [sic] courses.”

LaBrant was a demanding teacher and scholar with a career as a teacher of English from 1906 until 1971. And one of the defining features of that career was her persistent challenges to how teachers taught the field labeled, then, as “English.”

The field traditionally called “English” has evolved over the years, often at the K-12 level being envisioned as English/Language Arts (ELA) or simply Language Arts.

Nelson Flores, at The Educational Linguist, recently confronted “Language Arts” as a descriptor or teaching English:

Schools often teaches courses called Language Arts. Yet, little actual art happens in most of these classrooms. Instead, language is often treated as a static set of prescriptivist rules that children are expected to master and mimic back to their teacher. This is not an exploration of the art of language. This is linguistic oppression.

HOW ABOUT WE ACTUALLY BRING THE ART OF LANGUAGE INTO LANGUAGE ARTS?

Concurrent with this post from Flores, I argued that students must unlearn to CONTINUE READING: Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

Why Non-Native English Speakers Actually Speak The Best English : Goats and Soda : NPR

Why Non-Native English Speakers Actually Speak The Best English : Goats and Soda : NPR

Tower Of Babble: Non-Native Speakers Navigate The World Of 'Good' And 'Bad' English

Picture this: A group of non-native English speakers are in a room. There's someone from Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Nigeria and France. They're having a great time speaking to each other in English, and communication is smooth.

And then ... an American walks in the room. The American speaks quickly, using esoteric jargon ("let's take a holistic approach") and sports idioms ("you hit it out of the park!"). And the conversation trickles to a halt.

Decades of research shows that when a native English speaker enters a conversation among non-native speakers, understanding goes down. Global communication specialist Heather Hansen tells us that's because the native speaker doesn't know how to do what non-native speakers do naturally: Speak in ways that are accessible to everyone, using simple words and phrases.

And yet, as Hansen points out, this more accessible way of speaking is often called "bad English." There are whole industries devoted to "correcting" English that doesn't sound like it came from a native British or American speaker. Try Googling "how to get CONTINUE READING: Why Non-Native English Speakers Actually Speak The Best English : Goats and Soda : NPR

Correcting Course on Correctness in English/ELA – radical eyes for equity

Correcting Course on Correctness in English/ELA – radical eyes for equity

Correcting Course on Correctness in English/ELA

My granddaughter is six, in the first grade, and currently in the throes of learning to read—as commanded by formal schooling. Recently, she has shown some of those typical bursts of improvement I have witnessed in learning by young children; those moments give meaning to the word “marvelous.”

In an effort to inject some joy into my granddaughter’s reading journey, I have given her some comic books (a medium that was central to my own journey to being a voracious reader and writer). I was concerned that the text and format of a comic book would be beyond her, but she loves to make her own books, which are heavily picture-oriented to tell stories, so I thought even if she couldn’t read comic books, they would be very appealing to her own hobby.

But what surprised me was when she picked up a graphic novel of Marvel’s Spider-Gwen, she immediately began reading quite well—until she hit very commonly used wording and words that aren’t served well by structured phonics; she stubbled as “gonna” and “wanna,” but was really thrown by “MJ” as the way characters refer to Mary Jane Watson.

Having been taught formally how to read in an environment grounded in correctness, my granddaughter stumbles over the far more prevalent language usage in the real world.

This tension is represented well by the fate of the pronoun “they” (and its forms); “they” for centuries has served in the real-world of speaking English as CONTINUE READING: Correcting Course on Correctness in English/ELA – radical eyes for equity