Some Notes On Code-Switching
I attached Lisa Delpit's article, "Other People's Children", even though I know Lisa and Jessie have already read it. Tonya, I thought you might be interested in reading it before you begin teaching - her book of the same title has been the single most influential piece of writing on my teaching I have read thus far. (i.e., I highly recommend it.)
Last year, I had a lot of issues with teaching "Standard" English, because I didn't want to devalue my stduents' authentic voices and home languages. Now I know I did them no favors by celebrating everything they wrote, and the guilt is painful enough to motivate me into designing a unit, detailed in structure and system, on code-switching for this this fall (I'm also presenting this unit as my Reader's-Writer's Project.)
I believe code-switching is one of the most valueable things (besides literacy) we can teach our students, and I honestly believe the two - code-switching and litercy - go hand-in-hand quite nicely. While I do believe in the value of self-expression for artistic merit (creative, literary writing), it's obvious to me that literary writing without a basic understanding, a consciousness of grammatical language patterns is not going to raise these kids out of poverty. That is my one true goal as a teacher - to give my disadvantaged students equal access to power, choice, and democracy.
That said, I do believe literary writing ought to be taught to students in poverty. Many times these children are the ones who need desperately to express their emotions and painful experiences in the medium of the written word. But I think that can only come within a rigid structure (something I used to cringe at the thought of) with ample drilling and rote memorization activities. (If anyone has any suggestions on where I can find some templates for memorization and drilling of grammatical patterns, please let me know - I'm on the hunt.) Until we bring these kids to a level where what we've taken for granted as automaticity is also their own, we cannot even hope for their success.
Literature can be a great way to access grammatical patterns, particularly literature with a language pattern and narrative that the students relate to. Couple that with Beers' strategies for independent reading, and soon I think you will have empowered students to read, write, speak, and (most importantly) be conscious of language in such a way that no one will ever be able to take away from them.
Last year, I had a lot of issues with teaching "Standard" English, because I didn't want to devalue my stduents' authentic voices and home languages. Now I know I did them no favors by celebrating everything they wrote, and the guilt is painful enough to motivate me into designing a unit, detailed in structure and system, on code-switching for this this fall (I'm also presenting this unit as my Reader's-Writer's Project.)
I believe code-switching is one of the most valueable things (besides literacy) we can teach our students, and I honestly believe the two - code-switching and litercy - go hand-in-hand quite nicely. While I do believe in the value of self-expression for artistic merit (creative, literary writing), it's obvious to me that literary writing without a basic understanding, a consciousness of grammatical language patterns is not going to raise these kids out of poverty. That is my one true goal as a teacher - to give my disadvantaged students equal access to power, choice, and democracy.
That said, I do believe literary writing ought to be taught to students in poverty. Many times these children are the ones who need desperately to express their emotions and painful experiences in the medium of the written word. But I think that can only come within a rigid structure (something I used to cringe at the thought of) with ample drilling and rote memorization activities. (If anyone has any suggestions on where I can find some templates for memorization and drilling of grammatical patterns, please let me know - I'm on the hunt.) Until we bring these kids to a level where what we've taken for granted as automaticity is also their own, we cannot even hope for their success.
Literature can be a great way to access grammatical patterns, particularly literature with a language pattern and narrative that the students relate to. Couple that with Beers' strategies for independent reading, and soon I think you will have empowered students to read, write, speak, and (most importantly) be conscious of language in such a way that no one will ever be able to take away from them.
posted by Sarah Yost | 5:56 AM
1 Comments:
One thing I noticed about the Urban Code-Switching book is that it pointed out the difference in structure between informal English and formal English, but assumed that students had some understanding of parts of speech. Last year, I struggled with students just writing complete sentences, which led into a 6 week mini-unit on complete sentences at the beginning of the year. I didn't have time to continue the grammar mini-lessons with the Read XL and portfolio material I had to cover, so I skimped on grammar for the rest of the year. At the end of the year, I gave me students a bunch of Mad Libs to do in groups and almost every student asked, "what's an adverd... what's and adjective...what's a Pronoun." From your work on the code-switching unit, do you feel like students need more support they before begin to talk about code-switching?
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