Chapter 13 BLOG

The focus of this chapter is teaching English in context. One thing that I rarely think about struck me as sad and factual. It was the section called Attitudes toward Dialects. In the interview with a woman from England, she expressed that she believes her dialect to be the “right one”. While people may not admit it, that is how we feel. I know we have all taken classes in which the teacher was a non-native English speaker who was difficult to understand. You spend so much time trying to decipher what they are trying to say that you miss the message of the lesson. While I do not think the person with an accent or with a specific dialect, I may be judgmental of their speech. As a teacher, I cannot let my inability to understand someone’s dialect interfere with my interactions. “Teachers who communicate dialect bias in the classroom do not merely damage the teacher-student relationship through prejudice or impair students’ academic success through their low academic expectations for them…the student who is made to feel inferior for reasons of accent internalizes the shame associated with discrimination” (Diaz-Rico, p. 339). I do not want my bias to color my relationship with my students. I do not want to make them feel inferior because of the way they speak. I would like to find ways to avoid doing this and having my students treat others with disrespect because of their speech patterns. In Context Counts in Second Language Learning, Walqui states, “Language attitudes in the learner, the peer group, the school, the neighborhood, and society at large can have an enormous effect on the second language learning process, both positive and negative. It is vital that teachers and students examine and understand these attitudes. In particular, they need to understand that learning a second language does not mean giving up one's first language or dialect. Rather, it involves adding a new language or dialect to one's repertoire” (Walqui, 2000). This further supports the dramatic impact that teachers and peers have on the ELs in the classroom. What can we do to help them?
This article can be found at: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/99.