Reaction Paper Week 5: Race and Language

This week’s readings talked about the Critical Race Theory, and how educators can address race in the classroom without being colorblind.  The theories relate heavily to what we’ve been discussing in other classes regarding race and discrimination.  The aspect that I took away from this article that I found to be the most important was the idea of challenging what our current views are and asking questions such as “why are things the way they are?”  The problem that results in being colorblind is that one then doesn’t understand the history behind discrimination and as a result may unintentionally perpetuate it or appear to be completely disconnected from the reality of the world.

So the ultimate goal seems to be to challenge what we hold as the norm and to question why things are done a certain way.  This idea seems to be very useful in educating future educators, and I could even see implementing it in my classroom.  One of the ways of analyzing literature involves determining which voices are silenced or marginalized and figuring out why they are silenced or marginalized and what effect that has ont eh characters and the text as a whole.  This literary analysis could easily lead into a discussion about discrimination in the classroom, where the class could begin to focus on challenging what they view as the norm in their culture or society, and in the society of America at large.

Weekly Reaction Paper: Alim & Monareng

I think the general concept in both of the articles for this week was the focus on teaching English, while being continually aware of differing dialects and even other languages when we’re teaching, so that we can be aware and analyze our teaching strategies to be sure that we are addressing the needs of all our students in an equitable manner.  One of the important ways to be critically aware of the language variations in our classroom is to get our students involved in understanding and reflecting on those variations.

I especially liked the idea of dialect awareness programs that Alim talked about.  I like that it gets the students involved in thinking about what speech patterns and variations are present in their own communities.  When this concept is combined with contrastive analysis it makes it easier for students to learn to operate in “standard English” by helping them to distinguish the differences between their dialect, and the dialect of “standard English.”

The Monareng article talked a lot about the way language variation affects the speakers of various dialects, and how there is a power play between speakers of the dominant dialect and speakers of a minority dialect.  I think it would be interesting and more meaningful to our students if we taught language by explaining and discussing how the use of a certain dialect can put a speaker in a subservient position, and reflecting on how to be a vehicle for change to transform society’s view of that dialect.