Writing, Dialect and Social Status

I spend more time now in my 4th year of teaching allowing students to share more of their writing with one another than ever before. After attending the Capital Area Writing Project (CAWP) I was reminded about how important it is for students to have an audience. Without an audience a students is a writer; with an audience the student is suddenly transformed into an author. Your discussion of chapter 9 in Tchundi caused me to question the role that language and dialect plays in student writing.

Slang and informal language is so dominant in my students’ lives it has become ingrained in them. My students literally do not realize that they are grammatically incorrect when they say “he go to the bathroom.” This lack of standard English usage obviously is prominent in their writing in addition to their speech. I am hesitant (and was more so in my first years teaching) to have students share unpolished work at times because of the dialect and language they use. Tschundi’s discussion on dialect as identity reminds me that even “non-standard” writing needs to be shared and embraced. This is not to say “proper” grammar and usage should be ignored, but in order flourish in our writing we need to share and be exposed to each others’ writing. In order to truly build a community of writers we need to allow students to be in a position of author.

Tsundi brings up that many see Ebonics and divergent dialects as “broken” and “lower-class” dialects. (295) It is difficult for me to teach “proper” grammar and usage to students who are unaccustomed to hearing it throughout their day. Like Lisa brought up in class last week, it is our job to expose students to this language and explicitly teach them HOW to use this language and WHY, “The motivation behind this instruction has been to provide students with access to higher social levels.” Yes, it is our job as English Language Arts teachers to teach students to be critical readers, competent writers and well-presented. It is also our job to urge and expose students to as much mobility as possible.

At our school in Durham we have to attend “Poverty-Training” professional development sessions dealing with how our population of students does not necessarily reflect the middle-class values and structure we teach to. Our middle school is a middle-class setting. There is much discussion about how oral language and body language are all intertwined in this middle class environment. If you are interested here are the titles to these books we read for our sessions. It all links with dialect discussions we have been discussing in class:

1 A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne
2 Learning Structures/ Understanding Learning (workbooks) by Payne