In chapter four of The Skin That We Speak, Judith Baker gives teachers an effective alternative to teaching Standard English with the use of “trilingualism”. Baker makes the point that teachers need to truly respect students’ home languages in order to teach them when and how to use SE.
I thought the home language assignment Baker gave her students was a great, effective idea. This project showed Baker’s students that she was interested in what went on in their homes. Here, Baker showed how much she respected the students and what they had to say. Because their home languages were given credit by Baker, many of her students were more willing to use SE. For example, students Sandra and Tracy used SE in their restaurant presentation. The two students even backed up their use of SE when their classmates criticized the language (Baker 60).
Baker says that her approach to teaching SE is backward in the sense that it doesn’t start with the rules of SE first. Instead, it starts with respect. What are some other ways we can show students that we respect their home languages? In other words, how else can we show our students that we care about their cultural backgrounds? How else can we incorporate students’ home languages into more classroom activities?
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ReplyDeleteWhat Baker did in her class is similar to what Carter did in his class as detailed in Chapter 7 of The Skin that we Speak. Both of these teachers have realized that the students they intend on teaching need to be interested in the material. While Baker used a sort of study and comparison of home languages to grab her students’ attentions, Carter used music to grab their imaginations. His goal was to get them to write and that is what he succeeded in doing by letting them connect their ideas to the music. If nothing else, the story the class created is a spring board for other writing prompts and a study of standard English. Granted the manuscript the class created was not the best, improving it in terms of sentence structure and word choice could become an exercise to better familiarize themselves with the standard English they are trying to learn in school. In addition, this would show them that standard English is just a slightly alternate version of the language they speak. Their ideas are great; it is just a matter of presentation. The language their manuscript is presented in is probably more closely related to the language they speak amongst themselves and their families. The language as written for them see can be used to compare with standard English and to build upon, just Baker did with her students when they studied the languages of “home,” “formal,” and “professional.”
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