| DRAFT
Denying or Affirming Language:
Reading, Writing & Speaking in Standard English
by Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
"The philosophic aim of
education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and
into the one humanity."
—Paul Goodman
ABSTRACT:
Young children enter American schools with many home languages.
Some are nonstandard forms of English and others are languages of
other countries. What constitutes best practices in language instruction
for these children becomes, from time to time, a political question.
This paper proposes that the home language be prized and honored,
that the child be instructed in ways that make sense to the child,
and that adding Standard English to the child's mother tongue be
done in ways that do not raise resistance and shame in children.
The road to Goodman's "one humanity" winds through all
our languages.
How do we learn English? Each story
is unique.
I am the grandchild of four people who grew up speaking Yiddish
and Russian. They came to this country from Russia in the first
decade of this century. They learned English, which they spoke with
accents. My maternal grandmother wrote English phonetically, so
you could hear her accent in her writing. My paternal grandfather,
a businessman, was as meticulous in speaking English and writing
English as in wearing business suits and ties.
My parents spoke Standard, unaccented, elaborate English. They learned
the accents of the radio, not of their parents. They spoke a little
Yiddish with their parents, but (sadly) never thought to teach me
any. So I know that people can learn to speak English differently
than their parents do.
My son and daughter speak as I do, when they are with me. My daughter,
who is African-American and adopted, also speaks Ebonics. She learned
it during her elementary school years, from other African-Americans
(her friends and their parents.) She still speaks standard English
at work and to white people, including me.
Because, perhaps, of these interesting linguistic turns my family
has negotiated, and because of my experience and research in early
childhood education I am very interested in how we best offer young
children a second language in school, never shaming them because
they speak their first.
When we shame them, they either withdraw from intellectual work
so as to avoid further shame, or they re-enter the educational world
and have to undo what has been done. These remedial writing skills
come hard... When I was on the faculty of Pacific Oaks College in
Pasadena, CA. I taught a class called Assessment By Life Experience
(ABLE) for adults over 25. This was a class for mature students
who were earning credit by writing papers about their life experience.
My students had the highest pass rate for this course over a period
of years, so my dean asked me for 'my secret formula'.
Each student had four papers (20 pages, typewritten) to write;
and several presentations. All were in the area of human development.
About a fifth of the students, mature though they were, couldn't
write. Typically, they said, "I can't write, but I need to
get through this class." They could think well enough for the
work they had to do (I knew this because we talked it through).
Helping them overcome writing problems was a big problem for the
faculty, especially if we took seriously our gate-keeping responsibilities.
What did I do?
The white students usually had the skills needed to carry them through
the class. But some didn't. I particularly remember two: one who
made it and one who failed to make it.
Jerry swore he couldn't write, and what's more, he couldn't spell.
I told him what I told them all: "Write it wrong and I'll help
you rewrite it. I'll even help with the spelling." When he
finally, after stalling for weeks, gave me his first paper, it was
wonderful! I didn't have to reach for a teacherly supportive
comment, I just applauded because I loved the thinking and the writing
in his paper. It turned out that Jerry's spelling was worse than
anyone's, and he'd had such trouble about spelling all through school
that he'd simply decided he couldn't write. He flew through the
course once we decided that the spelling could be corrected last,
on the word processor, and that everything else worked!
Flo had beautiful things to say. The mother of young adults, she
had recently been left by her husband (a frequent story in a college
which has a large number of re-entry women from their late 30's
to their sixties) and was scrambling to make ends meet. She came
to class and participated poetically, but didn't write. She gave
her two presentations on schedule, and they fascinated and interested
the other students in the class. Once she showed me a promising
beginning to a paper, but then she disappeared. She returned to
class on the last day, bearing T-shirts for us all, made by her
son, which said "I got my experience assessed at Pacific Oaks".
I never got clear why Flo didn't finish the work. It was clear she
liked the class and wanted the credit, but she just didn't overcome
the problem.
Some School Experiences Cripple
Most of the others who struggled with
ABLE were Latinas. Maria, Norma, Graciela and Luz had different
stories, but the same experience, or so it seemed to me. They had
grown up in the LA basin, and were now in leadership positions in
child care or Head Start or community college because they were
competent and bilingual and responsible. But they couldn't write
in English. Couldn't.
I had become bilingual — adding Spanish — in my 40s. I would have
hated to write these papers in Spanish, and I told them so. But
my experience with language has never involved shame, and theirs
had, and that made, I think, all the difference. They went to school
during the period when children were punished for speaking Spanish
not only in class, but even on their own time — at lunch and at
recess. So, student by student, the time came when we had to fight
the resolve she had made as a child, never to be complicit with
the cruel teachers by writing this awful language.
It wasn't easy. I cried with Luz as she recalled being separated
from her friends and isolated in the school for forgetting, being
natural, speaking the language of her loved ones. I cried with Norma
over papers in grades 2-6 covered with red ink. The shame of it,
for a little girl whose family wanted her to do well in school.
I cried with Graciela over the mean words the teachers used to stop
her from saying what she had to say in the only ways she could say
it. And I cried with Grandma Maria because not only had she experienced
this kind of awful disrespect and tearing down of her self-esteem,
but she had seen the same thing done to her own children!
Student by student, after we cried, we worked. Draft after draft
÷ our deal was that I'd rewrite anything she wrote, until it was
good quality. I was a strong advocate of using a word processor·
it meant we could keep all the good stuff and just clear out errors.
I'm not sure what we would have done without the ease of the delete
key and the capacity to insert material.
The Secret, Revealed
This, I told my dean, was my secret: One must cry with the student
if she is to begin to write. And then one must have the patience
and editorial capacity to rewrite repeatedly with the student, showing
her what needs to be changed, and explaining why. Imagine my horror
to find, a decade later, that voters in my state, California, have
passed a law which requires children to leave a bilingual setting
after a year and says, among other things, that speaking Spanish
to a Spanish-speaking child can cause a teacher to be punished.
This law brings shame back, big time, to children whose first language
isn't English. Clearly, people who understand how crippling language
shame is must not allow such a law to be implemented!
In the names of Maria, Luz, Graciela and Norma, in remembrance of
all those tears, I beg, I beseech, I demand that this cruelty, isolation,
red ink, mean words, and disrespect—must stop!
Teaching African-American Children
The question of how the child will
be seen, who enters school speaking other than standard English,
was the center of the Ebonics controversy in the winter of 1996.
A very fine book, The Real Ebonics Debate, [Perry, T & Delpit,
L. Beacon Press, 1998] has been written about this subject.
Being seen as speaking an inferior language may well keep African-American
children from wanting "white music", "white talk"
or anything else "white" for fear they will be distanced
from their own community. They may throw out the European cultural
riches with the racist bathwater.
So, to the extent that legitimizing Ebonics (and offering bilingual
programs) causes teachers to validate what the children bring with
them, the self-esteem of the children will be supported.
The Culture of Children and
Teachers in School
1. Quality
of Bilingual Programs Varies
The opponents of bilingual education who put the awful referendum
on the ballot say bilingual programs don't work. To the extent that
school doesn't work (why are so many children using controlled substances,
not reading, attracted to violence in its many forms) neither does
bilingual education. But when it is supported, it works, and it
is the only route we know thus far for immigrant children to come
to Standard English with their self-image intact.
Like many other teachers, I have taught in a program (not bilingual)
which had sufficient funding and resources at the beginning, but
as it succeeded, both funds and resources were cut, so that, after
a while, teachers were trying to accomplish the same amount with
more children and fewer materials and were found to be lacking.
It reminds me of what G.K. Chesterton said, (this has been paraphrased):
It has been agreed that every man
shall have a cow.
We give him half a cow, to be getting on with.
He doesn't know what to do with half a cow, and leaves it lying
about.
This proves he didn't really want or need a cow in the first place.
We take it away from him.
Bilingual education has a mixed report,
but that is precisely because teachers and children have often been
asked to get milk from half a cow. Where the programs have been
properly funded, and the numbers have been reasonable, children
and teachers have succeeded with their tasks.
2. Quality of relationships between people
in the program
Many things affect the success of young
children in embracing Îschool culture'. The most important is how
much respect they experience; for who they are, for what they bring
with them from home, as they enter school. Children are ready to
learn if they are in settings that feel safe to them, and they resist
the lessons given by people who undermine their security
Teachers have learned, over the years, that to cover children's
written work with red marks makes them decide to abandon writing.
Good teachers respond to the ideas as they are written, and help
children learn to self-critique, as writers must. Models for Standard
English are all around us, on radio and television and in school.
Children often abandon their parents' code for a standard one, after
a period of adjustment. More often, they add the Standard English
code to the one they learned as babies.
If they can learn to read English, they will read Standard English.
None of us reads language which reflects our speech precisely: the
codes are different, and we can accept that, and learn another code
when we see the need for it. Standard written English is not standard
spoken English.
So it is necessary, before introducing hard work in a new language,
that children be accepted and understood as they speak their home
language. During these first years the teacher will often model
Standard English without requiring much (perhaps asking them to
repeat a few words) from the children in return, explaining to them
that later they will learn this new language. After they have been
accepted and have learned to read a little, the second language,
Standard English, can be introduced. Now there can be exercises
and challenges and immersions of different lengths...a story can
be read and phrases played with, patterns for questions can be developed;
all the good exercises we have learned in teaching reading can be
taught, and learned.
Colonizing minds
Overrunning the languages of indiginous people:
Linguistic oppression of indigenous peoples usually takes a different
form. I wrote about this in my book about Sylvia Ashton-Warner [
Pay Attention to the Children: Lessons for Teachers and Parents
from Sylvia Ashton-Warner ] who worked with Maori children in New
Zealand/Aotearoa, and hear about it repeatedly in the US. At the
Suquamish Museum, on their reservation in Washington, we find oral
history about the Indian Boarding Schools.
Lawrence Webster
They took you off to school, and while
you got white man education there you lost what you could have learned
at home. I don't begrudge the going to school, but I almost lost
the Indian language, to boot. I lost that much time away from home
with those long winter evenings when they used to tell us the stories
and one thing and another.
...You take any nationality there is, take them away from home,
put Îem with a different group altogether, stay there for quite
a number of years, he's going to forge a lot that he learned at
home. And I don't care who it is, he's going to forget some things
altogether. And if he's taken away very young from that home, he'll
lost it just that much faster.
And Ethel Sam
I wouldn't even notice I'd say something
in Indian, and then the teacher'd come along with his ruler and
hit me on the hand, ÎYou talk English'....The teachers used to scold
us. Sometimes they'd think that we're talking about Îem.
And Clara Jones
We stayed there for three years. We
were just kids, you know. They [parents] said we had to go or else
they would go to jail. That's what they used to tell us. And we
would cry, ÎWe don't want to go back, we don't want to leave home.'
They would tell us you will have to go or else we go to jail. There
were some around two, three, four, five years old. They had these
long rooms for our girls and there was sometimes forty to fifty
beds in one room.
The voices we hear above are from the people once led by Chief Seattle.
Their injuries as children are palpable, and we do well to remember
what they have told us.
Let's do it right
Since we know from experience and brain
research that second language acquisition is most efficiently accomplished
in childhood, we don't want to wait too long, but since we want
the child to welcome the second language and not to feel as the
Suquamish people quoted above, I'd suggest that second or third
grade is early enough for formal work in this area (the teacher
will have been modeling Standard English all along), and that teachers
need to be thoroughly trained never to explain that Standard English
is right and Ebonics or Spanish or Suquamish is wrong, but that
Standard English is the language of the business world, and is useful
and should be part of what we know.
There is some hard science here, to support my contention. Ron Lally
reports, in discussing the new brain science research, that the
younger a child takes on a language the easier it is to learn. This
supports our intuitive and experiential knowledge. He further reports
that a two-year-old in the US from a Chinese- or Spanish-only home
will learn English very quickly indeed, and very well, at the cost
of his/her first language. (This isn't the case where the home and
school are bilingual.) This terrible cost is also related to what
we know about the brain and the values of the community . . . the
child recognizes the cultural disposition toward English and discards
the first language. So this kind of immersion disables the child
from communication with those in the home, and extinguishes any
possibility of a gentle bridge back and forth between two cultures.
Eugene Garcia's research tells us that the child's home language
is linked with identity formation and that a solid grounding in
a first language makes it easier, not harder, for the child to learn
a second language.
If Americans were more accustomed to multilinguality the current
discussion would seem silly... of course children can learn to speak
in different ways in different settings. There should be no question
of replacing one language with another. In many countries children
learn two and three languages from birth. Any four-year-old knows
that you can do some things at home, others at child care, and yet
others at Grandma's. My own daughter, adopted into a white family
and herself black, learned
Ebonics at age eight or so, when she wanted to talk like the other
black kids did. She switched codes appropriately, and still does,
twenty-plus years later. All of us who are bilingual can switch
to the language appropriate to the context, and it is fun to do
so if neither code is derided or disvalued.
People can't -and shouldn't- accept being marginalized because we
speak like our parents. When I taught children from African-American
homes in the Harlem and Hunters Point, I learned that they respond
openly and with excitement to learning when they are seen as valuable,
well-functioning people.
I am convinced that we should utilize the children's own language
as much as we can, through grade 3, (building upon what they bring
with them) work with them in both languages for another three years,
and then ask them to use "school language" most of the
time at school. There will, of course, be children for whom no teacher
who speaks their language will be available, but this should be
the exception, not the rule, and it is unconscionable where there
are large population groups in an area. School boards who want successful
graduates will want to hire people who can teach young children
without taking away the children's self-esteem.
Immigrant children, who arrive in the US older and with some school
experience behind them in the home country, probably can proceed
at a somewhat faster pace through these same stages, because they
know themselves to be successful at school, and have learned to
read in their language of origin. I believe that this can compensate
for the ease with which very young children learn languages. In
any event, the learning of language must not be an onerous duty,
under the clock, but an expansion of intelligence and the ability
to communicate.
Following a responsible course of action, we would honor the children
as coming from one legitimate place, and heading for another.
Finally, the teacher's role must be to support the child as a learning,
integrated being, whose first language and second one both are strong
and convey the meanings the child wishes to communicate. The current
attempt in California to pretend that this important task can be
accomplished in a year is foolhardy and immoral, denying the realities
of children, teachers and languages.
In the name of diversity, and in the best interests of the children,
we must learn to greet them at the school's door with respect, and
never, ever withdraw that respect. Given this respect, they will
learn and learn, and they will astonish us with their wisdom.
Further reading:
Asante, M.K. African Elements in African American English. In J.
Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Baldwin, J. "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me,
What Is? Copyright 1979 by The New York Times Company.
Bilingual Education Handbook: Designing Instruction for LEP Students.
1990. Sacramento: California Department of Education, Bilingual
Education Office.
Cazden, C.B. "Effective Instructional Practices in Bilingual
Education." Paper prepared for the National Institute of Education.
1984.
Cazden, C.B. Classroom Discourse. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 1988.
Christian, D. and Mahrer, C. 1992. Two-Way Bilingual Programs in
the United States: 1991-1992. Santa Cruz, CA and Washington, DC:
National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second Language
Learning.
Christian, D. and Mahrer, C. 1993. Two-Way Bilingual Programs in
the United States: 1992-1993 Supplement, Santa Cruz, CA and Washington,
DC: National Center for Research on Cultural Diversity and Second
Language Learning.
Cummins, J. 1989. Empowering Minority Students. Sacramento: California
Association for Bilingual Education.
Cunningham, P.M. Teachers' Correction Responses to Black-Dialect
Miscues Which are Nonmeaning-Changing. Reading Research Quarterly,
1976-1977, 12.
Cummins, J. "Wanted: A Theoretical Framework for Relating Language
Proficiency to Academic Achievement among Bilingual Students."
In C. Rivera, ed., Language Proficiency and Academic Achievement.
Clevedon, England, Multilingual Matters.
Delpit, L. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.
NY: New Press, 1995.
Gates, H.L., Jr. Bearing Witness. In HL Gates, Jr., ed., Selections
of African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century. NY:
Pantheon, 1991.
Hakuta, K. Mirror of Language. NY Basic Books. 1985.
Kozol, J. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. NY:
Crown. 1991.
Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.
New York: Pergamon Press.
_____. 1982. Fundamentals of Language Education. Torrance: Laredo
Publishing Company.
Lessow-Hurley, J. 1990. Foundations of Dual Language Instruction.
New York: Longman.
Salamone, R. Equal Education under Law. NY: St. Martin's Press.
1986.
Willig, A. "Meta-Analysis of Studies on Bilingual Education."
Review of Educational Research Vol 55 No 3 (1985).
Wink, J. Immersion: Everyone Can Win!
Wink, J. Transformation: One School-One Answer
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