Blog Post Assignment 7.5: Leveraging Knowledge to Practice Conventional and Pragmatic Aspects of English

Rebecca Black’s “Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Nonfiction” highlights the interaction between reader and writer in online mediums as a mechanism for the writer to organically build her writing skills. Since we began this class, I have been thinking about how to use in collaborative writing in my role as an English tutor. This chapter certainly gave me a new way to think about that, as I have a few students whom I think would be really engaged in the fan fiction genre. I don’t have ELL students at the moment, but I can certainly see how this more natural way of practicing and building skills would be beneficial to a kid learning to navigate the intricacies of the English language.

“Nanako is able to leverage her knowledge of anime culture to practice conventional and pragmatic aspects of English, experiment with different genres of writing, gain a great deal of discourse or communicative competence in the fan fiction register through her written exchanges with other fans.” This isn’t about just using tech or social media for the sake of using it, it’s utilizing it to create a meaningful experience for students to connect themselves to text.

I really connected with Black’s emphasis on creating lifelong learners instead of kids who know the content we’re teaching. I agree that students will benefit from moving away from a classroom environment focused on propositional knowledge, shifting more towards procedural knowledge, which is geared towards building skills and strategies to learn and continue learning.

The Translanguaging Guide for Educators helped me to better understand an aspect to teaching that I’m not familiar with at all. I wasn’t aware that the way that someone navigates between two languages, or even the way that a household or group navigates between two languages, could be so complex. One of the ideas that stuck out to me strongly was the idea of translanguaging as a way to empower students. “But by making use of flexible language practices, translanguaging releases ways of speaking that are often very much controlled and silences. When new voices are released, histories of subjugation are brought forth, building a future of equity and social justice.” Using culturally relevant texts (or texts about a content-area topic but in the home language), drawing upon community for inspiration, including specific language objectives, and having students respond to readings using English and the home language using graphic organizers were some of the examples that I think would be useful in my future classroom.

Blog Post Assignment #7: Adapt to the Wonderful Ways that Language Works

Shifting Perspectives About Grammar: Changing What and How We Teach

It seems like Deborah Dean kind of made it up as she went along during her first few years of teaching. I didn’t expect such a candid admission right off the bat. It was a little relieving to read, as I feel like I have been winging it for the last year or so as an English tutor. Dean fumbled through district-approved textbooks while I spent way too many months griping about SAT workbooks. I can relate to her right or wrong dilemma, “My practice was the classic example of write and wrong: language as answers in the textbook, totally removed from what my students wrote or spoke.” After a few months, I found myself straying more and more from the required workbooks as I realized my students were not learning anything – the were memorizing types of answers with types of questions. It’s baffling to me that with so much research pointing away from textbook guided learning, so many organizations (like my tutoring center) still rely on workbooks and a one-size-fits-all style to learning. If this happened at the start of Dean’s career, and it’s continuing at the start of mine – when can we expect to see real change in teaching?

On another note, I found Dean’s comments about intertwining her grammatical lessons with genre. She mentions: “Contemporary genre theory helps us understand that genres are textual responses to specific situations, not merely text types (Miller).” Based on my own experiences, I agree that grammar should be taught in the context of reading and writing. I’m pretty sure that most of my language skills were developed through constant reading and writing (independently and academically). I can’t seem to recall a single grammar lesson in class, though I’m sure there must have been many. 

And as the teacher of teenagers in 2016, I can surely see the benefit of using genre as a method of teaching kids to code switch (especially from social media and texting to other forms of communication): “Teaching language from a genre approach helps students understand how to marshal their language skills for specific tasks instead of seeing language as a unitary concept.” But I do question if this only further pushes our students away from learning to love reading and writing for themselves. Can we get our students to fall in love with literature if we pick apart Atticus Finch’s dialogue to discuss the power of using pronouns versus names? Yes, learning how to manipulate language is incredibly important, but is it more important than having students really get into a reading flow with such a powerful text? I’m not sure if there’s a right or wrong answer here (see what I did there?), but I do agree with Dean’s overarching theme that we need to continuously reexamine the way that we’re getting our students to connect with grammar and language so that what we’re doing works in the context of their lives.

Blog Post Assignment #6: The Politics of Correction

The things that we "correct" are not always wrong. The article encourages us to honor our students' home languages and emphasizes the importance of showing them how to code switch. But are we not implying that one is inferior to the other if we say that there is a time and place for each? Or are we preparing them for the realities of being in the real world? I don't think there's a correct answer to those questions, but we'll keep trying to do what's right for our students.

And what we can strive for is this:
"He wrote with passion about a topic he care about."