I’m taking a class called: Language Acquisition and Learning in a Linguistically Diverse Society. Maybe I’m going to get another masters degree and maybe I’m not. The course takes up a lot of time – and space in my active working memory. My mind is crowded with the ideas and voices of authors and classmates. For the intellectually inclined, graduate studies are a terrific antidote for loneliness. For everyone else, there is transgressive behavior.
But before we come to the transgressions, readings and discussion in the Language Acquisition course have engendered a helical disturbance in my mind as two related and opposing ideas chase each other’s tails. First there is the research which shows that, by first grade, children from higher socio-economic status households can have as much as twice the vocabulary as children from lower socio-economic status households (5000 words as compared to 2500.) The gap just widens from there and success in school is directly correlated to language ability. So that is one strand of the problem. The second strand has to do with the ‘privileging’ of Standard American English over other dialects (notably African American dialect/s but including every other form of English spoken by ‘non-dominant’ groups.) In our readings we are asked to consider that Standard American English (“SAE”) is ‘on top’ because it is the language of conquerors and colonizers, the guys who make the rules and write the history. In short: there is nothing inherently superior/preferable in SAE – it’s just got the biggest guns. We read articles by a working-class white woman and a Caribbean woman of African descent, both of whom describe how speaking Standard English is a diminishment of their original selves, demanding a caution and care from which they are free when they speak in their mother tongue. As teachers we are asked to consider how we present SAE to our students who have not (yet) acquired it…so as not to privilege it. I hope that the solution lies in acknowledging that different forms of spoken English confer different degrees of status – but that status is not absolute. (Clearly not a discussion to be had with three or four year olds!) From there it should be possible to simply value the acquisition of languages per se, and pay attention to the context of their acquisition. In the classroom we can read literature in a variety of voices and dialects and invite the authentic communication of our students in all its non-standard glory, without rejecting the opportunity that a rich, precise vocabulary offers us for communication – and pure pleasure. Sorry I don’t have cites for the vocabulary disparity data – I can’t find the article in which I first read about it. The research of Hart & Risley (1995) and Graves & Slater (1987) gets cited in the body of articles I find on the web…but I haven’t found the full cites. Will update when/if I track them down.
Thinking about my language and the language of my students, I must say that there are very few three year olds who have mastered SAE so I don’t feel that bad using my middle-class, white, power-tripping, polysyllabic SAE in the classroom. My students, they’re all in this together for the time being…some just have parent/s with vocabularies that are more whopping than others. But I’m more like some parents than I am others and this surely affects the classroom experience of my students. It seems that the more I remind a child of her/his mom, the less interested s/he is in me. Nereida, for instance, with her very, very young Latina mother (loving but tough and gruff, and still very much an adolescent) seems genuinely fascinated by – and possibly devoted to – me. For Lesley, with his older, carefully articulate white mom, I am largely invisible. Lesley is comfortable and capable generating conversations with peers. For Nereida multiple conversational turns are a rarity. Her communicative style is tough, and gruff – cheerful but sometimes oblivious to cues – she so often answers questions with whatever it is she’s ready to say whether it relates to the conversation and question or not. Lesley is usually busy with friends whenever the opportunity for play arises. Nereida is busy with her modest but pointed transgressions, actions which invite the approach of a teacher. “But, wait,” I say to myself mid-paragraph, here. “how would someone else, with a different background, see the situation? I may be so far off the mark...” I sometimes feel, in the midst of coursework at the estimable temple of progressive education where I have often been a student, that I am a fish being asked to filet myself, bone by slender bone, in order to become more neutral, more transparent, less advantaged.
While we are on the topic of mothers, and being devoured or denatured by language, and the vast imbalances of power we encounter daily, and fish, and bones, and fish without bones, the drawing featured above was made by Rita who explained: “That’s mama. That’s a shark.”
