Hope

Yesterday I overheard a few teenagers talking about Obama at the bus stop.

"You know he's from Africa. What I'm saying is that could be you or me."

"True"

True.

A Black President and First Lady in the White House obviously does not wash away the persistent racial inequities in the US. But a pedagogy of hope goes a long way to battle misery, like the kind we see in Kiri Davis' short film A Girl Like Me:

BICS/CALP

The literature on 'academic language' draws heavily on Jim Cummins' (1979, 1996) binary of BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) to explain a number of phenomena in language acquisition--like why a student might be able to recite an entire Jay-Z song but not write a complete paragraph in English class. It's a useful distinction in some ways, particularly in advocating for immigrant students who may be unfairly assessed in school. If it generally up to two years for someone to reach conversational and fluency and five to seven years for academic proficiency, then educational policies and classroom practice should distinguish between these very different time periods.

But the insufficiency of this model to capture the sociocultural context of language use became evident to me during this election season. Traveling up to nearby the battleground state of New Hampshire to organize for Obama, we'd get sent off in pairs to canvass a neighborhood and talk to people about the presidential and senate races. The idea was to find out where people stood on the issues, if they'd made up their minds how to vote, and persuade undecided voters why they should vote democrat. Clearly, this type of exchange demands a high degree of CALP, right? Well yes and no. The issues are complex, and there is some specialized vocabulary you need to talk about taxes and health care plans. But for the most part, the people answering doors I knocked on didn't want fancy talk. A lot of them didn't want to talk at all but if you start in sounding all academic-y, you can rest assure they'll probably close the door in your face. It's like the example of a bar that Jim Gee uses. Walk into a neighborhood bar, it would be completely inappropriate to ask, "Pardon me. Could any of you good lads spare a match?" You'll likely get ridiculed; you might get your butt kicked.

Talking to folks while canvassing was exhausting and hard, cognitively demanding work. A lot more difficult for me than talking about politics with a colleague. But it certainly wasn't academic. Far from it. It was barely about policies and certainly not policy nuances, but about trying to connect on a human level with a stranger in a few seconds so maybe they'd be willing to talk for a few minutes.

Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space

Not too long ago I came across Kris Gutiérrez's (2008) article Developing a Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space. This text resonated with me for a number of reasons.

Gutierrez's theoretical framework is both:

• ecological, intentionally drawing on learners' knowledge and practices that develop in a range of spaces inside and outside of formal schooling, and

• political, engaging with institutional structures, social histories, and dynamic power relations.

Gutierrez came to speak at Boston College last fall, and at the time I'm not sure I fully understood the significance of the Third Space. This article brought into light some of my uneasiness with the focus on Academic Language.

First let me simplify the concept of Third Space:

• First space - learning and knowledge within home and community contexts.

• Second space - learning and knowledge from an institution, like school.

• Third space - learning and knowledge that merges the first two spaces, connecting the home, community and school. Third Space is the intersection of students everyday experiences and identities within a learning environment that values what the students bring from home. Institutional learning is shaped by the First Space and learners are shaped by the Second Space.

For example, Gutierrez describes how the curriculum at the UCLA Migrant Institute represents a junction between students' lived histories and genres of school. Students at the institute develop syncretic testimonios, or autobiographical accounts, both written and oral that situate their own lived experiences within new understandings of history that they are studying. At the same time, students are exposed to "a range of genres that are typical of academic writing: extended definition, persuasion, compare and contrast, personal narratives, and so on. However, each form is used in new ways oriented toward the development of a sociocritical literacy." (p.154).

This approach privileges who students are and what knowledges they bring and imagines new possibilities for growth. It explicitly contrasts deficit-orientations to pedagogy that seek to mold students in a normalized image of "smart," one that uncritically props up the dominant culture. What this reminds me is that Academic Language should not get reduced to teaching students how to speak and write like a educated, white person. Although it is essential that all students become literate in dominant Discourses, pedagogy that expects students to give up their home culture and identities to succeed serves to dehumanize those students--even if done with the best of intentions.

How easy it is to fall into patterns in which we look to somehow "fix" broken students. So how do we resist this tendency?

Let's Talk about Grammar

"Teaching academic language might mean that you teach some grammar within a history or science lesson."

As the word grammar rolled off my tongue, I swear I heard a few of the student teachers gasp for air. Grammar: how can the turn of one word evoke such visceral responses, anxiety, even trepidation. English teachers, who are supposed to tackle grammar in their classes, often don't like to teach it. Even many ESL teachers avoid grammar--or shun it. That is, until the infamous red pen is unsheathed.

It's here, with the pen, that many teachers end up dealing with grammar. Correcting errors in students' writing. The very practice that likely triggers the nausea associated with grammar is the very practice that gets repeated over and over in classrooms.

Accompanying the stress-provoking red pen, there's a good deal of research to suggest that that error correction has little or no effect on students' writing ability, but this is a contested issue in Second Language Acquisition research (e.g., see John Truscott's research and subsequent rebuttals). But does this mean that teachers should abandon grammar altogther? Despite what Stephen Krashen says, I don't think so.

It's just HOW we approach grammar that matters. I like the way Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman take up the issue, addressing both the form, or structure, of language and its functions. What's key is working grammar into content you are already teaching and learning, including students' own writing. In the coming week, I'll post some examples from a hypothetical history unit. In the meantime, just for fun, do you agree with the tree diagram below? If not, what's wrong? Oh, I'm just kidding...

Studying Language Acquisition to Teach Language

I visited my friend last week at her school to talk about teaching and share stories. I always enjoy our meetings because of her classroom tales but also for the lively brainstorm sessions we inevitably get into. In exploration possible classroom collaborations this year, we hit upon an interesting idea to teach academic language. In one of her ESL classes, she is concerned about the amount of slights that students direct at one other in regards to their language output, often in the form of snickering at other kids' accents when speaking or reading.

Setting classroom norms and reminding students of them seems to have worked to a degree but my friend is hoping to be more proactive. We began to talk about a unit devoted to second language learning, with emphasis on psychological and social contexts of learning. She immediately jumped on this, harking back to a unit she taught years ago to a particularly rambunctious and emotionally-charged group of middle schoolers. Together they delved into the subject of adolescent development, discussing and debating psychology research in light of their own experiences. The unit became a way to make the students' social and emotional lives a locus of study by placing them in conversation with the field of adolescent psychology. This dialogue anchored the discussion within personal experiences while elevating it beyond a unique emphasis on the personal. Students were introduced to academic constructs that they could use to make sense of and challenge their perceptions of the world.

Taking this idea and mapping it onto a landscape of high school students learning English as a second (or third) language, we've started to think about teaching a unit on language pedagogy as a way to explore some of their experiences learning English, unpack assumptions about English and language learning, and hopefully address the students' cajoling in a way that doesn't feel like punishment---a way in which the group can come to an understanding about how and why the emotional climate affects motivation and anxiety and, in turn, everyone's readiness to learn. It is also an avenue to teach the group academic constructs around language, or 'language about language.'

This might be a relatively short unit of study, or it could unfold into something else. We'll see. We talked about introducing the topic with a frontloading activity, like an opinionnaire (Smith & Wilhelm, 2002), where students respond to a series of statements about language learning and state whether they agree/disagree, and why. They then interview 2 or more people (e.g students in the class, teachers, principal...) about their responses, and report back to the group. It's a way to privilege students' thoughts and experiences and quickly expose them to other viewpoints. This also serves as a basis to loop in readings and build understandings from each learner's starting point.

The Political Limitations of Academic Language

I'll allow myself a bit of a tangent that informs my growing theoretical perspective on academic language...

The more theories and research that I read on teaching academic English, I find myself coming back to the question of limitations of this work. I understand the imperative to explicitly teach academic English. Having it opens doors, while the lack can mean the door is shut quickly in one's face. Consider this quote:

The 'everyday' speech we use is very different from the terminology used in schools. The ability to use the specialized language of the academic sphere is like a gatekeeper: it opens doors for those who have it, and fastens them shut for those who do not. -The Stanford Teacher Education Program

But I am troubled by equating academic language with success in this way for a number of reasons. First, people don't just have academic English or not. Despite the logic of standardized literacy tests, there is no authentic cut-off score that marks students as either having or not having the requisite skills for successful participation in and out of school. Additionally, being academically proficient in the dominant language does not assure access to the privileges of the dominant culture. It may be tempting to assume that teaching students how to be more "academic" is ultimately empowering (and many recent publications on the topic do so, e.g. Bailey, 2007; Zwiers, 2008), and while I agree with this notion to a degree, the logic starts to break down when people confront the harsh reality of systems that do not welcome them. Or perhaps the "welcome" signs are hanging behind many social and economic barriers to participation. For instance, you can work to learn how to write college-level essays all day long but if you can't actually afford to go to college and support yourself (and your family), then how empowering is it really?

For undocumented students the picture gets even cloudier. They have virtually no options for financial aide. If they can pay the international student tuition, which is usually astronomical, they're nervous about enrolling and getting turned in to the feds... Under these circumstances, wielding academic English is still critical but it is insufficient. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can help us deconstruct the linguistic structure of a text, but it's not going to confront the systemic failure of a society to support all of its residents, whether citizens or not. What academic language teaching can do, however, is prepare students to read, write, and speak in ways that hold social power. Like it or not, public schools find themselves at the center of a political storm driven by deep fear and resentment that many American citizens feel towards immigrants. We hear it in the inflammatory rhetoric of popular pundits like Lou Dobbs. We see it in the flurry of ICE raids in New Bedford.

Given sweeping anti-immigrant sentiment in this country, public schools cannot rely on old, assimilation strategies. Mastering the English language and adhering to a strong "work ethic" are products of the myth of American meritocracy, but the truth value of meritocracy has increasingly tenuous. Learning the language and working hard and following the law do not guarantee access to the American dream. Today’s immigrants, who are overwhelming people of color, receive more pronounced and protracted scorn than European immigrants did. It is exceedlingly difficult to blend into a melting pot when skin color is used to mark people as outsiders. Skulking behind immigration debates lie fears of demographic shifts that have already substantively altered the composition of many US communities and will favor non-whites in the coming decades, fears that are tacitly framed by matters of race and racism.

SFL will not provide answers to navigate these questions, but by studying it, I hope to find a tool that might aid in the struggle for a more inclusive and just society. Teaching academic language is part of the picture but so is social organizing and contentious politics and coalition building and...

Just some things swirling in my brain today...

Choosing Vocabulary to Teach

So how do teachers go about identifying words to teach? Beck, McKeown, & Kucan (2002) talk about three tiers of voabulary to help categorize words and make decisions about what to teach.

Tier One words are the most basic words, like clock, person, happy, which usually don’t require instruction. Keep in mind, however, that students beginning to learn a new language may need assistance here.

Tier Three words are low frequency words, like isotope or lathe, which are often unfamiliar to students and important for understanding a particular text. However, they do not usually appear in many types of texts across domains.
Tier Two words are high frequency words for mature language learners, like absurd, coincidence, industrious, levity, privy, obscure. We encounter tier two words primarily in written texts. Instruction in these words has good potential to augment one's language ability and will assist students to engage in more "academic" ways as they explore written texts.

Some criteria for identifying Two Tier words:
1) Importance and utility: words that are characteristic of mature learners and appear frequently across domains. Consider how generally useful the word is. Is it a word that students are likely to encounter in other texts? Will it be useful in describing their own experiences?

2) Conceptual understanding: words for which students understand the general concept but offer precision and specificity in describing the concept. Would students be able to explain the concepts using words already familiar to them? For example, ‘benevolent’ might be expressed as ‘kind,’ or ‘haunting’ might be expressed as ‘scary’.

3) Instructional potential: words that can be worked in a variety of ways so that students can build rich representations of them and their connections to other words and concepts.
• How does the word relate to other words and concepts that students are learning? Does it directly relate to a classroom topic? Would it add a dimension to ideas that have been developed?
• What does the word bring to a text or situation? What role does the word play in communicating the meaning of the context in which it is used? Does the use of the word convey a particular mood or attitude?
• Keep in mind that there is no formula for selecting age-appropriate vocabulary words, no golden rule. As long the word can be explained in known words and applies to what students might think, read, talk, or write about, it is an appropriate word to teach.
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Beck, I. L, McKeown, M. G, & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction. New York: Guilford Press