Language Differences

These few chapters talked about a lot of language differences that appear in the classroom. The first chapter I read, titled "Language Diversity and Learning," focused mostly on the dialect used in most American classrooms, and how this almost always affects the students' learning if the students speak a different English dialect at home. The second chapter that I read for today, titled "The Vilis Tokples Schools of Papua New Guinea," told of the multilingual nation that encountered some issues in setting up an maintaining the village schools on the islands of this nation. The third chapter, "Hello Grandfather: Lessons from Alaska," was centered on how students from different cultures see literary context at different levels of importance.

I recently experienced the trouble that can come from differences in language in a classroom. One of my classes here required us to write a paper about an excerpt we read. I read the excerpt, wrote the paper about my view of and critique of the article (which was the assignment), and got a terrible grade when it was returned. I went to talk to the professor, completely confused as to why I got such a horrible grade. The professor basically told me that I had completely misunderstood the author's main point, and that my critique suffered because of this. However, I had just seen the main point in a different light than what my professor had seen. I don't understand why I was given this grade on a paper-simply because I had seen something differently-but I do think it was due to a language difference. The class is a general education requirement, so I have been trained to think and read in a different way than is normal for this particular discipline. If I had been initially taught how to read in this type of class, I might succeed more. However, I am just expected to know the differences between education classes and this discipline without ever being explicitly taught these differences, which makes it difficult for me to want to try my best in that class.

If I am to promote peace and justice in this world, I need to consider my students' cultural background and language. I can best serve their learning if I am sensitive to the ways that they view the world and process information, and also if I enhance--rather than inhibit--their cultural upbringing. Because we are all sinners, we often think about ourself before we think of others. I would sometimes rather make a lesson that will impress my teacher, when really I should be planning one that will really get to the heart of the students' best learning and tap into their cultural knowledge. I need to first plan my teaching around the students' needs, and then worry about standards and teaching them things that the system requires. This might mean that I work on getting to know my students' social skills in my classroom before I tackle academic subjects, but students will learn best if I understand the home culture of each student in the classroom. By doing this, I will be showing God's love by caring about them as individuals who may be different from me.

Black Education and Cultural Powers

In the introduction and the first two chapters of the book, Lisa Delpit tells a few different stories about her encounters with cultural differences between blacks or poor people and whites. She is a black woman who tells and refers back to the encounters she has had when trying to define how to best teach writing to black students in a classroom. Blacks, she says, would rather have more emphasis on skills than on fluency, because fluency is already a strength for most black people. Even if white people do not see the fluency, it is present, and can be seen in the students' speaking and musical/rap interests and talents. Throughout her whole life, she has struggled with figuring out whether she believes in emphasis on skills or emphasis on fluency. While no definite conclusions were made about this, she decided that it is important to teach students in the way that they will succeed in the larger world.

Delpit defines the larger world as somewhere in which a "culture of power" is the dominant culture. To her, this "culture of power" defines the way in which the world runs, so students need to learn this way in order to succeed throughout life. When she talked with black parents, she discovered that the parents were begging to have their children learn 'skills' rather than 'fluency', because it will help them succeed in life (and it is also where these students struggle most). Students from white middle-class culture tend to learn 'skills' at home, so they struggle with fluency, but this doesn't matter, because the world does not worry much about this deficit. On the other hand, because black and poor students are not taught as many writing 'skills' at home, they need instruction. The author also went into detail about the reason that teachers and students of a different ethnicity do not understand each other. She offered the idea that those from a black culture are more likely to directly state their opinions, needs, desires, and instructions. Those from a middle-class white culture are more likely to state things indirectly. When a student, who is used to being directly commanded to do something, is given an indirect question-type command from a teacher or authority figure, it is often misunderstood as a suggestion (rather than a command). While these are sometimes untrue in certain cultural situations, they can give a basic way to begin understanding cultural differences.

I witnessed the writing differences argument while at my previous practicum placement. This was at an elementary school in which almost all of the students are black, with a few white and Hispanic students attending as well. In this special education classroom, the students were learning to write a short essay. The teacher (who is white) had tried to get the students to understand, but it wasn't working very well, so I volunteered to help teach it one day. I had observed that the students were having trouble with structure, so I developed an outline for them to follow. The outline detailed the types of sentences that should be within each paragraph. This appeared to help the students, and I believe that it may have been that it was a type of direct instruction. The strategies that the teacher had been using were not extremely clear to the students, because she had tried to deal with each individual issue as it came up. I think that the students responded very positively when given some clear guidelines to follow while writing. I don't think that it was the perfect method for teaching writing, but I do think that I learned something that day about teaching students of a different culture.

Summary and Explanation

I chose this book because it looked interesting. I also felt that it would be a good resource to study, as it doesn't appear to be a book that focuses on the problem, but rather explores, in great depth, the things we should know and focus on to find a solution. The chapter titles tell me that each one will focus on a different type of multicultural conflict. Some chapter titles were: "The Vilis Tokples Schools of Papua New Guinea," "Cross-cultural Confusions in Teacher Assessment," and "Language Diversity and Learning." The book had also been listed in Teacher Magazine as a "Great Book" and had won several other awards.