Language as a Dynamic System

Language is, at its heart, an intricate web of connections ranging from the phonological environments that separate discrete phonemes from allophones, to the complex, sociolinguistic processes that govern pragmatic speech acts. It does not exist without variation, and teaching contexts are made unique by the students within them and their individual learning needs. In short, we as educators are tasked with teaching in a way that focuses on the description of language use, as opposed to the enforcement of a prescribed, “correct” variation. To this point, the artifacts that I have chosen are not only descriptions, but celebrations of language, and how it functions as a system.

The first artifact that I have chosen to include is the curation project that I worked collaboratively on with Miranda Dufour for the LT 538 Teaching and Learning Pragmatics course. This project, titled “Slang and Social Distance Through Popular Culture,” explored how people utilized slang in numerous ways to either decrease or increase social distance, and how these strategies were demonstrated in pop culture media. Our curation project called for language teaching that was sensitive to the contexts in which students would be utilizing language. We offered literature and resources on the ways that instructors could step away from language that was traditionally over-formal, and instead embrace online communities of practice, slang, and swearing to build greater solidarity with the speaking communities of their target language. With conversations and conversational norms varying from language to language and culture to culture (Decapua, 2018), and slang existing as a large part of most casual conversation, instruction on slang usage would be a necessary inclusion in the language classroom.  This artifact examines sociolinguistic features and environment in language teaching, as well as encourages language teaching that caters to how students will use the target language and what their communities of practice will look like. This artifact also makes use of the Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional Competence (IPIC) Framework, as developed by the Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center (AELRC, 2020), which can be seen in the construction of a lesson plan included in this artifact surrounding annoyance swearing vs abuse swearing in the bridging or widening (respectively) of social distance.

The second artifact included here is the research challenge project from the LING 544 Second Language Acquisition class. This research challenge project was written as a condemnation of still-prevalent myths regarding the (incorrectly believed to be) negative impacts of dual language learning. This project spoke to the ways that language learning could positively impact performance in standardized assessments, and improve the development of several cognitive and metalinguistic skills, which have demonstrated improved performance in math and increased reading comprehension, writing, and vocabulary skills, respectively. The creation of this research project was made necessary by the same factors of enforcement on language, and the critiques of people’s voices, that make descriptive linguistics so important. In welcoming variation in language and diversity in learning contexts, it is important to acknowledge and discredit false ideas that may discourage language learning outside of standardized, monolingual practices. This research demonstrates the importance of descriptivist language learning practices, and highlights the benefits of language learning contexts that may have received prescriptivist criticisms in the past. With many schools embracing bilingual or dual-language classroom options, it is catered toward a learning context that is broadly applicable to many K-12 settings.

My last two artifacts are both taken from the LT 534 Language Learning in Context course. The first, a primary data collection and report, is a textbook analysis of Linda Grant’s (2017) Well Said: Pronunciation for Clear Communication. This was a material that I utilized for several months in my teaching of an adult’s Advanced English Pronunciation class. Nowhere is there a more prevalent need for a clear delineation between prescriptive and descriptive instruction than in the context of teaching pronunciation. Well Said made clear from the beginning that the goals students should be striving toward were pronunciation that allowed mutual intelligibility between themselves and native speakers of English, as opposed to the removal of native accent in favor of “native” English accent – hardly a monolith! I evaluated the textbook as being a credit to the course, and a large part of the resources available that made it successful. However, this was a text that was created without online classes in mind, and teaching remotely, especially with little control over the day-to-day lesson plans, brought to light many areas of weakness that could be improved for online or remote classes. Analysis of such materials is particularly timely as well, with the increase of online language learning contexts post-COVID.

My final artifact, also taken from LT 534, is a comparative analysis of online English pronunciation learning and indigenous language instruction in the US. The two contexts that were analyzed were chosen for a few specific reasons: I have past experience teaching online English pronunciation courses, and I hope to have an opportunity to work in indigenous language revitalization in the future. I also hoped that the analysis of the affordances and constraints of these two contexts, and how they strove to utilize and overcome them, could also be of benefit to the other teaching context that I am passionate about, which is English literacy instruction in ESL or bilingual classrooms in the US. This analysis acknowledged the negative impacts experienced by both contexts due to the historical encouragement of English language instruction at the expense of minority language communities. It also demonstrated the constraints and affordances of contexts and how these varied due to differing social statuses of target languages, communities of practice, and student relationship with bilingualism. The latter was specifically examined between contexts that would tend to encourage either conflictive bilingualism, or harmonious bilingualism, respectively (Ortega, 2018).

References

AELRC (2020). Intercultural, Pragmatic, and Interactional (IPIC) Measure. Georgetown University. https://aelrc.georgetown.edu/resources/ressearch-briefs/ipic-research-brief/

DeCapua, A. (2018). Culture myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. University of Michigan Press. 

Grant, L. J. (2017). Well said: Pronunciation for clear communication. National Geographic Learning. 

Ortega. (2018). SLA in Uncertain Times: Disciplinary Constraints, Transdisciplinary Hopes. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 33(1), 1–.