This page is focusing on names—more specifically, how important it is to get our students’ names right. I also want to include a disclaimer that this email is not in response to any feedback I’ve gotten from students, or directed at any teachers in particular! I know we all do our best to get our students’ names right, and even if we come up short, most of our students are too shy, unsure, or nice to say anything. That’s why it’s so important to hold ourselves to a higher standard because even if students don’t correct us, they notice when we say their names wrong.
We’ve all experienced some…shall we say… unique names here at UT, both with our native English speaking students and with our ELs. Some of them are very strange to us and hard to pronounce, but research shows that learning to pronounce our students’ names correctly is incredibly important. This study included anecdotes from students who have had their names mispronounced or changed by teachers, and concluded that, “Whether being culturally disrespectful, unaware of their actions, or even just stumbling over a name they had never seen before, the tone set by a teacher about a student’s name was something significant that participants have remembered for many years.”
Here are a couple of excerpts from the same study (okay, more than a couple but I couldn’t narrow it down):
Every teacher this student ever had mispronounced her name. She dreaded daily attendance, never raised her hand, and tried to remain inconspicuous and anonymous in the classroom. She graduated from one of Portland’s high schools with honors. At the honors ceremony prior to graduation, a vice principal walked to the podium to present the student with a prestigious award. He butchered her name mercilessly, shaking his head and laughing as others laughed along. The student slumped in her seat and hid behind the person seated in front of her. She did not go onstage to receive her award and did not attend graduation the next night. As soon she was able to, the student changed her name to ‘Anita.’
In elementary school, a teacher asked me to provide my mother’s maiden name for an application form. I vividly recall him laughing at my response once I told him, ‘Her maiden name is Sandel.’ Her name seemed so ‘foreign’ to him that he could only comprehend and pronounce her name when he compared it to an object. His confused response was, ‘Like a sandal?’ I didn’t find that comparison humorous the way he did (or the rest of the class who began laughing too), but I definitely felt it was demeaning being ridiculed in front of my classmates.
A Latina named Maythee (pronounced My - TE with stress on second syllable) had many bad experiences in school with teachers and the pronunciation of her name. She shared: Since kindergarten I’ve had my name anglicized to May-ThE…. I did have one bad experience in high school when a biology teacher spent the whole year calling me Maitai! I just never had the nerve to correct him until the end when a bunch of students told him. I’ve always known that no one remembers my name so I have to make it a point of repeating it frequently. It’s definitely always made me feel like an outsider. Since I come from an immigrant family, it was always yet another way that I knew I was not American. As a child, I used to try to anticipate when teachers were going down the list so I could say my name out loud before they had a chance to mispronounce it.
Ahilan was mispronounced brutally by my first grade teacher, leading me to adopt that mispronunciation and use it all through high school and college.… To this day it causes confusion and embarrassment for me with my friends and others.… My last name was (and is) mispronounced or not even attempted on a daily basis. Numerous people asked me to shorten it, or just shortened it for me. I couldn’t talk about that for a long time. It made me feel that it was an imposition on others for them to learn my name; it made me feel embarrassed to have it.
If you enjoyed reading about students’ experiences with their names, this article is a story about a girl named Tasbeeh. Her name had been mispronounced her entire life and when a teacher finally cared enough to get it right:
When I say my name, it feels like redemption. I have never said it this way before. Tasbeeh. He repeats it back to me several times until he’s got it. It is difficult for his American tongue. His has none of the strength, none of the force of my mother’s. But he gets it, eventually, and it sounds beautiful. I have never heard it sound so beautiful. I have never felt so deserving of a name. My name feels like a crown.
An article by Education Week Teacher (I think you only can read 3 articles for free, but I bought a subscription, so let me know if you want to use it) highlights why it’s so important to pronounce names correctly.
For students, especially the children of immigrants or those who are English-language learners, a teacher who knows their name and can pronounce it correctly signals respect and marks a critical step in helping them adjust to school. But for many ELLs, a mispronounced name is often the first of many slights they experience in classrooms; they're already unlikely to see educators who are like them, teachers who speak their language, or a curriculum that reflects their culture. "If they're encountering teachers who are not taking the time to learn their name or don't validate who they are, it starts to create this wall," said Rita (ree-the) Kohli, an assistant professor in the graduate school of education at the University of California, Riverside. It can also hinder academic progress. A divide already exists between many English-learners and immigrant students and their native-English speaking peers. Despite a national increase in the overall graduation rate, the dropout rate for foreign-born and immigrant students remains above 30 percent, three times that of U.S.-born white students.
Here are some strategies you can use to help you pronounce students' names correctly:
· On the first or second day of school, while students are working on something, go around and ask students individually how to say their names, so that you don’t pronounce it wrong and force them to correct you in front of the whole class.
· Ask students, “How do your parents say your name?” Without asking this question, they likely will say that however you pronounce it is okay.
· Emphasize to students that you want to say their name correctly, that they deserve it, and that they should correct you if you say it wrong.
· When students come in the first week, greet them at the door, say their name, and ask if you pronounced it correctly.
· Do your best to foster a personal relationship with your students so that they feel comfortable with you.
· Use pictures from Skyward, notes with phonetic pronunciations, and class activities to help you remember names.
I’ll close with just a few more links. This article focuses on the connection between names and building relationships, this one talks about the impact of mispronouncing names, and this article addresses why pronunciation matters. Finally, the My Name My Identity campaign aims to bring awareness to the importance of names and to build a culture of respect and caring in schools.