Thursday, March 19, 2015

Linguistics in the Classroom: An Ethnographic Recording by Audra Cormack

Linguistics in the Classroom

            “Are there still dialects?” an inquisitive soul might ask.  According to Professor Kirk Hazen of West Virginia University’s Department of English, the answer is simple: “We’ve still got humans!  If you kill off all the humans…language itself would stop existing as we know it.”  In our February 29th class meeting, we took Kirk’s answer as a resounding “yes.”  Within the walls of our Allen Hall classroom, Kirk’s guest lecture was accompanied by a discussion of all things language, including dialect identities, prescriptively correct vs. rhetorically correct perspectives, and exciting application possibilities for those very human students of ours.
Kirk has been a professor for fifteen years, is the founder and director of the West Virginia Dialect Project (WVDP), which studies language variation and change in the state, and is the author of three books and over thirty articles.  Speaking to us about his role as an English teacher, he said, “[It] has to be the weirdest of weird teaching jobs.”  It seems the nature of his English research is no less strange…and wonderful.

LANGUAGE AND WRITING
“The perception of dialect study in Appalachia is very different from the actual study of it,” he said.  To help our class understand these foundational differences, Kirk took us through the linguistic study of language variation and how it is primarily based upon language instead of writing.  While writing is a technology, “language is a biological endowment that other species don’t have,” he told us.  Going on to describe writing as a way of recording, Kirk kept up an already ongoing joke of my ethnographic recording of everything he was saying.  This humor set the atmosphere of our meeting that night and helped ease the tension of some of the very serious issues we would later discuss.

PRESCRIPTIVE VS. RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVES
According to Kirk, Professor Charles Fries of the University of Michigan wanted teachers to understand the important difference between language and writing and to stop teaching prescriptive rules as moral code.  A prescriptive perspective approach says that there are such things as “absolute corrects” in English.  This perspective is all about judging language and is done to supposedly teach students to be “morally upstanding as people.”  A rhetorical perspective, however, says, “it may be wrong or right, depending on its achievement of rhetorical purpose.”  In other words, English has too many complexities to simply filter it down into “right” and “wrong” categories, without taking context into account.  Kirk said, “I argue for a more complex understanding of language and how it works.  That doesn’t always work well for folks.”

STIGMATIZED PRONUNCIATIONS
“Language,” Kirk explained, “is one of the last parts of academia that has right and wrong morality still.”  Through a chapter from his latest book and a YouTube video of David Beckham, we discussed the occurrence of socially marked pronunciation.
Stigmatization is a strange beast, as we learned that it doesn’t exist when everyone has the same, (seemingly “different”), pronunciation.  In southern North Carolina, in Warren County, for example, /f / is pronounced in place of /th/ in “birthday.”  The pronunciation is completely unstigmatized, however, and no one knows about it because everyone shares the same pronunciation.


TEACHING METALINGUISTICS
After listening to Kirk’s opening lecture, we all began to warm up in our understanding of language and dialect, and several class members wanted advice for how to start implementing these ideas in our classrooms.  Carmen expressed some anxiety about teaching linguistics in rural communities, where students may have never before been exposed to in-depth language study.  She asked Kirk for his opinion on how best to begin introducing linguistics to these students. Kirk said that it is a very slow process, but that there are many strategies we can use to begin.  He shared the following ideas for classroom application:

            IDEAS FOR TEACHING:
·      Have students look at their own speech, at certain bits of variation:
o   For example, have them look at English inflectional suffixes, such as the “g-dropping” coronal nasal -in [ɪn] versus the velar nasal -ing [ɪŋ].
§  “Walkin’ is fun.” vs. “Walking is fun.”
§  “I was walkin’.” vs. “I was walking.”
“There is a greater preponderance to get ‘walkin’’ when the thing is verby vs. when the thing is nouny,” Kirk told us.  Gerunds, it seems, are even cooler than their grammatical title.        
·      Talk about their grandmother speaking or words she uses versus what they say or what words they use.
·      Ask them, “What are some of the vocabulary terms that are actually different throughout your community or that differ between your community and other regions?”  This approach will teach students about regionally specific lexicon. 
o   Examples could include:
§  “pop” vs. “coke” vs. “soda”
§  “firefly” vs. “lightning bug”
§  “frying pan” vs. “skillet”
·      Get them some texts from Shakespeare and before.  Find language differences.
·      Teach them about multiple negation.
o   For example:
§  “She didn’t want no candy.” 
According to Kirk, “This used to be the standard preferred genre convention to use.  For various social reasons, it became stigmatized.”  He emphatically told us (blowing our minds) that, “Multiple negation has ALWAYS been a part of English!”
·      Inform our students and ourselves about the Great Vowel Shift.  It is vital for understanding the concept of spelling.
o   Kirk explained that, in the time of Chaucer, you have words like this: “book.”  You spell a word with the vowel cluster <oo>; wouldn’t it be nice if this digraph represented the long o sound /oː/?  It did!
o   If you have a word like “meet,” wouldn’t it be nice if it represented the long a sound /eɪ/?  It did!
During the Great Vowel Shift, these long vowels moved up, and the actual pronunciation of tens of thousands of words changed.  In fact, all pronunciation changed, but spelling didn’t, and length no longer made a distinction in meaning.

Jon asked what accommodations we, as teachers, should make for our students’ dialects in writing.  Kirk said that this is a matter of teaching and training our students in genre conventions.  Audra added that the importance of this genre convention approach is that our actions become “an editing issue rather than a value judgment.”  Brandi gave us a clear example of an Appalachian college teacher who noticed that her first-generation students were spelling words in the same manner in which they pronounced them.  To address the issue, she had them make a list of the words that they commonly misspelled, how they said them, and how they thought the words would be written academically.  This allowed the students to differentiate between speech and writing. 
Audra said that, with speech, normalization is the needed approach.  If we teach our students the various genre conventions in which to use speech, we can “normalize difference, rather than stigmatize difference.”  Our students need to learn from us what is socially acceptable in various contexts instead of being fed devastating ideas that their language is socially stigmatized.  Awareness, according to Kirk, is key to our students’ success.  “ I want these students to learn more.  They should be metalinguistically aware – aware of what their own variations are,” he declared.  I would agree.  As teachers, we have the power to help build our students’ minds and confidence or to contribute to their destruction.
Along with learning teaching “dos,” we also went through a few major “don’ts.”
o   For example, we might look at an instance when the infinitive “to be,” as in: “My car needs to be washed” disappears.  With this regional construction, “needs” is directly followed by a bare passive participle: “My car needs washed.”   
§  Which is correct?  Kirk said he had a teacher from Ohio ask him, “So what do we do about this problem?”  Kirk’s answer?  “What problem?”
§  It seems we need to understand that our students’ speech patterns may be regional markers but are most certainly not criminal!
o   Having students “translate” text into different dialects of which they may be unfamiliar could also be a potential teaching pitfall.  An example of this risky activity would be when teachers direct students to rewrite a Shakespearean play in different dialects.  The resulting writing sounds like different “types” of people.  Audra said that this is a common but problematic teaching exercise because it can affect students’ perceptions of people and encourages dialect stereotyping.

DIALECTIC IDENTITY, STIGMA, AND RACISM        
Awareness of stereotypes surely leads us to consider identity.  Carmen shared a relevant personal story about her boyfriend’s dad, Sam, who “plays up” his dialect in conversation.  Raised in Nicholas County, WV, Sam traveled all over the world, even living in California for a period of time, before returning to Nicholas County.  He has clearly been exposed to a variety of dialects.  Carmen said she thinks Sam emphasizes his home dialect because “he doesn’t want to see it go away.”  Kirk did not seem surprised by this behavior, saying, “[His dialect is] part of his identity.  Performing it will be part of what he does.”
            What happens to identity, then, when people move away from their homes?  Is their dialect lost?  What about their identities?  Audra revealed an example of a student who had left her home county to complete her dissertation work but had returned home to find that she no longer “fit in,” linguistically, in either her home northern city or back in the southern region to which she had moved.  The student clearly experienced displacement.  Kirk said that the dark side of dialectic identity is that social stigmatization of the dialect usage “reminds people of who they don’t like.”  Someone’s dialect, in other words, can be used as a tool for discrimination.
            When dialect is being used to discriminate against someone, deeper issues are exposed.  Our next question from Jennifer, (after pondering what we, as teachers, do about things like code switching and curriculum changes), involved the Oakland, California school board decision to define Ebonics as the native language of their African American students.  “What was the explosive part [of this situation]?” she asked.
Both Brandi and Kirk blamed the uproar on racism.  “It gave all too many people opportunity to make overt criticism of black America as part of humor – a way to openly make fun,” he said with chagrin.  His next statement made us feel how deeply important it is to be dialectically aware – not only as teachers, but as citizens in this world.  “Dialect discrimination,” he claimed, “is the last open back door to racism or discrimination.”



ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
·      Language Log – great archive resource for language in the media
·      tysto.com/uk-us-spelling – resource for teaching spelling genre conventions
·      Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English by John Russell Rickford – highly recommended book on the Ebonics firestorm
·      Ebonics timeline:
·      An Introduction to Language by Professor Kirk Hazen
·       “Unvernacular Appalachia: An Empirical Perspective on West Virginia Dialect Variation” by Professor Kirk Hazen, Paige Butcher, and Ashley King 

·      “Variationist Approaches to Language and Education” by Professor Kirk Hazen

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Book Review 3: Crum: The Novel by Lee Maynard

Review by Carmen Bowes
February 26, 2015
I am reviewing the novel Crum by Lee Maynard. It is a semi-autobiographical, realistic fiction novel and was first published in 1988 by Washington Square Press; my copy was printed by Vandalia Press in 2001.
Synopsis
The novel opens with 3 lines:
            When all the goodbyes are said
            I want to be the one who is leaving
           
            And it’s going to be good to be gone
They are oriented just like that, no punctuation, and extra spacing between the second and third lines. Crum is a novel about staying and going, home and wilderness, and most of all, it is about growing up in West Virginia.
Maynard’s writing bounces back and forth between the obscene and the romantic. In one scene his friend blows up an outhouse and in another he is noting how glorious fall is in West Virginia. He says:
 “I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it. The air was lighter and cleaner and it smelled better. Things in the woods seem to calm down, knowing that they are having the last kind days before the wet and blowy winter slams the lid shut on the tops of the mountains” (55).
            The story follows a high school boy, who we assume is some form of Lee Maynard himself, through his senior year. He ends up in all sorts of different trouble, finding his way in and out of squabbles, fighting with the boys from Kentucky on the other side of the river, and getting attention from girls and then having it taken away; all of the normal tells of a coming-of-age novel. The big difference here is that the backdrop is West Virginia and the kid-turning-adult does not have misty notions about their childhood, he can’t wait to get out, and he does.
Use in an English Language Arts Classroom
I think this novel could be taught in an ELA classroom. It has potential on its own and in conjunction with other texts.
There are a few hang-ups, well, one hang-up for the most part; it is filthy. The word cunt appears multiple times along with lewd content and some pretty great examples of teenage boys and girls not caring a whole lot about their reputations.
That being said, I think this novel’s balance of the obscene and some serious thought provoking subject matter could make for a perfect novel to teach the right class. To use this in a classroom, I recommend first off that it is fit for 11th or 12th grades only, you would have to assess your students to see if they could handle the whole novel or not. On top of that, I would suggest a permission slip sent home to parents ahead of time.

Text Alternative and Thematic Unit Ideas
·       This novel could pair nicely with some Mark Twain. You could either pair it or use one of Twain’s texts as an alternative to Crum for students whose parents did not sign the permission slip.
·       I designed a unit last semester using this text and the short story "Strawberry Lipstick" by a Russian woman named Kseniya Melnik. I used social class and home as driving themes for the unit, inspecting both texts for the best ways to incorporate ideas. 
·       Since this text can get pretty mature, pretty fast, I would say that teaching one part of the book might be a safer alternative as well. It is separated into 5 parts, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer...Again. You could use one or several of these in order to show the language without the vulgarity.
·       Another idea I had was to read Crum and connect it to the “brain drain” we have spoken about in class.
·       I also found that Crum might pair nicely with some of Shelby Lee Adams Appalachian Photography (See the snake handling woman to the right). You could do a thematic unit about the representation of Appalachia.
Conclusion
      While this text presents some challenges, it is a book about boys being boys in Appalachia. It is relatable, it creates a space to talk about community, representation, and what students want for themselves. I think in the right classroom, this text could be incredibly rewarding on multiple levels for both students and teachers.



Addressing the "Culture of Poverty" Myth and Using Documentary Films

Disrupting the Stereotypes of Poverty
Jennifer Parrill Lopez

* As a class, we choose to employ person-first language and avoid terminology with negative connotations.  However, direct quotes of other authors remain unaltered.


            If you’ve been identified as Appalachian, people think they know a little something about you.  Drawing on the common stereotype, they may assume that you are poor, uneducated, lazy, and welfare dependent.  We have studied how critical literacy and Place Based Education give our students the opportunity to unpack these stereotypes, explore the fallacy of an “Appalachian Culture,” and view themselves as participants who influence the body of work that surrounds their identity. 
This week, we applied a similar lens to the stigma of poverty through reading selections from Paul Gorski’s Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap, specifically Chapter 4 “The Trouble with the ‘Culture of Poverty’ and Other Stereotypes about People in Poverty” and Chapter 9 “The Mother of All Strategies: Committing to Working With Rather than On Families in Poverty.”  Like “Appalachian,” poverty has been misidentified as a culture whose inherent weakness must be remedied from the outside.  Once we understand the myth of the “culture of poverty,” we as pre-service teachers can begin to interrogate and remedy our deficit view of students and families living in material poverty.
Why is it important for educators to critically consider the social stigma and prevailing inaccuracies surrounding poverty?  We, though teachers, are unwitting consumers of this false model.  As Brandi stated,

“Unlearning prejudices and stereotypes takes years, but we have to do it if we want to serve our kids well and not just be nice to them.  We grow up with a single narrative of what poor people are like, what Appalachians are like, and we constantly have to redress that.”

Brittany expressed a need for this self-awareness, “I will need to push all my students, no matter what I know about their background and home life.”  If we allow our assumptions to inform pedagogy, then lower expectations of students living in poverty result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
Gorski credits Oscar Lewis with coining the term “culture of poverty” in his 1959 work Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty and many theorists have since based their work on this concept of a shared set of traits among those in poverty.  However, subsequent research has determined that “poor people* do not share a predictable, consistent culture” (55).  Nevertheless, “the same type of application of Lewis’s work survives today in (Ruby) Payne’s (2005) mind-set of poverty model, which claims that poverty is attributable, not to inequities or to an unequal distribution of opportunity or even to educational access disparities, but to the problematic ‘culture’ of poor families”*(54). 

            Gorski identifies five stereotypes associated with families in poverty and education – stereotypes that insidiously affect how we teach and interact with our students:
·      Stereotype 1: Poor People* Do Not Value Education
·      Stereotype 2: Poor People Are Lazy
·      Stereotype 3: Poor People Are Substance Abusers
·      Stereotype 4: Poor People Are Linguistically Deficient and Poor Communicators
·      Stereotype 5: Poor People Are Ineffective and Inattentive Parents


Of these, Stereotype 5 was predominant in our roundtable discussion as we examined how the structure of the school system disenfranchises those in poverty, the idea being that school is a system of social reproduction. “School is a place where the differences should be set aside, but really is put center stage, for instance with fundraisers” observed Brittany.  Carmen expressed the need to engage parents as equal partners.  This means considering the compatibility between the structure of parents’ lives and the structure of the school schedule.  Is the school structure incompatible with the availability of transportation and work demands? Home visits were suggested as a minimum effort for the elementary level, and suitable for at risk students at the secondary level.  Dr. Slocum pointed out that, “Being informed specifically about a person’s life enables you to make connections with your students…it takes a lot of practice to learn how to be in community with someone rather than about someone.” 
So we are left to dismantle our own misperceptions in preparation for teaching.  Dr. Slocum asks us,
“As a teacher, as an ethnographer – how are things working here, how are we interacting [in class with our students]? How do we experience whiteness? Class? Collecting data points and constantly testing – what am I being told about this person and by whom?  Does this actually make sense and why might this person be telling me this?  Kids make the same judgments about themselves and their classmates – develop facts and counter facts and set up a narrative about poverty that questions stereotypes rather than perpetuates them.”
This two-fold approach is challenging, not only because it means crafting a curriculum of social consciousness, but also because it demands a level of introspection that can be uncomfortable.  For instance, Carmen described her mother’s responsibilities as a school psychologist, making home visits to monitor students living in material poverty.  In order to clarify, I asked, “Assessing for neglect?”  My underlying belief was revealed - children living in poverty are at a higher risk for neglect.  When Brandi quickly amended with “impoverishment,” I realized my assumption.  This is what I mean by insidious.  We are hardly aware of our beliefs, but it is revealed through our actions and words.  This is where pretending to be socially just will fail and parents and students will see through the façade of “niceness”.
            Although there was predominant agreement with the position of the chapters, there was some discomfort with the representation of “middle class”.  Audra C. felt that Gorski, “constructed a ‘culture of wealth’ while attempting to dismantle the ‘culture of poverty’ – there’s no room for people who are not low SES to continue to interact and learn.”  Caleb asked, “Is there a ‘middle class culture’, but not a ‘culture of poverty’?”  Sam felt that the idea of social class bore further scrutiny, “What gets lost is that social class is a representation, an appearance like suburban-ism – one of the structures that creates poverty is the educational system itself – by privileging the suburban middle class ideal.”  If we are working to disrupt stereotypes surrounding low income, surely we should strive to abandon all misconceptions associated with class and socioeconomic status.



            So, we’ll continue to do the work and catch ourselves out – not just for the remainder of the semester, but for years to come.  Gorski mentions the ease with which we denounce those outside of our own group.  Will critical literacy and Place Based Education enable teachers and students to stop identifying with the group, and start identifying with individuals?  It’s a start.

Media Literacy Resources
            Film representations of the Appalachia often reinforce inaccurate stereotypes, focus heavily on mining issues, and center on historical rather than contemporary events.  Using film as an alternative text in the PBE classroom facilitates the dismantling of the falsely constructed image of Appalachia that reaches a broad audience through media.  Below are some suggested resources for media literacy/PBE lessons.

Films
Harlan County, USA (1976)
Matewan (1987)
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2009)

These and other titles can be found at Amazon, iTunes, youtube, and appalshop.org.
Media Literacy Questions for Analyzing Point of View:
PBS: Media Literacy Questions