Language Diversity and Education by Carlos J. Ovando, the author makes the point that the language diversity present in the United States has significant implications for all teachers and all students. He emphasizes the importance of both a person's first language and the dominant language in a culture. He notes the complexity of learning a second language: in addition to the cognitive mastery of vocabulary and grammar involved, fluency in a language involves discourse (structure of paragraphs and larger chunks of written language); appropriateness (adjusting language to the social setting); paralinguistics (body language, gestures, volume, pitch, etc.); and pragmatics (cultural norms involving language, subtle conversation skills). Even though ESL students may seem to be learning English rapidly, those language skills may be largely social and inadequate t the cognitive demands made on it in a classroom.
Ovando gave examples of true dialects in the United States -- creoles, or combinations of several languages developed so people of two or more languages could communicate. They include Gullah, French Creole and Hawaiian Creole. 175 Native American languages have survived. In Anchorage, Alaska, the students speak more than 100 languages as first languages.
This article was most interesting for the detailed explanation of the truly multi-language nature of America's schools. Obviously when one city may have students who speak any of 100 languages other than English, the schools cannot expect to be able to hire teachers fluent in all those languages as well as English, so broader strategies are needed. Ovanda suggests adopting a policy of "constructive pluralism" as a starting point. In this view the student is not criticized for being linguistically different, and the teacher adopts a problem-solving frame of mind rather than making judgments. This approach would combat the view that Black English is inferior because of its use, for instance, of double negatives. Those opposed to this view may feel that "Americans should speak English," but teachers should be able to look past a political stance and teach all the students in their classrooms in the best ways possible.
Perhaps the clearest and most direct way to make the reading and general learning experience more personally relevant, however, is to include an analysis of text-to-self-connections in reading lesson plans and tasks. Not only does this lead explicitly to every individual developing their own context for reading a given text, making them consciously aware of the different perspectives that exist in literature and in the wider world, but a lack
Language and Critical Thinking Language and language diversity has a significant effect in influencing critical thinking because it shapes the individual's worldview or his/her perceptions of the realities that s/he experiences everyday. One of the most often used comparisons in order to illustrate the influence of language diversity in critical thinking is the differences in worldviews of the Eastern and Western cultures. Looking into the basic differences in their language, Eastern societies
Spain and Diversity Education SPAIN AND EARLY CHILDHOOD INTEGRATION The world is coming to grips with the fact that in order for people to live together across an interconnected global community, they need to share some common educational foundations supported with common teaching approaches, tactics and technologies (Urban, 2009). This is why collaborative organizations like the European Union developed a set of common educational goals (in 2001) for 2010; goals that included
Language and Thinking Language is the one aspect, which distinguishes human beings from lower species of life (Faccone et al. 2000). Sternberg (1999 as qtd in Faccone et al.) lists its properties as including communication, arbitrary symbolism, regular structure, structure at multiple levels, generation and production and dynamism. Sternberg assumes that language is most likely acquired naturally from the environment where a person is raised as an infant. The stages seem
When school leadership values diversity and demonstrates the value of diversity the school is more likely to be characterized by diversity in the classroom. IV. Modeling Respect for Diversity Harris (2006) states in the work entitled: "BRAVO Principals" published by Education World that school principals "model respect for diversity when they engage their faculties in addressing issues of identity so that children have successful role models that represent all ethnic groups.
A group that is, by its very nature, mentally defective, will also easily be viewed as incapable of supporting itself without help - a strain on the larger society. In terms of modern day American society, this could be seen as declaring that African-Americans, and other similarly impoverished and marginalized groups, are likely to remain forever within the care of the social welfare system. Believers in such ideas might
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