Michael John Di Martino

Celebrating Linguistic Heritage While Learning English

Until school boards permit a freer use of dialects and languages as early as possible in the American classroom, the literacy level of students for whom standard English is not native will continue to suffer. As a new teacher of English, I welcome full heartedly theories that allow students to bring their home language and prior texts into the classroom.

Language itself is valid to theory because theories are valued when they become social practices. Hence, as bell hooks suggests, any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public (64). Although our national language is English, a technicality of the bifurcating British political power dating back over two hundred years, descendants of other ethnic and racial groups are also accountable for the greatness of this county. I am not by any means attempting to suggest that English should not be the language of this land, but that we need to make the students whose home language is not English be part of the national discourse. While standard American English serves an academic purpose, it does not reflect the discourse of all Americans. After all, it has not been possible to preserve the form of the English language brought to this country, which, by the way, was not the standard English spoken in England in the 1700s. The majority of students in many US school are not of AngloSaxon descent. This, coupled with the other fact that all languages are destined to change, should be a strong indication that the traditional American methods of teaching in a language not shared by a sizable portion of its society are inadequate. How do we best serve the literacy of the US inhabitants whose home language is not English? Since I do place the validity of theories and practices in the teaching of English on my own hard-earned experience, do kindly allow me to summarize my linguistic battles, which serve as the basis for the Theory into Practice paper. I have spent a large portion of my life feeling ashamed; either ashamed for not speaking the standard national language of for sounding foreign. As a child, I knew hunger but not the sense of being devalued. I was happy alone with my imagination, embracing the words of my forefathers or just creating things with my hands. The images I created either in my mind or with words always appeared as part of a larger reality. All was possible then. But that was before I was told we were poor. That revelation certainly explained why we lived in a dingy and damp one-room flat in one of the least desirable neighborhoods. Yet, what truly bothered me was the social connotation of the word poor. We were the commoners. There were others considered better, not only because they had many
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conveniences such as hot water, but because they could read, write and speak in ways much valued by those in power. When my mother, with some difficulty, taught me how to write my name, I knew she lacked literary skills. I was not to be surrounded by books. Luckily, she could tell me stories from her childhood: the stories told by her mother, grandparents, and by the last puppeteers who traveled from nearby town to earn a meager living. Learning to read and write was not meant to be easy for me. Certainly, not in the hands of my sadistic first grade teacher who enjoyed abusing the pupils both physically and emotionally. She was also a Southerner and spoke our mother tongue, but not once did she use it to comfort us. She was a believer in total immersion in the classroom, where the first words of the standard language we learned served to classify the social status of our parents. Poverty by another name didnt make me feel less despised. Some appreciation for school began with my fourth and fifth grade teacher. He was the second person I knew whose storytelling seemed real, and the first to see something in me that I still do not. Whenever he ran into my mother he advised her that I was worthy of an education. The importance of an education was not clear to either one of us, but the fact that he thought me capable of learning definitely meant something. It most certainly spurred me to try harder simply because the teacher believed in me. At that time, one of my main preoccupations was to justify learning the public language of those affluent, which played no part in my lived world beyond the classroom. Once, when I had to recite a poem in class written by a fellow Southerner, I realized the possibility of mastering the standard language in ways to be emulated. That did much for my self-esteem. Never before did I recite a poem while blushing because of my own intense feelings. When I came to the US, I expected to learn a new language called English; I was not aware of nonstandard forms and of the differences between British and American English. Worse yet, I exposed my tender self to further linguistic prejudice that would torment me like a never ending nightmare. Generalizations are fallacies better avoided, but what I am about to state contains a painful truth confirmed and reconfirmed for veracity through many years. Many
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native American speakers have a misguided sense of language superiority when engaging with people who have strange accents and overlook the fact that these foreigners have their own mother tongue. I spend my first year in the US in all mainstream classes. It was an unproductive and very emotionally disturbing experience. I had dealt with immersion in the classroom as a child but not in a foreign county. Then, I was marginalized for not speaking the national Italian language but not silenced because I could still interact outside of the classroom in the Sicilian vernacular. Now, my tongue contorted painfully, and I feared hearing the harsh new sounds of my voice. When all hope was nearly lost and anxiety prevailed, the school board introduced the first ESL program in my high school. My ESL teacher, Katharine, was caring and talented. Although she had never taught English, her experience as a foreign language teacher guided her. She integrated a cultural study in her classroom and illustrated most of the new vocabulary she introduced. Her sketches were too babyish for high school age kids but helped me get the gist of the new words. Katharine also knew rather well that academic English serves specific purposes and situations, and that we could have broadened our dialogues by learning other variations of the language. She invited the coolest guy in school, Raul Mendez, to teach us what was then called slang. There was nothing offensive about teaching and learning words borrowed from African American Vernacular English. This linguistic variance has allowed me an understanding of some dialogues outside of the classroom. There is an unexplainable emptiness and lack of vision within people who can speak but not write in their mother tongue. Their words take on a more direct association with things than the written form. For these individuals, it is more challenging to learn standardized languages because they have difficulty associating their words with the symbols of letters. In the US, the unfortunate children afflicted by this dilemma are likely to be African Americans or first generation Americans. Many of these children are left behind scholastically and may spend several years attempting to recover reading and writing skills. My theory is not very original, nor is it free from implications or financial burdens to school boards. It is similar to that
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proposed in the first Oakland resolution, and to the models adopted in Switzerland and Canada. Whenever possible, children or adults need to read or be read to in their native tongue either before or while learning English. In the case of many African Americans left out of the national discourse, the studies of African American speech, which began to prove that this dialect is based on logical morphology, hold the key to proficiency in academic English. Legitimizing the use of African American literature in the classroom is not taking retrograde steps in American education. Rather, it permits these Americans to recover the symbols of their primary language that are vital to their experience to hold multiple discourses. In my ESL classroom, my linguistic experiences guide my teaching. As you might have perceived, I am not a believer in total immersion. Ideally, language and grammar are best learned in context, but this happens most naturally in early literary programs and after one gains proficiency in a given language. ESL students learn listening, speaking, reading and writing skills simultaneously. While in some institution the use of any foreign language or bilingual dictionary is forbidden, I disagree with this practice. Human beings need validation of their home language; when people are lost in a new space in which language is merely a collection of sounds, they need more reassurance that their words posses meaning. Like children, they need to touch the letters. They need to compare the letters of their words with those of the language to be acquired. We ought to encourage them to retain their linguistic symbols in order to transfer these to the new language. I have had students from nearly a dozen different countries and it is impossible to instruct them in their primary languages. However, at intermediate levels I do not expect strict adherence to formal grammar or pronunciation. I do not mark their misuse of verbal tenses, emission of direct/indirect objects, or disagreement of subject and verb as mistakes; these are not inherent in some of the students home languages. To simulate an environment inductive to learning English, I also let them translate words and expressions out loud and enjoy seeing their faces light up because their native words carry fuller meanings. I also encourage them to translate written materials, and do not object when some scribble Asian characters next to
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English words when taking quizzes. As a person and former ESL student who has experienced linguistic shame and continues to see linguistic prejudice, I do not have a misguided sense of linguistic superiority. In the language lab, for example, I prefer that students listen to variations of the English language. I see the advantage of linguistic diversity. The only way to truly have students bring their home discourse and prior texts into the classroom is to let them celebrate their linguistic heritage while learning English. If academic English does not play an active role in the private lives of students, we have to create a space for the students diverse literary skills in the classroom.

_____________________________ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. NY: Ront Ledge. 1994