Under the pressure of passing the TOEFL test, the students are constantly engaging in

learning activities that cultivate a consensus on the importance of mastering standard English in
the classroom, which reinforces national governmentality. Through this process, students are too
absorbed in the language appearing on the TOFEL test to place any value on the other forms of
language use outside of the classes. In order to help students prepare their life outside the
classroom, we hope to present the current social and linguistic reality to students who are
subjugated in mainstream institutions (Alim, 2007, p. 161). We also want to train the students to
celebrate, highlight, and consciously utilize a variety of language forms to develop an
understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures,
ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles (Alim, 2007).
This lesson, focusing on the students reaction to aural input, is intended for students to
experience and acknowledge different ways of speaking. In the listening materials for the
TOEFL test, the language use (word, pronunciation, grammar) is uniform and
fixed rather than diverse and fluid. If the teacher does not address the
socio-cultural issue involved and the students continue accepting TOEFL English
as the only appropriate form of the language, we are creating an access
paradox (Lodge, 1997) in which we perpetuate the marginalization of certain
forms of language in a society that continues to recognize the value and
importance of these forms (Alim, 2007). Since many students make it their goal
to speak TOEFL English, it is natural for them, oftentimes subconsciously, to
see it as the standard language and marginalize other ways of speaking.
Therefore, in order for the students to face these issues consciously, they will be
exposed to the variety of language use in America in the video and through
making meta-commentary, they will have the chance to break down the
preconceived biases again certain accents they previously hold.
We expect the students to accept the existence of various language use and recognize the
linguistic heterogeneity of language users. Furthermore, when students listen to Non-TOEFL
English, they are involved in a cognitive process of evaluating what they hear. Our goal is for
them to first become aware of how they view these accents in positive or negative terms and start
breaking down these predetermined linguistic hierarchies in their mind through a deeper
understanding of what accent means. In activity two and three, we use five videos in total to
show students various forms of language use. Through the discussion, we hope students will
realize that the functionality of language matters more in communication other than the
appearance of language (accent).
The reason why we talk about language domination and access here is to address the
existence of variety language use, by introducing activity 3, we want to help students take one
step further to reflect on their own language use experience through interacting with the audio,
which contains the same culture and language background as they do. By doing activity 4 -
human bingo: first, students have chance to engage in real communication to experience what we
were trying to show them in the previous class interact with different people which involves
diverse ways of language use. Second, by asking and answering the human bingo worksheet,
students are given the chance to rethink all the main issues we have discussed in previous class
again, to compare their thoughts with the thoughts from other peers and from themselves at the
beginning of class. By asking them questions, we push them to think and analyze their
experience when interacting with variety of language use, to think whether they have met
difficulties, what difficulties, how they dealt with these difficulties. By this process, we hope to
make students feel more comfortable with sharp differences of culture and social values they
met in group discussion and they might meet in their future daily American life; so that they treat
them as normal, as unremarkable and natural; and above all, as an essential productive resource
for innovation rather than as a cause for anxiety and anger (Kress, 1995, p.6). In this way,
students are more likely to see themselves and treat all language users as legitimate community
members.
In activity 5, we play a video as a wrap-up. In this video, the speaker talked about how
Singlish being defined as wrong in American and discuss why this happened. In the end, she
inspired the audience by emphasizing that there is no right or wrong accent. The message we
want the students to take away from the class is Your way of speaking is your way of living.
The students will then understand that if they want to change their accent, it is all their decision.
We want to remind the students through the class that if they want to align themselves with the
form of language use that they believe will help them in upward social mobility, they have the
right to do so. However, more importantly, we want the students to see that they should not feel
inferior as language users because they do not speak with the TOEFL accent. By watching this
video and discussing their thoughts, we hope students can get some inspirations about variety of
language use and how should we treat our own way of speaking and others way of speaking.

Lesson 3: Project Presentation in Mixed Groups

In this lesson students will be able to: Materials

Talk about their own opinions about the 1.Weird Al Yankovic-Word

legitimacy of the various ways of using
English and identify themselves as
legitimate members of
English-language-using community of
Practice;
Understand that there are various ways of
using English to express themselves and as
long as what they say make sense, it does
not matter if they speak prescriptive
English;
Crimes
http://www.vevo.com/watch/weird
-al-yankovic/Word-Crimes/USRV
81400343
2.Henry, E. (2010). Interpretations
of Chinglish: Native speakers,
language learners and
enregisterment of a stigmatized
code. Language in Society, 39,
669-688. (p.674-p.681)

English language is used to help

communicate with people from different
backgrounds, a lingua franca and students
should feel more confident about their
English competence and also respect others
ways of using English.

Introducing with Word Crimes Teacher Note:

 1. Teacher plays the Word Crimes video During this stage, teacher should
and asks the students to share their thoughts introduce the concepts
prescriptivism &
with each other after watching the video.
nativerspeakerism.

2.Teacher has students do the whole class

sharing.

3.Teacher asks students the following

questions:
1). Do you agree with what is said in the
video, why or why not?
2). How you think about your English, or
more specifically, spoken English? Do you feel
confident while using English to communicate with
others? Why or why not?
3). Have you committed word crimes? Do
you think committing word crimes is OK or not
while using English?

Chinglish and extended thoughts Teacher Note:

4. Teacher has students read excerpts from
Henrys article by dividing students into 2
big groups. Half of the students read
Foreign Perspectives on Chinglish
(p.674-p. 677), another half read Chinese
Perspectives on Chinglish (p.677-p.681).
5.Then teacher pairs students from different
groups and lets them share the information
they learn from their excerpt and their
thoughts with each other.
They can use the following questions to
guide them:
1). Is there anything standing out to you?
2). What are different peoples opinions
about Chinglish? What do you think
about Chinglish?
Teacher should keep in mind that
this way of assigning two groups
of students to read different
excerpt have many advantages:
first, it saves time; second, having
students do intensive reading
instead of the extensive one in
order to get a better understanding
of the part they read; third, it offers
each student the opportunity to
talk.
Before having students do the read,
teacher should make it clear to
them that later their partners from
other group will have to depend on
them to know the main message of
their corresponding excerpt. In that
case, students will try their best to
understand their excerpt.
 The constructive feedback is an
6. Constructive Feedback: important part of the whole lesson,
Teacher tells students that Chinglish is which will make sure that students
are in the right track.
not bad or should be forbidden, it is just a
way of using English. In fact, to some
extent, it enriches English. The way you use
English/language, is an indication of who
you are. So, we should feel comfortable and
confident in speaking English in our own
special way.

Presenting Project Teacher Note:

7. Teacher assigns each student from the When trying to put students in
project group in a mixed group in order for mixed group, teacher should make
sure that in each mixed group,
them to share their project with members in
there will be at least one student
their new groups. from each community (they
Teacher tells students that identify themselves with) in each
While you are listening to others group.
presentation, you may ask yourself
questions like:
1) What can you learn from others
project?
2) What kind of feedback will you give
them?
3) Do the projects have something to do
with what we have learned today, such
asprescriptivism,
native-speakerism?
Re-watching Word Crimes Teacher Note:

8. Teacher has students watch Word Crimes
again and then let students voluntarily
share:
1) What do you think about the word crimes
now? Is there any change in your thought
compared with before?
2). If someone keeps correcting others
During this activity, teacher should
give students more time to reflect
because with enough time of
thinking, students will be able to
display how the lesson affects their
thinking and through this, teacher
will know whether the objectives
of the lesson have been reached, to
while they are talking, what would you tell them some degree.
based on what we have talked about today?

Wrapping Up Teacher Note:

9. Teacher tells students:

1).There are various ways of using English
and as long as what speakers say make
sense, it does not matter if they speak
prescriptive English;
2).English language is lingua franca and
students should feel more confident about
their English competence and respect
others ways of using English as well. They
are both legitimate members of
English-language-using community of
Practice.

Discussion
The lesson is to break down concepts like prescriptivism, native-speakerism and
Chinglish among the students. At the beginning of the class, students will watch Word
Crimes and be asked to think about their opinions so that they will be further led to think about
their feelings toward their own English competence and ways of using English.
Nowadays more and more people keep saying that English has been ruined by young
generation and English should stay pure. Therefore, we use this video as a representative of this
popular point of view. Through this activity, we hope students will engage in critical thinking
about this prescriptive perspective. Since one of our purposes of this lesson is to tell students
that it is not necessary to concern themselves with prescriptive grammar since people hardly