October 21's Reflection

The words “help”, “developmental”, “remedial”, “standard”, “native” and the like really annoy me insomuch as what they refer to is the real question. The first three words foster and enhance the deficit model that other ethno-linguistic diversities are less intellectual, less knowledgeable and possess less critical and analytical skills. What is Standard English? Is it the American English, British English, Scottish English, Australian English or World English?????

Personally, I find defining what is standard by what is not or by what it lacks rather “naïve” and “misleading” at the same time. Standard English is just a myth, a literacy ideology and an “abstract” concept that needs, or maybe does not need, to be concretized. Standard-English proponents say that the use of “ain’t” and double negatives is indicative of a “stigmatized” version of English, but what about these examples:

I might could do that
Drive careful
My car needs cleaned

It seems that topic relatedness is an important aspect of a writing classroom. However, from Johns’s article, I felt that this is not an easy task to perform. What relates to my experience as a learner might be different from that of what other learners’. One student loved to write about the different paces he had been in, whereas another loved writing about joining a certain cult, and a third loved to write a letter to a magazine editor. Learners across the board prefer to write for different reasons and for different audiences, and this is what I mean by the fact that topic relatedness is a relative concept.

It is about time all people acknowledged the fact that we do not live in a vacuum, but rather in a cultural, social, institutional, academic and discursive continuum. We live in a globalized world whether we like it or not, and calls for English-Only and mono-lingualism need to be reconsidered. Literacy, as argued by many scholars, is a highly social practice and process, and thus our classrooms need to be socio-literate in nature, because our classrooms are not homogenized. Classrooms are heterogenized; students come from diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural, sub-cultural, dialectical, ideological backgrounds, and as teachers we have to be fully aware of such a fact and should not treat students, based on the deficit model and the native-non-native dichotomy.