3-27

March 27, 2012

English is a language of power. This is evident in the reading assigned this week. Due to globalization, English has been learned widespread. This is due to the amount of media produced in English such as movies, advertising and music. People all around the globe learn English in order to be part of the global society.

Monoligualism is also discussed in this week’s reading with quite a brash quote (found in the third perspective) by Skutnabb-Kangas on page 22 and 23. In this quote it is made clear that monolinguals are incompetent to teach ESL. It goes on to say that the first thing ESL teachers need to do is eradicate monolingualism among themselves. I really was wide eyed while reading this quote because that is me, a monolingual. I really don’t agree with the quote. I feel that an educated and empathetic teacher can reach ELL students just as a bilingual teacher can.

I recognize that there are certain benefits to being a bilingual ELL teacher. I think that learning/knowing a second language would help me empathize with my ELL students on a completely different level. However, in my opinion, a monolingual teacher can be just as effective in teaching ELL students as a bilingual teacher. This quote is an extremist view, I understand, but it is important to know that this viewpoint exists.

Another idea that is explored is that monolingualism promotes complacency. This is because being a native speaker of English you can go pretty much anywhere and have signs in written in English and speakers of English nearby. Therefore, there isn’t an urgency to learn a second language. This has caused second language learning to decline in Universities in America, the UK, and Australia (p.23). This is the reason I have never become extremely motivated to learn a second language. I took 4 years of French and went through the motions to earn an A. However, I never mastered the language because there was no immediate need to do so. Now, when I visited Paris, I really wished I would have retained the language but other than my one trip to France I would probably never need to know French as a means of communication. Unlike non-native English speakers, I don’t need to learn a language to do business, watch a movie, listen to music, or surf the web. I believe that if I spoke French as my first language I would be more motivated to learn English so that I could take part of the global society.

March 20

The Rich and Troudi article was a reminder of how common place Islamophobia has become since post 9/11. It was interesting that it is just as a reality in the United Kingdom as in the United States. The definition of Islamophobia on page 617 of the article uses the words “irrational fear.” I know so many people who have an irrational fear against people who are Muslim. It comes through when they talk with one another, othering Muslims by saying, “Well, you know how they are,” and “Must be a terrorist.”

My sister was recently flying to Texas. She was sitting across the aisle from a Muslim man who was very nervous. He caught her eye because he was very unsettled and looked like he was going to be sick. In the midst of this happening a woman behind her leaned up and said “I’m thinking the same thing you are.” My sister being as calm as she could looked at the woman and said, I’m not sure what you’re thinking but I’m thinking he really just doesn’t like flying. “ This is a prime example of Islamophobia post 9/11. If this woman would have taken time to observe and take in the big picture she would have seen how uneasy he was about flying.

But how do people overcome something as powerful as 9/11? How do we train our minds not to go to the dark place when the media has ingrained so many Muslim/terrorist images before our eyes? I think that we have to be disciplined members of society, more observant than respondent. Being an observer is a difficult skill and one that many people have not attained. With self-discipline and commitment it can be practiced and applied to situations like the one I described above.

On another note, It has been quite common in my experience to hear a person begin a sentence with, “I don’t mean to be racist, but…” The use of “I don’t mean to” is used to be a deflection away from the person being racist or making a racist remark. This use of words can be categorized under a new racism, a category of racism where people know what their saying is racist but it doesn’t stop them. What makes it “okay” is the acknowledgement that you don’t mean to be racist in the first place. This thinking is just not right.

Finally, when I was reading the Karim and Ibrahim article I wrote a huge question mark beside BESL on page 349. What is this? I asked myself. I had never heard of this acronym before. BESL (Black English as a Second Language) made sense as I read and understood the information presented in the article. The students interviewed said they learned English mostly from TV. As African immigrants they are going to identify with people who look most like themselves. Therefore, they are going to be drawn to rap and hip hop TV and consequently Black English will be the model that these ESL learners are exposed to.

So, I wonder will the students have a hard time code switching between BESL and ESL? Some native English learners have a hard time with code switching between AAVE and Standard English. This was just a thought I had in the back of my mind.

March 6

I think that Taylor-Mendes calls attention to something that is very important regarding ESL/EFL textbooks. Since America, the UK, and Canada, as mentioned in the article, have experienced diverse immigration it is interesting that our textbooks do not show this through images. The question What does an American look like? Is answered through the illustrations in the studied textbooks as “white, wealthy, powerful, isolated with members of their own race, and free of problems.” This, I believe, is very sad since a walk down many American large towns and cities will reveal that Americans are very diverse and look very different from one another. This reality is what our nation was founded on and it is a very sad thing that these ideals are not shown through the images projected in textbooks targeted for students who are learning English.

I think that it is interesting that most of the participants (10) in the study were white themselves. Also, the participants came from two of the wealthiest social classes in Brazil (wealthiest 20% of the population). I wonder why the researcher did not try to illicit participation from a mixture of many different people with many types of racial and cultural backgrounds. I wonder how the emerging themes would have differed.

Out of the three themes discussed in the article, I find the third theme “race divided by continent” interesting. After reading some of the quotations from the study I have generalized that this theme means that the images in the textbooks show “aggressively traditional” images of people. Therefore, leading viewers to assume that if you are wearing a certain dress or participating in a certain ritual as described on page 76 of the article you are part of a different culture, from a different continent.

I wish that I could have these textbooks in my hand as I was reading this article. They were all published in the 80s and 90s, and I wonder how images have changed in more recent textbooks. I know that when we adopt new curriculum for our schools, one of the big things we look at are how people are represented in the textbooks. I think that companies as a whole have become more sensitive to this topic since school districts make it a necessity to review what types of racial stereotypes the books are sending. The textbook companies want to make money, so they need to be sensitive to silent messages their products are sending.

The textbook spoke at length about media representations of people of different countries. After I read the textbook, I started paying attention to news broadcasts and how people were represented in what was reported and what was not reported. I found it interesting when I stopped to think about it that all the images of terrorists are based on the first images that are reported to us by news broadcasts. If you asked any American to close their eyes and picture a terrorist they would most often picture an Arab man. (p.199) This is based off of the information coming to Americans through media outlets. No one immediately thinks of the American terrorists who have spread panic through mass bombings or planned attacks. Media has such power over us, it is scary. It makes it more important to teach young people how to think critically about the information they are presented with on a daily basis.