My Language Beliefs

I believe that language is inextricably linked to identity and experience. I realized this when I started talking to my students about my experience with language. I couldn't talk to them about my conflicted relationship with Southern speech without telling them about my family and my upbringing and my sense of who I am. In some way each of our guest speakers revealed the truth of this connection. They all had to share deeply personal details from their lives--a speech impediment, growing up in a housing project, falling in love and moving far away--in order to talk about their experiences with language. When my students share their experiences with language, they too reveal their identity.

How I talk is who I am. And who I am is how I talk.

I believe that it's my job as an English teacher to help my students see language variety as a strength. We talk about multilingualism, language registers, dialect, and slang in class to help us understand the ways in which everyone moves in and out of multiple language modes. Many of us do this sophisticated language play without even realizing it. I want my students to be aware of how highly skilled they already are in their language use. And I want to help them become even better in the arenas of formal language on which they will be judged and on which much of their future success in school will rest.

I believe that developing a polished formal voice in writing and speech requires having confidence in one's unpolished casual voice. I believe that all work in an English classroom is about developing students' voices so that they can own the language in which they speak and write about what they think.