Promoting and Legitimizing English
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P41-C3
2025-09-25
273
Promoting and Legitimizing English
Students who do not have access to the politically popular dialect form in this country are less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do.
[From Lisa Delpit's essay, "Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction"]1
I discussed the pedagogical approach of promoting student multilingualism. I look at the work of teachers who promote English monolingualism in their classrooms. We begin with an excerpt from an interview with Hong Kong-born English teacher Anne Yee, who implemented an English-only policy in her classroom as a way of providing her English as a second or other language (ESOL) students with more opportunities to practice English. Like African-American educator Lisa Delpit, whose quote on the importance of access to linguistic capital, Mrs. Yee believed that her students' future economic prospects depended on their ability to communicate fluently and effectively in English.
Anne Yee has been working as a teacher for 17 years. She first came to Canada as a high school visa student. She completed her high school, university, and teacher training education in Toronto and went back to Hong Kong to teach. After teaching for 4 years, Mrs. Yee worked in the Education Department of Hong Kong as an education officer. In this position, which she held for 2 years, she was responsible for supervising the work of government-funded schools in Hong Kong. Mrs. Yee then returned to Toronto where she began teaching again. At the time of the interview, she had been teaching in Toronto for 12 years. Mrs. Yee is currently an English and ESOL teacher, and the head of the ESOL Department and Literacy Committee at Northside. Over the years, she has taught ESOL and "regular English" students from Caribbean, Asian, Middle-Eastern, African, and Eastern-European backgrounds. In describing her experiences of working with students from such diverse backgrounds, Mrs. Yee says they have helped her to become a sensitive, tolerant, and accommodating teacher. They have also made her aware of the need to work toward equity and antiracism. In describing the impact of her own educational experience on her teaching practice, Mrs. Yee had this to say:
Having acquired English as a second language myself and having attended schools and universities as an ESL student in Ontario, I understand the extreme importance of oral English on the lives of ESL students and newcomers. I feel that it is crucial for my ESL students to acquire maximum fluency in oral English before the end of their adolescence, since my linguistic training has taught me that the articulation flexibility that is required for second language acquisition will start to deteriorate after adolescence. I also understand that it takes a lot of courage for a second language learner to speak in English due to linguistic and cultural barriers. The English-only policy is thus introduced into my class to maximize the opportunity for my ESOL students to practice oral English. These students have minimal opportunity to speak English at home and outside their ESOL and English classroom.
[Response to Questionnaire, November 9, 2001]
The following interview excerpt, "A Commitment to English," begins with me asking Anne Yee about her beliefs about bilingual teaching. The rest of the data comes from observations and interviews undertaken in Mrs. Yee's Grade 12 English class. Excerpts from additional student interviews and discussions. The ethnographic text, the commentary, and the pedagogical discussion have been member checked by Mrs. Yee.
1 See Delpit (1998).
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