COMMENTARY: SILENCES IN THE MULTILINGUAL CLASSROOM CO-WRITTEN WITH GORDON PON
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P62-C4
2025-09-26
206
COMMENTARY: SILENCES IN THE MULTILINGUAL CLASSROOM
CO-WRITTEN WITH GORDON PON1
In their interviews, Victor and Mina present two very different views on the importance of speech in the classroom. Mina, who had always attended school in Toronto, desired conflict and debate in whole group classroom discussions and believed that everyone should contribute to smaller group discussions. Victor, who had completed most of his schooling in Hong Kong, worried about being perceived as "showing off" if he contributed to classroom discussions in the way Mina desired. Knowing that her grade 12 advanced English class consisted of primarily Chinese-Canadian students— many did not speak English as their primary language, and several had been in Canada for less than 2 years—Mrs. Yee expected that many students would be quiet and not verbally participate in class. Likewise, she anticipated that many of these students would want to use languages other than English in the classroom. Accordingly, she established a classroom English-only policy (discussed in chap. 3) and often asked students to work in racially and linguistically mixed small groups so that low English proficiency students would have opportunities to practice speaking with more proficient students. Despite these pedagogical strategies, silence, particularly among Hong Kong-born students, characterized many of the classes Gordon and I observed. We noted that many of the Chinese-Canadian students spoke very little and some not at all, both during whole-class discussions and in small group work. Moreover, many of the Chinese-Canadian students never raised their hands to volunteer responses, offer commentary, or to pose questions.
1 The ideas in this Commentary and in the Pedagogical Discussion are also discussed in Pon. Goldstein, and Schecter (in press).
الاكثر قراءة في Teaching Strategies
اخر الاخبار
اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة
