The Effects of Training in Linguistics on Teaching: K-12 Teachers in White Mountain Apache Schools
ATTITUDE CHANGES AND PARADIGM SHIFTS
One of the objectives for presenting sociolinguistic information about language use, dialects, registers, bilingualism, etc. was to help to change teacher attitudes so that they could more effectively teach their students both English and the content delivered in English. It is often difficult to document attitudinal changes. However, these teachers were very open about commenting on their misconceptions and subsequent paradigm shifts in class and in their journals.
The following comments reflect the relevance of these linguistic and sociolinguistic topics for these teachers. They demonstrate how their attitudes began to change indicating a paradigm shift from a somewhat deficit model of student intelligence and linguistic abilities to an acceptance and respect for their knowledge and linguistic skills. The paradigm shift in some teachers occurred because they didn’t realize that the community spoke a rule-governed English dialect, in which rules sometimes differed from those of standard English as presented in textbooks, proficiency tests and as spoken by many of them. The teachers, even native teachers, commented that they had been correcting their students’ Apache English, even telling them that it was NOT GOOD English. They reported that they had been spending enormous amounts of time correcting what they considered to be errors. Riegelhaupt discussed in her lectures the nature of language use in the classroom and in the community. She also defined the terms dialect and registers and provided examples of dialect characteristics of English in various areas of the United States and the English-speaking world. Teachers were asked to describe characteristics of their students’ Apache English dialect. This led to the important teacher realization that the English that the Apache children and the community speak is really another dialect of English just as we have Southern English and Bostonian English and Black English.
The Apache people are native speakers of English, Apache English. We sensed a paradigm shift in some teachers because they didn’t realize that the community spoke their own dialect of English with its own rules. This rule-governed dialect of English differs from “standard English,” especially in its formation of plurals and past tenses. It also differs in certain aspects of the lexicon where frequently Apache words are adapted to the English phonological system, or are inserted into Apache English as codeswitches. After the lectures by Riegelhaupt on these linguistic and sociolinguistic topics, teachers provided self-reports on their perspectives as a result new insights about Apache English. Some of these paradigm changes/shifts were also reported in by Carrasco, Riegelhaupt and Gilbert (2002).
These paradigm shifts are extremely important because teachers were naively correcting Apache native speakers of Apache English. With this teacher perspective, the students in turn were reluctant to express themselves and to learn English for academic purposes. Their variety of English was not being recognized. Instead, it was being mocked and treated as incorrect. Teachers felt that it was their responsibility to eradicate dialectal features rather than to use them as a source of prior knowledge to be valued and built upon. This new insight on the part of the teachers already has had pedagogical implications for language, and content learning, and cognitive development. It also has assisted in the acquisition of standard English and register expansion, while developing a respect and acceptance of the local dialect of English.
Teacher A
Before Dr. Riegelhaupt’s lecture, I had heard many times that cultural languages should be maintained. I heard it over and over this past summer at the symposium for indigenous languages at NAU. I am not being patronizing when I say that Dr. Riegelhaupt’s way of presenting the issue convinced me of the need for our students to learn the Apache language. Perhaps it was fertile ground because of the passionate lessons previously presented by Mr. Perry.*
Teacher B
Teacher B comments about the fact that she had been told that the children at school did not have any language at all. She wondered how that could be possible, but assumed that these seasoned teachers knew more than she did. She had not taken a linguistics course at that time she arrived at Whiteriver, but the few linguistics lessons that she learned were eye-opening and had an immediate impact on her and her teaching.
I wondered about that (that teachers said that kids didn’t have a language), because our students come to school able to communicate. They do have a language, and we need to acknowledge it as such. Our challenge is to help them acquire a “school” language as well, and to learn when and where the use of each is appropriate.
Teacher E
Teacher E talks about her previous attitudes toward accepting the dialect spoken by her students.
Through Dr. Riegelhaupt’s lecture this finally dawned on me. My job as an English teacher is not only about teaching right -vs.- wrong “standard” English, but about teaching my students different forms of appropriate English along with when, where, and how to use them. This allows me to still teach Standard English while it removes the negativity of don’t say/write that way because it’s wrong.
In the following commentary this teacher admits to coming to the important realization that her students speak a perfectly viable dialect of English that serves them well in communicating with each other. She now believes that it is essential for her to recognize and respect their dialect, while still incorporating standard English in the curriculum.
Another issue raised in Dr. Riegelhaupt’s lecture that I hadn’t thought about, it goes along with the above issue of appropriate language use, is the idea of being bidialectal. While bilingualism is not a difficult concept to understand and accept, bidialectal was for me. I struggled with this label as a possible excuse to condone mistakes and non-standard English. I feared it was an excuse not to teach Standard English usage and grammar. But as I thought about it I remembered Mr. Perry’s workshop* and the differences in the Apache language between Whiteriver and San Carlos. For Apache speakers those are distinct and recognizable dialects of the Apache language. In English there are different dialects, so why not recognize Apache-English as a dialect of English with its own structure, vocabulary, and legitimacy?
Teacher E continues by admitting that she had been confusing her students because of her verbal and non-verbal (cringing) reactions to their use of English.
What Dr. Riegelhaupt said about dialect made sense. There are consistent differences between the English spoken in Whiteriver and what I know is standard, for example the use of mines for mine, for example, the book is mines. The English teacher in me cringes at this “mistake”, but I now see that it is a consistent mistake that’s not considered a mistake in Apache-English. It is a part of that clear and effective communication I assumed possible only through Standard English. By trying to remove elements of the local dialect from my students, I was the one creating the confusion.
