Identifying students through language

Language is a huge part of our identities. It comes from our culture and from the place we grow up in. We use different dialects, terms, expressions, etc., and that is why sometimes we might speak the same language, English for example, but we cannot understand each other. 

"If literacy is more than just decoding marks on a page, if it is shaped by culture and context, then the cultures and contexts we inhabit in our lives outside the classroom will necessarily influence the way we approach literacy practices in school." (Williams, 2005, p. 343)

In her article, Williams (2005) talked about how growing up in a family of teachers helped her in developing her academic language. She said that debating, arguing, and providing evidence were parts of her daily life since she was a child. Then, she explained how that did not make her "smarter," but it made it easier for her to succeed in school. Not all students come from a family of teachers like Wiliams, however, they all come with a language they inherited from their families. The teachers’ job is to use that language as a tool to help their students. 

A language is a tool that we use to perform our identities and it represents our culture and who we are. Teachers need to use language to build an identity of readers and writers and they need to able to understand their students’ language and use it as a facilitating tool.

Students’ language:

• Students come to the class with their own “language bank” that they use daily. If students are not familiar with school vocabularies, the one Williams (2005) talked about, that does not mean that they are not able to learn, it just means that they do not have them on their “language bank.”

• For today’s students, a lot of them are familiar with the language of the internet, they even create new words and use them between each other such as keyboard warrior ( a person who make aggressive comments and post on the internet). 
• Some students come from a totally different culture than the dominant culture in their classrooms, which results in language disconnection between them and their teachers or classmates. Teachers here need to work on comforting the student by using his language as a bridge to make him fit in and feel that he belongs.

How teachers’ language affects their students:

“The language that teachers and students use to describe and position each other can empower as well as create inequalities” (Johnston, 2004 as cited in Hall, 2010, p.1825)

When teachers describe their students using any kind of words, they give them the identity that is held in that description. If a teacher kept telling her students that they are writers and she linked anything they do to being a writer that will let her students more likely to develop and improve as writers because they already think of themselves as writers. In her study, Muhammad (2015) used the phrase “sister authors” to describe the girls in her study. By doing this, she built a community of writers and positioned the girls as the power holders (authors). 

Teachers can either give or take power from their students by the language they use with them. Mrs. O’Reilly, a teacher in Hall’s (2010) study, identified some of her students as poor readers and she told them that. By labeling them as poor readers she gave them the identity of “poor readers” and took their power from them. Even though she told them that she is planning to help them, they will still think of themselves as students with poor reading skills. Her doing this might influence the ideas that they already had in their minds. In Vetter’s (2010) article a Mexican student named Raul admitted that he feels people around him sometimes see him as “dumb Mexican”, which results in him not participating a lot in the classroom. What if there are students who think like him in Mrs. O’Reilly’s class? How would they act after being called poor readers? Calling a student, who is afraid of people seeing him as a dumb person, a poor reader will just influence that idea in his mind and will make him isolate himself even more. 

Gina, Raul’s teacher, used her students’ language to help in positioning them as engaging readers. She invited her students, Raul was one of them, to participate in the classroom by using a language they are comfortable with. She did not only use good words to describe them but she also learned about them and used the language they use. Teachers do not need to be able to speak their students’ language, they just need to able to understand it and employ it as a utilization tool in the classroom (Smitherman,1977, as cited in Vetter, 2010).


   A space to reflect:

if you were asked to define language, what would you say?

References:

Hall, L. A. (2010). The negative consequences of becoming a good reader: Identity theory as a lens for understanding struggling readers, teachers, and reading instruction. Teachers College Record, 112(7), 1792-1829.

Vetter, A. (2010). Positioning students as readers and writers through talk in a high school English classroom. English Education, 43(1), 33-64.

Williams, B. T. (2005). Home and away: The tensions of community, literacy, and identity. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(4), 342-347.