Language and Identity

The words "culture of power" are never far from the tip of my tongue these days. So it didn't surprise me to see shades of Prudence Carter in both Richard Rodriquez' "Aria" and Virginia Collier's "Teaching Multilingual Children." Both Rodriquez and Collier allude to the dominate culture--this time the linguistic dominance of English--and the importance of helping ESL students gain access to the cultural capital English provides.

Yet as we saw in Carter's work , access to the dominant culture can come at a price. Rodriguez discusses this in his piece. For while he asserts that "what [he] needed to learn in school was that [he] had the right--and the obligation--to speak the public language of los gringos," (34) Rodriguez admits that his linguistic transformation cost him "the special feeling of closeness" (36) he shared with his family. Spanish was something special, something different that Rodriquez and his family shared. It gave them a feeling of closeness and security that they did not experience in the outside world. That's why the scene where Rodriguez walks in on his parents speaking to one another in Spanish only to have them switch to English when addressing him is so devastating. Rodriguez explains how "Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. . . I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief" (35). Now Rodriguez' parents were just doing what they thought best for their children by supporting their efforts to learn the language of the culture of power. But to Rodriguez their acknowledgement of him in English rather than Spanish felt like a rejection, an expulsion from the safety and closeness he had associated with home, with his parents, with Spanish.

The feeling of closeness associated with one's culture is something Carter discusses. I kept thinking of the cultural straddlers in Carter's piece who while able to successfully navigate the codes and norms of the dominant culture discussed feeling more comfortable, more themselves when they were home in their own communities. The black cultural capital, including black linguistic capital, valued in these communities was like the Spanish spoken in Rodriguez' home, a way to define oneself using different standards then those outlined by the culture of power. So like most cultural assimilators when Rodriguez becomes more and more "Americanized", when he publicly becomes Richard instead of Ricardo, he no longer can define himself using these alternative standards and thus loses the safety and familiarity of his "private" identity.

Virginia Collier seems to recognize the risk of forcing ESL students to totally assimilate into mainstream linguistic culture and advocates for an approach to the teaching and learning of English that both respects a student's native language and ensures their proficiency in English. She discusses how the traditional approach to language teaching has been "eradication." This approach "looks upon dialects other than standard as deficient" (226) and that teachers of eradication "see themselves as the tools by which a particular student can rid himself of stigmatized dialect features and become a speak of the 'right' type of standard language--the passport to achievement, success, and acceptance" (227). Unfortunately instead of empowering students by giving them the tools they need to accumulate dominate cultural capital, this approach often disenfranchises students by devaluing their own culture and thus calling into question their worth as individuals.

Both Rodriguez and Collier address the difficulties in effectively teaching ESL students without devaluing their own unique identities. To further illustrate this dilemma, The Huffington Post ran an article a few weeks ago entitled "English Learning Students Far Behind Under English Only Methods" which detailed the struggle that California schools are having closing the achievement gap between their ESL students (who are overwhelming Spanish speaking) and their native English speaking peers. While the headline leads one to believe that the English only education Collier disapprovingly refers to in her work is failing and needs to be revised, the article itself is much more ambiguous. The problem isn't as easily defined as monolingual education versus bilingual education: "Instead, researchers say what matters more is whether schools use data and track student performance on an ongoing basis, whether the curriculum is rigorous and whether teachers are trained to help English learners connect their learning with what they already know in their own language."

Reading these articles convinced me even more that everything we discuss in class is connected. Power, culture, identity, ed reform, it all influences the way that we teach and the way that our students learn.