Have the materials in this chapter raised questions for
you? Doubts? Do you feel the same way you did before
this course on matters of language in the classroom?
Write a short list of guidelines you might go over with a
biology class where all of the teaching assistants are non-
native speakers of English. How can the students
contribute to making communication work? Are there
concrete steps to take when communication breaks down?
Interview a graduate teaching assistant or a professor or
instructor who speaks English with a strong accent of any
kind that contrasts with the average person on campus.
For example, someone with a strong Texas accent
teaching in Northern California, or someone whose first
language is Japanese teaching in Cincinnati. Ask what
experiences they have had because of accent. Positive,
negative, neutral?Notes
1 Between 1996 until the writing of the second edition of this book, there
has been no official or published revision to the NCTE’s Standards for
the English Language Arts.
2 A 2003 study went one step further, asking non-academic professionals
to evaluate 66 written sentences, each with one error (and a few with
no errors, as a control). Their choices were “does not bother me,”
“bothers me a little,” “bothers me a lot,” or “no error.” The researchers
found that the professionals were very inconsistent and sometimes
incorrect in their evaluations, and more interesting still, “while
nonacademics are less bothered by usage errors, the errors that they
find most bothersome are still common dialectical features” (Gray and
Heuser 2003). In other words, the subjects had retained bias and
ideology better than the grammatical rules they had been taught.
3 Here I touch only briefly on the question of children who come to
school speaking a language other than English. Native speakers of