Week 12: Multilingual Practices

The focus of chapter 2 was very interesting to me because I had never heard of the concept of the concentric circles in regards to explaining the English language.  The author indicated that the inner circle entailed students who spoke English as their primary language, the outer circle was made up of those who spoke it as their second language in a multilingual context and lastly the expanding circle which was made up of those who studied English as a foreign language.  The author also pointed out that although this diagram helps understand the different levels of acquisition, it does not address any type of variation.  For example, the book mentions the African American vernacular to be one of the variants that the system does not include which we previously determined as a class that it should be addressed as a separate dialect of the English language.  This exclusion of the dialects makes it a questionable diagram especially for those minority language groups that were not included.

I also found the comparison of the ELL classes in the United States and those from Britain to be fascinating.  It is interesting to think that two countries with the same native language to run their systems completely differently.  In Britain they do not pull students out of regular classes even if they need more instruction on the language because they argue that it causes cultural isolation and segregation.  The United States systems however do not address cultural isolation thus they encourage providing the extra guidance to ELs so that they do not drown away amongst their native speaking peers.  These ideas were then followed by the analysis of the Lau vs Nichols supreme court decision which debated the “discriminatory intent versus the discriminatory impact”.  They found that language development must occur before being placed in class which in my opinion makes the most sense.  When foreigners enter this country for the first time barely knowing the language, it can be an extremely overwhelming experience and if they were to be placed in classes where they don’t understand it can only lead to making manners worse.  For example, a new student entered my middle school from Russia but knew very little English.  He was placed among English speaking peers and did poorly in math until he was placed in an ELL class where we later found out he was a math whiz and joined the school’s mathlete team.  Examples like this are perfect evidence of how important it is to be giving students the extra help they need before throwing them into the water with no life vest hoping they can swim.  Of course the ideas of student motivation and teacher competence are both important factors that were also addressed in this section, but I really think that the idea of EL classrooms and its benefits out way the possible cultural isolation or segregation that may or may not appear.

The chapters also mentioned the term diglossia which I was unaware of before reading this section.  It is really interesting to think that there are communities that language varieties are important because they play different roles in society.  After analyzing this idea more I can understand better and even see examples in my own community that I hadn’t previously noticed.