English Teaching: Practice and Critique
“What do we do about student grammar — all those missing -ed's and -s's?” Using comparison and contrast to teach Standard English in dialectally diverse classrooms
Rebecca Wheeler (Christopher Newport University)
This paper explores the long and winding road to
integrating linguistic approaches to vernacular dialects in the
classroom. After exploring past roadblocks, the author shares vignettes
and classroom practices of her collaborator, Rachel Swords, who has
succeeded in bringing Contrastive Analysis and Code-switching to her
second and third-grade students (children 7 and 8 years old) in urban
Virginia, in the southeastern US. The author then shares principles
that have allowed her to successfully defuse social and political
concerns of principals, central school office administrators, teachers,
students, parents, politicians and reporters, as she shows how to use
tools of language and culture to teach Standard English in urban
areas.