Return to Unit One:TR

Class Plan -- Unit One, Day 11

• Finish Response Essay Workshop (Discuss Comments)
• Start thinking about personal experiences with learning school language
• Begin synthesizing the essays we've read so far, discussing the way they relate to one another.
• Pull central, overlapping issues/questions out of this collection of readings on "home vs. school language."

1. Jot a quick paragraph or two discussing how the Rose essay relates to one or more of the questions/issues on the list we put together in class today
2. Revise Response Essay to hand in. Bring it in a folder with collecting, drafts, etc. [It's often a good idea to prepare a checklist to hand out on this day, so that they know what exactly they are expected to turn in along with their essays.] Write postscript to Response Essay (for specifics on what is expected in this postscript, see Assignment Sheet).
3. Get back into the Web Forum and post a short (one-paragraph or so) response to the following question: How has schooling affected your use of language? What effects has your use of school language had on your family life, the way you perceive yourself, your sense of your own identity (however you want to define that), etc.? If you feel that your use of language has NOT changed much since you came to school, how do you explain this?

YOU WILL PROBABLY WANT TO HAVE AVAILABLE SOME COPIES OF YOUR INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO USE THE WEB FORUM. STUDENTS INVARIABLY LOSE THIS HANDOUT.

Activities:
Complete Response Workshop Give students 15-20 minutes to discuss their essays with their workshop partners. Encourage them to take notes on comments their partners give them verbally, and to ask questions about any written comments they don't fully understand. Daily.One way of entering into this discussion might be to have students write in response to a second daily prompt, something like the following: What would the author of the essay you wrote your Response paper about say in response to the following questions: What kinds of language are most valued in school? How does personal or private language use differ from school language? What challenges does this difference present? Or, if you find that school language doesn't present you with any particular challenges, how would you explain that?

Discussion of this daily will help you to move into a general discussion of how SOME of the readings so far address the central questions students will be dealing with in the Inquiry Essay. However, you will probably want to encourage them to think about other readings (Tannen, Lockett, Mundari, etc.) which could answer this question just as well. Eventually, you will also want to move students toward more SPECIFIC articulations of this home vs. school language issue, by encouraging them to pull central, overlapping issues/questions out of the collection of readings they have digested. Ideally, this list should consist of issues that they will find easily applicable to their own experiences. You will want to come to class with a list of a few issues/questions that you have found recurring in the readings. You can use a couple of these to get the ball rolling in discussion, but the students should ultimately be the ones responsible for generating this list. (You might ask them to write a list down if they are having trouble coming up with ideas off the top of their heads.) Here are some issues/questions that you could possibly include:

• How does learning the language of school change the way people see themselves?
• What are the benefits of learning school language?
• What effects does it have on their various types of identity (family, cultural, religious, class, etc.)?
• To what extent is it possible for people to preserve and make use of their home language when it is drastically different from the language of school? How do people keep family relationships and cultural identity in tact in these situations?
• When there is a broad gap between students' home language and the language of school, who has the larger responsbility to bridge that gap--the teacher or the student? [i.e., Tannen, Rodriguez]
• Is knowing the school language worth the costs that sometimes accompany it?
• If school language doesn't present certain people with any particular challenge, how can that be explained? [Jung]

Record on an OH transparency the issues/questions that are generated, so that you can use them in the next class.

Explain assignment for next class, particularly the web forum assignment and its purpose (getting students to begin thinking about their own experiences having to do with school language, and generating some ideas that classmates might draw on in writing their own essays).