Dialect continuum

The fact that Americans are only limited to learning English as the common language directly affects my personal life as well as my professional future due to my native tongue being Spanish. My mother was the one who originally taught me English, as well as my grandfather who was a U.S. Marine and would always speak English to all of my family. My mother was an English teacher so that facilitated my learning experience as well as fixing accent and grammatical errors. Coming to America I…

To Be or Not to Be: Proper Webster’s dictionary is a tool for survival. How else would one know how to spell autochthonous? Language was invented because communication is vital to our survival. Society could not have developed without a means for its inhabitants to properly communicate with one another. However, there is a battle among the “proper” and the “improper” better known as the Prescriptives and the Descriptives. One group who cringes at the thought of the improper use of the English…

In many classrooms across America today, race and ethnicity are very much on the table. Teachers dream of seeing their students discuss difference in a constructive way. Some educators actively encourage their classes to get outside their comfort zones and confront the country’s racial history, but I ask myself after reading McIntosh’s Interactive Phases of Curricular and Personal Re-Vision Model, how much was race and ethnicity practice in the classroom long ago when I was in elementary. I can…

that proper English is not necessary correct. The author goes on to provide good examples of different rules governing dialects and proper English. For example, he explains that different dialects are rule driven just like proper English. The author is very effective…

“Spanglish” English such a complex language something spoken by many, and yet many others yearn to learn it. That was me a young and fragile girl who yearned to understand a foreign language, a language that other kids spoke. Although I was born in the United States I was not born speaking the native language – English. As early as I can remember, Spanish was what I spoke, heard, and understood. At the time my mom and dad only spoke Spanish in the house. To make matters worse, when I was about…

AAVE B: AAVE is a rule-governed and systematic language. C: Examples that serve as proof. 3-Body Paragraph 2: A: AAVE’s effect on its speakers. B: AAVE speakers face difficulties in professional settings. C: AAVE speakers manage to switch from dialect to another in order to blend in. 4-Body Paragraph 3: A: Linguists suggest the use of AAVE in class. B: The Oakland school board attempts to use AAVE to improve SE. C: Discouraging attitudes prove to be obstructing the educational…

There are many symbols and meanings in “Fahrenheit 451”, the author uses these symbols to get this point across in an informal manner. There are three particular ones that the author uses that really stick out. One example of this is the earphones, Montag uses his earpiece to communicate with the hidden English professor Faber (pg 90). These earpieces are a symbol of the future of technology and what is to come of future generations. In the story, “Fahrenheit 451” Montag describes the earpiece…

The school that I decided to do my EL service paper on is San Juan Unified School District which served in Arden-Arcade, Carmichael, Orangevale, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, parts of Rancho Cordova, and parts of Sacramento. In their district they value diversity and it is a valuable asset that strengthens and enriches their community. EL students belong to their community and it is their mission to educate and inspire EL students to succeed. EL students are placed into their neighborhood schools.…

It has been recently reported that 22% of children less than 5 years of age living in the United States are Hispanic (Facts for Features, 2008). While Spanish is currently a minority-language, the growing Hispanic population indicates that this may change in the years to come. With that in mind, schools across the nation should consider hiring more speech language pathologists (SLPs) and/or providing further bilingual assessment training for their current SLPs. Especially in densely populated…

Charlemagne once said, “To have another language is to have a second soul” (BrainyQuote). As a native Spanish speaker, I find this statement to be true since I think about objects different than an English native speaker would. For example, when thinking about objects Spanish speakers tend to associate objects with genders while English speakers do not. The topic of language and how people think has been studied by a few Linguists, Psychologists, and Neuroscientists. Research and studies have…