Intercultural Communications Post 8

The article by Lin that was for reading this past week was a critical analysis on autobiographical narratives of them teaching and learning English by the authors of this article. These narratives all come from diverse sociocultural contexts with English. “English is now a heteroglossic language that has become pluralized …we can point to the creative communicative strategies adopted by people from their own communities from way back to acquire and use English in their own terms” (Canagarajah, 2000, pp.130 – 131).  This quote ties in with what was read and discussed from the last week. English has truly become more pluralized and it is interesting to see when and why people use English, how they use it, and of course like it is said in the quote that each community has adopted creative ways of speaking the English language.The first connection I made with this article was the activity that we had done in class last week. It had to do with what strategy you can do in order to teach and have students understand the different varieties of English and distinguishes between errors and these non dominant language forms and functions. In ours we chose to have the students write on a short topic that would be discussed in class. We chose an invitation for them to write. We would break them up in partners of diverse cultural backgrounds and each one would write the invitation on their own in a natural manner. The partners would then switch papers, read each others, and then identify the variations in their partner’s paper that they would not use in theirs. This analyzing and writing is similar as to what the article was about. In the article, the authors of the narratives compared and contrasted and identified diverse situations that each faced. Of course there were some similarities and then differences that caused each person to have a different approach on their teaching and learning English. These students that we could give this assignment to would be seeing the differences in their variations and analyzing and would then see from their background why they write this way. In my future classroom I plan to do the activity that we came up with last week and also ones similar to it. Clearly it is a good strategy due to the article that we had to read this past week followed the same guidelines. My students are going to all be diverse in either my Spanish class or in my ESL class. This method of teaching and learning would work well in both class but I feel it would be more effective in and ESL class in the idea that because they are still learning the language they need to understand and be knowledgeable of these differences and people’s backgrounds and also because I am a native speaker of English. In the Spanish class of course I could do this but with teaching the different variations, forms, and functions of Spanish. It really is interesting to read and discover the reasons why other people do things even as simple as how they write or use the English language in their natural manner. What other ways can we engage ourselves in understanding and learning people’s diverse backgrounds in learning and teaching English from diverse sociocultural backgrounds and how and why they write and speak they way they do?