This week’s readings fostered some deep thinking and realizations for me. I was especially struck by the tendency of people to catergorize objects and others based on the emphasis a language provides (Barret et. al, 2023). For example, in Eastern pomo the emphasis is placed on how the person knows an event happened compared to English which focuses on the time an event occured. In this way, some notice details of an event at a higher rate than speakers of other languages. I wondered how this observation would explain bilingual/multilingual students? I hypothesize this would give emergent bilinguals the opportunity to approach situations with a new lens and provide unique insight. However, due to many systematic injustices in the US, many multilingual learners are stuck down and forced to utilize English and are penalized if they are translanguaging.
Barret et. al also discuss accents. I come from an immigrant household and all of my family members apart from my siblings have a Mexican Spanish accent. Many comments on accents contain underlying tones that see Mainstream White English accents as the cultural norm and those that fall outside of the category are seen as the other. Although some may comment on a good accent to a BIPOC individual, it sends the tone that others from that same community have an inherently bad accent.
There’s a clear relationship between what a person is told about their language and that individual’s beliefs about their identity in relation to that language. Baker-Bell’s study at Leadership Academy made me reflect on my field placement in EDUC014. Evans Elementary in Yeadon, Pennsylvania primarily serves black students. They use an online teaching platform that quizzes students’ English and Math and teachers are under pressure to assure students reach a lesson quota. This forces teachers to follow the Mainstream White English to fufill the program’s requirement. Similarly to Baker-Bell’s study, the schools are perpetuating systems that construct Black Language “inferior and incorrect”. This system “reinforc[es] whiteness as anti-blackness” (Baker-Bell, 2020). What shocked me was that teachers at Leadership Academy were telling their student’s that their way of speaking English is “non eloquent” and “not proper English”. I thought about how upholds rasicolinguistic ideaologies by engraving these negative connotations on someone’s way of speech. Baker-Bell conducted an activity where black students analyze two forms of speech, Black English (Language A) and Mainstream White English (Language B). The students described language A as improper and unprofessional and language B as smart and classy. They were repeating what society told them for most of their upbringing. There were instances where students challenged these ideas in group discussion. Which is why I think it's so important for marginalized students to be given the space to challenge oppressive norms and ideologies that bring their communtiy members down.