Language and Power

Excerpts fromTongue Tied by Richard Rodriguez and Virginia Collier

Virginia Collier's emphasis on the importance of balancing respecting and affirming home culture and language with teaching Standard English echoes Delpit. “ I suggest tht students must be taught the codes they need to participate fully in the mainstream of American life…while also being helped to acknowledge their own “expertness...” (Delpit 45).  "Aria" exemplifies the idea.  Rodriquez stresses the “necessity of assimilation” while showing the detriment of devaluing his native language.  “…While one suffers diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality”(39).  Standard English is a tool- it allows participation in the culture of power, but it should not be used to replace a student’s first language or dialect. 

Spanish was not valued or affirmed in school for Rodriguez “I would have been happy about my public success had I not sometimes recalled what it had been like earlier, when my family had conveyed its intimacy through a set of conveniently private sounds” (38).  Rodriguez had to give up one language for the other.  Collier not only warns us of the dangers of this, but provides guidelines to overt putting students in the same situation that Rodriguez was in.

What Can We Do…

“However idyllic the original vision of teaching may be, the reality is that in the complicated
school world of proposals and government superplans there are things that can be done” (223). 

Teachers have a lot working against them.  In every issue we have discussed in class this struggle has been embedded in the solutions.  We often feel powerless and unsupported.  Collier acknowledges the obstacles and reminds teachers that “[we] have the chance to interact daily with live, growing, thinking, maturing human beings, and the time is special, despite the complications of managing a bureaucratized, overcrowded classroom of overtested, underchallenged students” (22).  Collier suggests teaching English-language learners following the stated guidelines can “eliminate boredom, raise awareness, and make language teaching as well as learning as culturally relevant as possible for students…enrich[ing] the life of the student, but also that of the teacher” (235). 

Keeping It Real: Code Switching

Code switching is not restricted to ELL.  People use different languages for different purposes and in different situations.  The cultural straddlers in Keeping It Real  “subscribed to formulas of success determined by dominant or elite groups…[while also] leaning on [black cultural capital] to procure legitimacy among their racial peers, to signal their own allegiance to their backgrounds and heritages…” (Carter 63).     Carter explains, as Delpit did, that different vernaculars are part of one’s cultural identity.   The same principles apply when switching between different languages. 

This video connects code switching to many of the things we have discussed in class: advantages of participating in the culture of power, cultural identity, and maintenance of the status.