Michelle Lefebvre
I was recently reading an article about code-meshing when I came across this piece of advice: “Become a language ethnographer: Complete a neighborhood walk and document the multiple languages in your school community” (Zapata & Laman, 2016, p. 368).
This article describes several classrooms where teachers encourage their students to use all of their languages. To do this, these teachers bring in dual language books and invite members of the community to give presentations to the class in different languages. The authors argue that this inclusive approach better reflects how students use language and that students are more engaged in literacy tasks when they are able to use language creatively in order to express themselves (Zapata & Laman, 2016).
The authors of this article suggest that if teachers want to adopt this kind of approach, becoming a language ethnographer might be helpful. Personally, I think they’re right. Surely knowing more about the languages spoken in my community will make me a more effective, democratic teacher.
While I’m not currently teaching in a school I do hope that one day I will be able to enact this kind of approach. Plus it’s sunny and I’ve been cooped up all day, so I’m setting off to find out which languages (besides English and French) are represented in my neighbourhood.
The first thing I noticed was that this was kind of hard; there are a lot of languages in my neighbourhood and I didn’t recognize some of them. But, with the help of Google translate, here is what I found:
- On a Covid-19 public health information poster, I saw Filipino, Vietnamese, Chinese, Yiddish, and Persian.
- I saw many signs written in Malayalam and Tamil on South Indian restaurants and grocery stores. I also saw Tamil on the signs of a jewelry store and a salon.
- The sign outside of a synagogue was written in Hebrew.
- Inside a supermarket, I found signs and labels written in Indonesian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese.
- The sign on a grocery store was written in Russian.
I think that being more aware of the languages in my neighbourhood could be the first step in building a bridge between the community culture and the school culture.
So, are you ready to become a language ethnographer? Do you think it provides teachers with useful information? What impact could incorporating elements of students’ cultural backgrounds in the classroom have?
Reference
Zapata, A., & Laman, T. T. (2016). “I write to show how beautiful my languages are”: Translingual writing instruction in English-dominant classrooms. Language Arts, 93(5), 366-378.
