Throughout the article, I could understand where Rose was coming from, but had never really encountered this problem for myself. I don't necessarily speak in a completely different way at school as I do when I am around friends. I suppose growing up in the suburbs and being in honors and AP style classes guided and molded the way that I speak and write, even in everyday circumstances. However, I can see how his argument about the way students are being taught is relevant for any classroom setting. I have seen my peers struggle with understanding dialect and terms they had never heard before. It is a very real problem that needs attending to.
As far as the article itself, I really liked this statement, "Discussion...you could almost define a university education as an initiation into a variety of powerful ongoing discussions, an initiation that can occur only through the repeated use of new language in the company of others." In my limited time here at OU, I have found that I have learnt just as much, if not more, from discussions that I have had with peers as I have sitting in a lecture. It was also interesting to me that the author himself had gone through similar circumstances regarding various cultural differences.
I was especially impressed with the way Rose discussed the fact that underprivileged students, "...need more opportunities to write about what they're learning and guidance in the techniques and conventions of that writing..." Writing is something that many students both old and new have problems with. Getting their point across, using the correct dialect, grammar, and punctuation. There is a mountain of things for students to remember when writing, but I think that if our society were really to tackle this problem, we would have to start from the ground up. Start at a younger age and make the English language something that students can be comfortable with.
Overall, I enjoyed this article. It gave me an insight into something that in my 19 years I had never really thought about.
I think starting from the ground up is a good idea, but I also think that if we remember what Delpit had to say (our reading from our previous class) she insists that we change this from the top to the bottom. I suppose there is really no one right answer, and I think that's what makes the issue so complex.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the most difficult aspect of academic discourse is its divide from spoken language. How much more information would we have access to if scholars wrote the way we actually spoke? Then again, if we think of the "Bed Intruder" what would be the consequences of ONLY being exposed to that kind of language? I don't really know.