Saturday, April 2, 2011
week 12
These articles were somewhat confusing for me to understand. However, I did find the article by Canadarajah, about Lingua Franca English to be extremely interesting. The idea behind LFE is a multilingual approach, which seems to be a far reach because of its goals. The article describes LFE as a non-geographically specific, multilingual way of life. All users would have more than one native competencies and learners are not considered incompetent. There are no strict rules of language and speakers monitor and shape their language choices by those around them. Multilingual speakers do not move towards someone else's target, instead, they construct their own norms. Meaning is produced in practice and acquisition aims for versatility in conversation and agility, not mastery and control. However, even in an ideal world, it's hard to picture these goals ever occurring. It would be excellent if our students would aim to reach understanding and not have to match society's view of target, but in our education system, especially with the high stakes testing, it's not feasible to teach in a way that fosters the goals and ideas presented in the article. However, taking some of the ideas and implementing them in the classroom would be one step closer, while still preparing students for the tests at the end of the year.
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Amy,
ReplyDeleteYour post made me smile because I posted mine and then looked at yours and they started almost exactly the same way... "I"m confused!" However, I really like the comment you made about "constructing their own norms". It has a lot to do with interlanguage that we talked about earlier in the semester - everyone kind of has their own interlanguage. I know that my Spanish is heavily influenced by both my Spanish AND my English experiences and so I create my own "norm" of how I speak Spanish. A native speaker of Spanish who knows me and several other American individuals who speak Spanish as their second language once told me that I "habla como Seth" - I speak Spanish like one of the other Americans she knows. Go figure. We probably structure our sentences the same. But it's so true - we do create our own norms. I like how you comment, though, about the implications of these norms to testing. I never thought about that, but it's true - if we don't all speak the same norm, we can't test on the same norm. It's something very interesting to think about.
Hannah