In the crush of course content each semester, teachers can feel forced to choose between content and language objectives. At our alternative high school, we found that as long as students' work reflected content knowledge, teachers tended to tolerate ambiguity in students' oral and written language production. More specifically, teachers who ignored a lack of articulation in oral speech found (not surprisingly) that students' written work reflected their oral language. Once we made this connection, we realized the disservice to students. Overlooking inarticulate speaking or writing meant we were bypassing opportunities to guide students to a more "academic" spoken English, which would benefit students in their future classes and careers.
Most of our students, whether they are native speakers of English or mainstreamed English language learners, have strong language skills. They have lived and worked in their communities for years, so their ability to communicate is proficient. When speaking, they make their intentions clear even if their grammar or pronunciation is not considered standard. For example, when a student recently said, "I ma' fi' dolla' las' ni," everyone understood his lament of a lack of tips the night before. In speaking, we can tolerate such ambiguity because paralinguistic and context cues support comprehension. In the past, we rarely corrected speech. However, through recent formal and informal conversations and meetings, teachers have become aware of the effect of ambiguous speech on students' writing skills. Quantitative and qualitative data also show a dramatic lax in articulation. This sudden collective insight has added a dimension to our teaching: a new focus on how students' working oral language affects their academic writing.
The Evidence
Our reading assessment provided evidence of improper pronunciation that later appeared in student writing. For example, our data showed students pronouncing went as /wen/. They then produced contextual sentences orally such as, "We went to the library yesterday," to prove understanding of the word. Omitting final sounds in their speech correlated with omitting corresponding letters in their writing, as seen in these common examples:
- I think the most importan part of this book is when ….
- Some people though it was very fun.
- … you have to be strong and fight agains that ….
- My position on this argument is base on the comparison between ….
This finding led us to a greater awareness of their prosody in class discussions. We are now making a point of presenting a more "academic" English pronunciation, one that is readily accepted by the students!
From Awareness to Action
Teachers are now less likely to ignore miscues in pronunciation and include minilessons on discourse analysis, as suggested by Wheeler (2008), to help students learn a more "academic" English. Such lessons are enthusiastically accepted by the students, who are motivated to improve their language skills. In fact, we find that they are grateful for the attention. Recently, a student thanked a teacher for her help, and the teacher responded, "You're welcome." The student reacted immediately. "You're [emphasizing 're] welcome?" The teacher broke it down. "Yes. We say you-are-welcome. You're welcome." The student's face lit up. "Three years in this country, and I saying [sic], 'You welcome! You welcome!'"
In addition to minilessons that target common errors (like dropping last letters) and careful, gentle corrections in speech, we also use the online open-source software Audacity to create multitrack audio recordings of student speech that we can compare to speakers of standard English. A spectrogram offers students an objective, visual form of feedback. Most important, students can see their omissions of final sounds and a lack of precise articulation.
Writer's Workshop
To foster a higher level of accuracy in students' written products, we find the writer's workshop approach (Atwell, 2014) effective in both addressing ambiguity tolerance and providing a venue for authentic assessment and student reflection. The writer's workshop fosters an environment of learning and deep reflection on students' individual writing products. Minilessons provide an opportunity to address areas of concern in student work, and also afford us the opportunity to flood students with exemplars of standard written and spoken English. The regular individual status meetings provide students with face-to-face, personalized feedback, which is a hallmark of authentic assessment. We then track student progress on the issues discussed during individual conference time and follow up with students on these areas in subsequent sessions or through personalized communication supported by Google Docs. Perhaps the most rewarding part of the writer's workshop is group sharing, when students share their work and receive feedback from their peers. They celebrate each other's successes and identify areas for improvement.
In an effort to boost student confidence, teachers have been encouraged over the past couple of decades to ignore student errors in speech and writing. While it is important to validate students' sense of worth, the reality of standardized writing assessments—not to mention future education and career requirements—means that teachers must shift their mindset to one that calls attention to student errors in a safe and empowering environment. Instructional strategies that target common ambiguities in speech allow students to safely practice fluent speech, and reflective writing practices equip students with tools to improve their verbal and written products, which, in turn, boosts both student performance and student confidence.