Strong Response Blog #1

In “Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard?” published in the year 1990 in the English Journal by English teacher Linda M. Christensen, the author explains that to be a good writer, students have to be taught to use their background, experiences, and individual insights instead of just plain standard English because she believes that it is limiting the way students clearly express themselves, she does this by demonstrating that her experiences and credibility as an English teacher, which helps her strengthen her argument. Throughout this text, which is organized to highlight her main ideas through bold, isolated sentences, she acknowledges these ways that she believes is correct for students to show their “faces” and fully develop as a writer, which for example includes the use of both English and home languages, experiences and knowledge.

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In her work, Christensen focuses on how students have various ways to express themselves through writing and language but cannot because of society’s limit of how two should represent themselves. The author argues that there are many ways students can learn to be free with their creativity when writing only if teachers and other superiors show them how to and by questioning the root of why it should be limited to Standard English. She makes use of bold, isolated sentences such as “asking students to memorize the rules without asking who makes the rules legitimates a social system that devalues their language”(Christensen 40).This acts as a strong argument because it is an important question to ask as students that will make them care about why they write what they write.

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One of the main concepts that Christensen highlighted to be important to teach students was that embracing their home language could make a richer writing and reading experience. At the start of her piece she begins introducing the topic with an anecdote about how when she was a child, she was corrected by her teacher for the mispronunciation of word and this brought to her attention that people in society need to be able to have a good sense of the standard English in order to make it, which is how she discovered that the so-called “melting pot is just an illusion”(Christensen 1990). She observed that today many are corrected for expressing themselves in their home languages, an example can be how author Gloria Anzaldua recalls being “being sent to the corner of the classroom” when all she “wanted to do was tell the teacher how pronounce [her] name”( Anzaldua 1987), with this being mentioned, it can be concluded that neither when writing or talking the American Education System and the people behind want everyone to be the same, talk the same, and write the same, when in reality writing can be much more appreciated by blending languages, as shown by Gloria Anzaldua’s text “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” where she mixes her Chicano dialects with standard English to show different perspectives of how language affects writing and the public view of it.

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Another very important aspect that Christensen pointed out was that students writing should be embraced in a collaborative and socially accepting atmosphere where they gain insights that can help them write with “passion”. In this text , the author mainly focuses on how writing has become manipulated by society members to govern “how we speak and write”. She believes that students should take more risks when it comes to writing and should write with “honesty…about their world”, but first they have to dig deeper into being comfortable with other students in a place where they can openly share their experiences and potentially relate to others’.She described how she “sometimes recruit former students to share their writing and their wisdom” (Christensen 1990). She gave an example of how a senior student of hers, Rochelle, “blends her home language with Standard English” and how she gave the advice to her students of relating the tales to their own lives and eventually they will start writing, writing poems, stories, letters, essays, etc because it came from their experiences. Students started to share and eventually relate to each other and gain insights that could help discuss their ideas and thoughts with each other which can lead to better writing because it includes multiple perspectives and concepts. Christensen also embraced the idea that we should did deep to find why standard English limits students when by exposing them to other ways of expression they can thrive successfully.The author believes that when students fail tests and get poor SAT and ACT score “they will believe they did not succeed because they are inferior instead of questioning the standard of measurement and those making the standards”.

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I agree with Christensen about the ways the educational system should change the practice of standard English. I have been wondering these questions for the last six years since I have arrived from my home country, many people would test me and would want me to speak the way it is supposed by correcting me and telling me I was wrong, similar to the author Anzaldua. I can connect to this topic greatly and the author does a good job of thoroughly explain the reasoning behind her ideas by establishing credibility and clear commentary that connect throughout her work that support her values.

Works Cited: Christensen, Linda M. “Teaching Standard English: Whose Standard?” The English Journal, vol. 79, no. 2, 1990, pp. 36-40.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” Borderlands: the New Mestiza = La Frontera, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987, p. 2947-2955.