Preparing Teachers to Teach across Dialects

Abstract

When programs are being planned for teachers of standard English as a second dialect, two questions come to mind. First, what can the planners lear from past experience-experience with preparing people to teach English as a foreign language? And second, what more has to be learned? If the experience of the 1950's and 60's has taught us anything, it has made clear the importance of getting teachers to compare the target language with the student's own vernacular. Among other things, this means finding out about the linguistic system exemplified by the individual student's speech. That is not the same as spotting his errors. Where second-dialect students are concerned, for instance, the teacher needs to get answers to such questions as these: Under what circumstances does the student's dialect construct sentences without a form of BE (where standard dialects would use BE)? What do members of this dialect group do about the indefinite article a-when it is used, when not? How do speakers of this dialect habitually signal past time? For information of this sort, the teacher preparation program draws upon the resources of descriptive linguistics. Studies by William Labov, William Stewart, Beryl Bailey, Roger Shuy, and others help the teacher here by giving an objective view of the student's home language. Linguistic studies also mention points of contrast between the vernacular and the target language, and these points of contrast in turn suggest items for classroom practice. Sometimes the linguist's findings also suggest what kind of practice may produce best results. A linguist may show, for example, that a second-dialect student who has trouble putting the third-person singular -s on a verb like talk or explain (which ends in a consonant sound) may be able to manage the -s in practice exercises involving verbs like see and play (where the final sound is a vowel)-and that even a verb form like talks or explains can most profitably be practiced first in a sentence like He talks a lot or She explains it, where the troublesome consonant cluster is followed by a word beginning with a vowel. Many insights of this kind can be derived from the linguistics component of the teacher preparation program. When teacher participants complain of too much linguistics, it is usually because they have not been shown clearly enough how the linguists' findings can help a teacher help students in a classroom.