Linguistics in Central New Jersey: May 2014

Have you ever noticed the speech patterns of children these days? Many students are unfamiliar with oral grammar, syntax and the meaning of words. What is worse is their writing-- poor spelling abilities, the lack of comprehension, reading as if they their literacy is still emergent. To a large degree, one may argue that the prominence of social media is to blame for this phenomena. Sentences such as, "hey, how r u?" and "i gotta do ma hawk...i shoulda did it earlier, lol" have become all too common. Unfortunately, such discourse has made its way into the field of academia. Granted, such language is okay when posted to social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, or when commenting on a friend's post, but in academia (and every day life), it is worse than a new stick of chalk flatly scratching its way down a chalk board.

 I was engaged in a discussion with a former professor (okay, fine, a debate) a few months back about this very phenomena. He made me aware that while reading his class' ENG 101 and even 201 papers, students write similar sentences containing poor spelling, a lack of tactile, no knowledge of syntax and the inability to write differently than they (the students) speak. "Why?" I remember asking him in a snarky way as if I already possessed the answer. I knew that he would blame social media as significantly contributing to this (as he is a technology troll...don't tell him I said that), but I could not, for the life of me, anticipate an alternate reason. Then he said what I did not want to hear: "Oh, that's easy. They are all learning disabled." "Are they in a developmental English class," I asked with one eye brow raised. "Well, no," he slowly replied, "they are regular college level-classes, but they are all way below level cognitively." Usually I would accept this as an answer, but the sheer ignorance of his response was like being stabbed in the gum with a toothpick. I remember asking, "Well, what are their majors? Are they undeclared?" He replied, "No, many of them are nursing, education and even English majors...but I'm telling you, they lack proficiency."

 Although there may be some truth to my professor's claims, I inquired further as to the specifics of his class. He told me that out of the 20 students in his EN 201 class, 5 were from the Philippines and 1 from China, all of whom spoke English as a second language; he further noted that these students spoke with heavy accents. The remainder of the students, he said, were American students (those with English as their primary language), yet he could not understand why, if they were not "learning disabled," they were unable to write or speak properly. As our conversation continued, he told me that he was thinking about referring them to remediation.

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 It has always been interesting to me how willing and eager school personelle are about placing students into Special Education programs. According to a recent study (with data extracted from the Department of Education website, 2009), some of the most common "disabilities" include reading difficulties, writing difficulties, dyslexia, comprehension inabilities and even the lack of critical thinking. Yet, little to no consideration has been giving to another possibility-- one that could pose an objection to my professor's theory: language dysfunction.

 It has always been interesting to me how willing and eager school personelle are about placing students into Special Education programs. According to a recent study (with data extracted from the DOE website, 2009), some of the most common "disabilities" include reading difficulties, writing difficulties, dyslexia, comprehension inabilities and even the lack of critical thinking. Yet, little to no consideration has been giving to another possibility (one that trumps the aforementioned): Language Acquisition.

 In American public schools, there are approximately 5.5 million students whose native or first language is not English (Swanson et al. 302). Of these students, it is estimated that 80% are Spanish speakers whose school achievement is much lower than other non-native speakers performance (303). In fact, according to data collected by Christine Shae, in 2002 there were “as many as 45% of teachers reported having at least one ELL in their classroom ELLs account for approximately 6% of the school-aged population, with Spanish-speaking students comprising approximately 70-80% of that group” (143). This is a surprising number of English Language learners in today’s public school system; such a large number poses risks for excessive student placement in special education programs. Moreover, ELLs are typically below grade level in both speaking and reading English. “..The status of limited-English proficient students suggests that nearly three quarters of ELLs read below grade level in English in the third grade” (143-144). As a result of these limitations, these students are often referred to special education for reading remediation. These students are at a higher risk of being placed into remediation due to their lack of reading and language abilities. Other scholars (e.g. Swanson et al) connote that the weakness (and area of improvement) of ELLs often resides in phonemic awareness; however, Swanson et al. expand upon the previous methods by enlisting two sub-categories of memory within the realm of phonemic processing. Among these differences, one of these methods includes a focus on efficiency and the other on phonological level (303), both of which increase memory, word recognition and fluency in both reading and speaking. Moreover, the authors argue that school districts ought to be better appraised with the phenomena of second language learners, for although they lack cognitive disabilities, they are nonetheless being placed into Special Education classrooms, which could be detrimental to not only social development, but to English-language emergence (304-305).

Phonemic awareness appears to be a common consideration among researchers argue that interventions in phonemic awareness and manipulation are needed in order to rectify said problems (144-145). The investigators posit that sound elements are needed before any familiarity of symbols can be acquired; such auditory acquisition is what is most commonly referred to as phonemic awareness. Furthermore, the researchers define manipulation of phonemes as the process by which one segments phonemes into smaller, more manageable units of speech and/or blending them into words (144). Stemming from this phonemic awareness are reading fluency (decoding, speed and accuracy), vocabulary and text comprehension (144).

If one considers such difficulties as dyslexia and comprehension "dis"abilities, one ought to be mindful of language as being an issue-- language in terms of first language acuisiton, one's exposure to "proper" English, a consideration of the dialect with which the student has experienced and so forth. Moreover, within this proposed "language dysfunction" one ought to further consider the possibility of a student not being of English-speaking orientation, which, of course, poses significant problems when trying to read a text in English. So it is no doubt that such difficulties would occur. If what my professor said is true--that many of the students derived from otter countries with English being a second language, then the notion of language acquisition being the issue is not foreign (no pun intended)

So what the heck am I babbling about, you may ask. And that is a profound question to ask (as I, myself, just found my thoughts wandering aimlessly as the cursor danced from left to right producing insignificant utterances). Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

• Do you know where is the bank? (Instead of do you know where the bank is?; an utterance from an ELL)

• I isn't able to talked to you right nows (Instead of I am unable to talk to you right now; an utterance from an American English speaker).

• You ain't got to worry (Instead of you don't have to worry; as uttered by both an ELL student as well as a speaker of an Urban, Northern NJ dialect).

• The inability to distinguish between different vowel sounds such as "pen/pin/pan/pain"and "ball/bowl/bed" (Typically a problem portrayed by ELL students).

Check this out! Sorry, I don't know how to make the screen appear with the video embedded within: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrHe_DRq_xg

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It never ceases to amaze me, (such as this very moment as I sit with my headphones on, but not plugged in) at the utter ignorance (for lack of a better word) of students' poor lingusitcal skills. I hear people mispronouncing endings, replacing "'ve" with "a" (as in shoulda) and confusing "sh" with "ch." These utterances are not formed from speech impediment of any kind, nor from a lack of English-language understudying. Rather, they are dialects better left spoken in informal (or even social media) situations; these are not the kinds of language difficulties I discuss above, but they are important to look at.

A few moments ago, I vigorously took notes as a college student uttered the following sentence: "I ain't got no headache. I be having anxiety and like it's like really annoying, lol (giggle)." Not only did I roll my eyes and plug my headphones into iTunes (I'd rather listen to The Beach Boys sing "Little Deuce Coupe" than her), I started thinking about this sentence and realized this utterance to be a prime example of a form of "language dysfunction." Thus-- the questions are raised: Is this sentence a result of societal influences, of technological lingo or perhaps of other exposure? is it a learning disability or a lack of English proficiency? Further, could there be a lingsutic blockage plaguing her ability to form a correct sentence-- (Of course, as Ochs suggests, we do tend to speak differently depending not the situation). We tend to transcend discourses based upon situations (we speak, act and even dress differently when talking to friends than we do presenting a paper on nuclear physics before a committee of distinguished scientists). So perhaps this girl was speaking that way because she could (after all, I don't think her friend was a nuclear scientist in any way).

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Overall, all of these researchers appear to, rather implicitly, (though I do explicitly) question many school policies for not providing adequate consideration to why students speak the way they do. Moreover, there seems to exist a consensus that, they believe that phonemic awareness and morphology ought to be explored and introduced to these students, if the lack of English proficiency is to blame for their reading, writing and comprehension issues and not a learning disability (Klinger 112). Thus, phonemic awareness needs to be one of the first elements taught to students (whether as ELL or regular, American born children) for out of that emerges morphology (that is, all of these individual sound units have sound) and from them stems comprehension. Once this is achieved, one ought to be able to learn the difference between a verb, noun, adjective and adverb and how it is possible for, say, a noun to turn into a verb (with a derivational affix) and so forth.

The function of language could be complex, but as we can see based upon the research, the sooner one is immersed in a language, the sooner he or she is able to speak it more fluently. Here is a video that I have used with my ESL students to teach adjectives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkuuZEey_bs

Linguistics in Central New Jersey

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Acquiring the Acquirable: Functional Language Dysfunction