At a regular private school, a sixth-grade class with 20 to 30 children at the same age has students from many different English backgrounds. Bereiter (2002) confirms our expectations and fears when he says “I think educators must face up to the fact teaching for understanding is not culturally neutral”. They come from other private schools, sometimes from a public one, some of them enjoy learning English and some just don’t. “Furthermore, they tend to overshadow what I call small-d diversity, the economic significance of which is beginning to count as never before” finishes Bereiter (2002). In this scenario, English teachers have to teach the language according to the academic curriculum with no possibility of having a leveling test to get to know the student previous knowledge better.
As Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope presented, we have to deal with many learner differences, such as social issues, cognitive differences, contents, background education, age, sexual orientation, gender and even disability, which Bereiter (2002) also agrees, “These are important kinds of diversity, and for various reasons they are looming larger and larger in educational policymaking”.
A way to start the language acquisition as L2 is through socialization, “forms of socialization orient the child toward speech codes which control access to relatively context-independent meaning” as Bernstein (1971) once said.
We cannot pretend these differences do not exist or deny our role as mentors. Delpit (2006) says, “teachers need to support the language that students bring to school, provide them input from an additional code, and give them the opportunity to use the new code in a nonthreatening, real communicative context”. The easiest way of doing so is mixing activities up, teaching from grammar to role-plays using sometimes the mother-tongue, as well as giving them the constant support for accomplishing tasks.
Teachers need to support the language level that students bring to school, provide them input from an additional code, using textbook, literature excerpts or simply an easy-to-understand explanation of the context, and give them the opportunity to use the new code in a nonthreatening, real communicative context, producing written and oral texts.
Bibliography
BEREITER, Carl. 2002. Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. New York: Routledge. pp. 242-244.
BERNSTEIN, Basil. 1971. Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical Studies Toward a Sociology of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 175-178
CHALL, Jeanne. 1983. Stages of Reading Development. New York: McGraw Hill. pp. 10-24.
DELPIT, Lisa. 2006. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press. pp. 48-53.