I made a strong cross-classrooms connection with something I read recently for my Teaching Writing class. Yo quiero to talk about it con you. It’s about what I just did in the previous sentence. In the book Naming What We Know, the author of section 4.6 addresses language, but not language as the words, word choice, structure, etc. Rather, the author discusses language as a living and changing entity, which I connected to my Linguistics class. You see, languages are constantly evolving/devolving, adding new words and perhaps leaving a few behind. Not only that, but the same language can be spoken and written very differently in different parts of the world. Just look at all the different dialects of English throughout the United States!
As teachers, this is important to keep in mind. For one, we might find a job in a different part of the country, or even the world, where our language is not the same. But that doesn’t mean that it is wrong. That is a prescriptive mindset, which can be damaging when grading a work by someone who doesn’t speak or write the same way that we might. This is the mindset that linguists try to avoid. As teachers, we should try to be descriptive, Look at WHAT is being said and HOW, rather than whether or not it is actually correct.
Now, I hear what you are saying, those of you who must grade formal papers. Yes, there are certain rules that should be followed. But these rules are more like guidelines anyway, and rules can always be bent and twisted to fit our needs (within reason). When entering a new area, we must discover how the people speak, and especially how our students speak, to be able to grade them accurately and fairly. No language is universally spoken, so we must be diligent to learn the lexicon of the area before we can judge the writing from there.
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