"People untrained in linguistics. particularly politicians, tend to believe that if limited English proficient students can converse with their monolingual English-speaking peers, then these English-language learners can compete with them on an equal footing. If it were only so easy! English-language learners who can chat comfortably in English do not automatically develop the academic language skills needed to compete." (225)
What Collier is saying here is that learning to speak a second language is only part of the battle. It is possible to learn the oral practices of a language but be completely clueless when it comes to how to write and read the language. It's similar to how an American preschool student is able to chat in English however they may not be able to write their own names or read a picture book. In other words, just because a person is able to speak another language at the conversational level does not mean that they are completely fluent in said language.
Quote Number 2
"Students will produce utterances in the classroom in their native dialect. To affirm the home language means that they will not be mid that they are wrong, or that what they say is vulgar or bad. Instead, the teacher analyzes with the students the differences between their dialect and the standard variety: grammatical patterns, pronunciation differences, vocabulary items, varying social contexts, and so on." (227)
I think what Collier is trying to say here is that each language has many different dialects depending on the region it is spoken in. Just because a child may speak a different dialect than the "standard" dialect it doesn't mean that the child is speaking an incorrect or vulgar form of the language. It's like how English spoken in America is different than the English spoken in England. It might be the same language and an English speaker from America will be able to understand an English speaker from England but there are distinct differences between the two forms of English.
Quote Number 3:
"When bilingual people use both languages in speech, alternating between the two, they code-switch. Code-switching occurs at the word, phrase. clause, or sentence level. Linguists consider code-switching to be a creative use of language by bilinguals who know both languages well." (229)
When Collier talks about "code-switching" I believe that she is talking about how when a person speaks two languages they might switch back and forth between each language. The person may start a sentence in one language then end it in another or vice-versa. She also goes on to say that code-switching should be encouraged rather than condemned to help encourage the student to learn the second language. Code-switching is something that I am very familiar with. I live in a somewhat bilingual family. My mother's native language is French and while she doesn't code-switch very much but my grandmother will. She'll start a sentence in English then halfway through switch to her native language, French, to end the sentence.
Things to consider:
I was able to relate quite a bit to this reading. And I have been exposed to many of the things that Collier talked about in regards to learning a second language. I was brought up in an English and Canadian French (Quebecois) household. So when I took French in high school I already had some understanding of the language. However I was told by my teacher that the French I grew up exposed to was "bad French" and that I needed to learn "proper" French. I would like to know if anyone has had a similar experience, it could be with any language.
I liked the video that you posted. I thought it showed a good point. Not only do people in society talk in different languages but they also have different accents and ways of speaking. I mean if you look at English; there is the type we speak in the northeast, the south speaks differently and if you go to England that is totally different English as well. Spain also shows this. There are different types of Spanish spoken depending on the area you go to.
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