Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Are You With Me?
This article was really interesting to me because it made me think about something that I was not often faced with and didn't really realize could be a potential problem. It talks about how African Americans have a different way of speaking than white people do and it can cause a problem in a classroom when it is majority African American students or an African American teacher. Foster goes further by developing on the difference between Standard English and African American English this is done through codeswitching within African American females. I grew up in a school district that was predominantly white and I have never had an African American teacher, but at Indiana University I have had teachers of other ethnicities that spoke a different form of English which made it hard to understand them.
This is a brief clip from a sitcom Modern Family this particular episode does a good job addressing codeswtiching and people talking in different forms of English. One of the main characters speaks Latin-English but can speak Standard English if necessary. Even when speaking standard English though it is hard to understand her because she is used to speaking in a different language. Gloria tries to speak in a Standard English tone throughout the episode but in the end realizes that it is her tone in Latin-English that makes her who she is and defines her background and personality.
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I too grew up in a school system that was predominately white. Standard-English was all we heard. However, there were a few substitute teachers that spoke in Latin-English or other forms that incorporated their native speech. Like Gloria of Modern Family, there speech was a different tone and much slower when they attempted to talk to us students. However, when they would be on the phone or talking to others that spoke their language, it was much faster. Their use of Code-Switiching was very interesting to watch, especially for a kid from an all white community.
ReplyDeleteI am also from a predominately white community so I never really thought about code switching before coming to IU and more specifically taking this class. I liked that you used Gloria from Modern Family to compare it to Foster’s article. Her accident is very obviously different from Standard English and even in this short clip when she is code switching her Latin accent is present.
ReplyDeleteI found this article to be very interesting to me because I went to a high school that had a wide variety of ethnicity. The part of the article that I related to was the part when they discuss the teachers "performance" at the beginning of class because I feel like all of my high school teachers did that every class. Great video, it relates very well to the linguistic devices that Foster discusses.
ReplyDeleteThis video was a great one to chose and really related well to the article. I, too, am from a predominately white community so I never got to experience much code-switching going on. Gloria from Modern Family is a perfect example of what code-switching really is. It's amazing how she can switch to speaking standard english, although with a Latin accent, on the dime. Keeping that Latin accent helped her stay in touch with her ethnic roots.
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