View Content #22545

by Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

Language is emergent, dynamic, and varied. This perspective should be integrated in curricular practice whenever possible.

As we consider this month’s guiding principle, I first invite you to engage in this short reflective exercise on one small piece of your own language.

1. Write down 3 to 5 ways a person “should” end an email. Best Wishes? Thanks? Sincerely?
2. Now, open your own email and write down the closings you used for the last ten emails. How do they compare? Are they similar? Different? What do you notice?

If you are like most, the list is probably more varied and different than the list you originally made.  While only a small example, it is representative of the immense variety present in our own, everyday language practices. We often say things differently than we tell people we say them and change and adapt our message and words depending on who we are talking to, or maybe even how hungry we are.  The slang word hangry definitely comes from somewhere. Variety also spans across geographical boundaries, socioeconomic classes, communities, age groups, and educational levels, to name a few.

Critical to our role as language teachers is helping learners navigate variety and emergent interactional behavior. That is, we can prepare them to engage in conversation by observing what their interlocutor does or modify the “correct” version when it comes across as too formal or cold in a conversation with a friend.  While we can never teach them the words to use in every situation, we can prepare them with the skills necessary to be good observers and analysts in order to be able to adapt to any context in which they find themselves.  Embracing language as dynamic and emergent means we

• present language as the most appropriate option, not as the only correct possibility.
• embrace dialectal variation as fundamental to human interaction while celebrating lexical diversity and “non-standard” forms. 
• demand attention to context and audience in speaking and writing and value it through instruction, assessment, and reflection.

This month we will further explore these ideas and ways to tackle variation and dynamic human interaction in the language classrooms.  This week’s Activity of the Week is an expanded version of our short activity above you can use with your own students as a starting point. Happy co-constructing!