Rationale for Artifact 4.2
Standard 4
The teacher understands the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the
discipline(s) he or she teaches and creates learning experiences that make these aspects of
the discipline accessible and meaningful for learners to assure mastery of the content.
Artifact: Activity “Mexican Spanish”
The study of dialect has become important to me during the last year as it can be
used to create a point of access into culture and social issues and is so deeply interwoven
with the identity of a speaker or group of speakers (Muller, 2013, Moyer 2013, Byers
2014). I believe that language instruction should at some point include the study of
dialect, as it relates to authentic communication in the TL, target cultures, communities of
speakers, comparisons of language and culture between groups, and can be used to talk
about connections between cultures, communities and the language itself (Kramsch,
2009, Moyer 2013, Byers 2014, The National Standards Collective Board). I want my
future students to understand the value of dialectal variation and begin to see dialects for
their value as valid, useful and rich linguistic systems of language in their own right
instead of taking a prescriptive view of language, which devalues them in favor of the
standard variety as the only “correct” or “real” one. By doing this, I believe that my
students will gain a greater understanding of the Spanish language as it exists in authentic
communication within and outside of the academic realm, along with the cultures with
which it is infused. That being said, I have chosen to include a multi-staged activity
entitled “Mexican Spanish”, which I developed for as part of a project for my FL 663
course, to serve as an example of the ways that I plan to incorporate this theme into the
curriculum and make it accessible to my students, while teaching them how to find
authentic speech samples and to recognize and study linguistic variation as it appears
naturally.
During the preparatory phase and the initial classroom phase of this activity,
students will work with an authentic portion of audio from an interview with a native
speaker and its accompanying transcription in order to make notes on any distinct
features of speech that they notice. In this way, they will begin to learn to tune into
salient variation in pronunciation, lexicon or grammar and compare it with the standard
variety of the target language that they have been acquiring in class. Then, as they
discuss their thoughts on the variation that they perceive with each other and with the
teacher, they will begin to develop metalanguage concerning the topic. This use of
metalanguage will hold meaning as it relates to an actual experience and serves the
purpose of interpersonal expression in the TL and classification (Swain 2000). The
students will also be given the opportunity to survey speech samples from different areas
of Mexico and learn to gather linguistic data on what they hear, in doing so, they will be
exposed with a range of dialects that clearly portray differences in phonology. Along
with learning how to find, discuss and categorize types of variation within the TL,
students will also learn how dialect plays a role in the identity of Spanish speakers and
their cultures a geocultural marker.
At the end of the activity, a final stage is introduced, in which the individual
student is given the opportunity to use their Spanish to play the role of the sociolinguist
and gather linguistic data along with sociocultural information about the variety(ies) of
Spanish used by native speakers near them. As the student takes on this task, he or she
will demonstrate the skills gained through the previous experiences of this activity as
they take on deeper meaning through personal and practical application.
(The interview referred to was not to included with the artifact for privacy reasons.)
References
Byers, P. (2014). Enfrentando cuestoines pertinentes a la expansión y creación de
programas del español como lengua de herencia.” (unpublished manuscript).
University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.
Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moyer, A. (2013). Foreign accent: The phenomenon of non-native speech. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Müller, M. (2013). Conceptualizing pronunciation as a part of translingual/transcultural
competence: New impulses for SLA research and the L2. Foreign Language
Annals, 46, 2, 213-229.
The National The National Standards Collaborative Board. (2015). World-Readiness
Standards for Learning Languages: Fourth Edition (W-RSLL). Alexandria, VA:
Author. Retrieved from: http://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readinessstandards-learning-languages.
Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition through
collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second
language learning. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.