Triple A Learning IB Blogs

There are contradictory impulses at work in the study of English literature and language which inevitably involve a bit of tightrope-walking-tension for the teacher. On the one hand, in our efforts to contribute to internationalism, we need to instill a recognition and respect for the wide variety of ‘Englishes’ in the world today, each with their own ‘rules’ and values that add to the wealth of English cultures as a whole. On the other, given current realities, we need to give students the ability to recognize when they need to use so-called standard English(es) for access to academic (and other) success and to help them gain the appropriate vocabulary, idiom and registers. This is a matter of exploring sociolinguistic positions and recognizing the historical reasons for the tension between these. In doing so, we can explore why some dialects are ‘the norm’ while others are marginalized.

This will naturally lead to a discussion of the tension between those who wish to protect the ‘purity’ of a language or encourage its ‘organic expansion’: those wishing to establish what is ‘right’ and those who view language as inherently creative and changing. Hopefully we will get our students to understand that we need to move out of this binary mode of thought and recognize the spectrum of choices available.

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