Ethnography Paper One Pager

Double Standard Expectations Regarding the Best Way to Teach Language:
An Analysis on Code-Switching, Standard English, and
ESL Students in the English Classroom
I. Framework for the Investigation
After a semester of diving into different issues that affect and influence teachers in their everyday classrooms, I could still not grasp my mind around one. Rebecca Wheeler, an English professor with an MS and PhD in linguistics and author of “Code-Switch to Teach Standard English”, claims that students are more apt to learn standard English if they understand the rules and regulations of non-standard Englishes. She also states that code-switching in the classroom can be used to enhance, if not expedite, the proficiency of standard English. Yet, some questions still remained very unanswered in regards to English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.
Whose role is it to teach standard English to ESL learners if code-switching is allowed in an English classroom?
How does different discourses within a classroom affect ESL learners?
How does the use of only verbal standard English in an English classroom compromise the cultural identity of ESL learners?
II. Context of the Investigation
To answer these questions I decided to interview a woman who learned the British standard English as a young girl in Sri Lanka. She arrived in the United States at the age of 18 and attended Shrewsbury high school in Massachusetts for another two years. I also interviewed Tricia Rabusin, a fifth grade teacher at Palm Avenue Elementary in San Bernardino, California and Doctor Patricia Bailey, a professor at the Colorado State University and instructor of world literatures.
III. Research Methods
Primary and secondary resource data was collected and analyzed in several ways. Imara Dean, the Sri Lankan woman, was interviewed over the telephone, Tricia Rabusin was interviewed via email, and a personal face-to-face interview was conducted with Patricia Bailey. Because ESL students arrive into different school systems at different times, I wanted to have a wide variety of opinions; thus, I included the input of an elementary school teacher, a woman whose primary language was not English in an American high school, and a university professor whose studies focus on both language and world literature.
IV. Investigative Results
As I compared the two out of the three major themes that emerged from my research of my primary sources, I began to question my secondary sources. The first theme is that language reflects socio-economic status and primary discourses can lead to outsider status if language, as a tool, has not been properly taught to or has not been acquired by the speaker. The next theme is that cultural identity is challenged by family and community more than it is by teachers, whose role is to teach, engage, and model standard English. The third theme, the teacher’s responsibility to address problems with standard English and to teach by example, was not a theme that challenged the secondary sources but raised some questions about the “students” that the authors were referring to.