How to talk to your students

I feel as though there is a pretty sizable gap in the "languages" spoken by most teachers--or any adult, for that matter--and kids today. Thankfully for us coming into the profession now as opposed to 20 or 30 years ago, we are a little bit closer to complete comprehension of what our students are saying (which, I have found, is especially handy if it's not appropriate talk for school), just by nature of being users of a lot of the same vocabulary.

Popular culture is a pretty big part of my teaching philosophy because it helps provide the necessary context that kids need to learn the material. Languages are alive and just like a science teacher would use experiments to prove scientific principals or supply a real world situation for practice, a language teacher must provide ways to exercise language "muscles" with authentic and relevant communication. One of my favorite examples of this is the scene in Good Morning Vietnam when Robin Williams's character, Adrian Cronaur, takes over teaching English to a group of Vietnamese adults. He sees what they are learning and scoffs, remarking that you don't walk up to somebody on the street and say, "Good day, I would like to buy some butter and some cheese." He then teaches the class how to say, "Hey man, what happening?" Providing students with authentic communication tools that they actually stand a chance of using in real life has its place in the foreign language curriculum, there's no doubt about it.

Authentic communication also needs to take place between teachers and students and it is our responsibility as teachers to bridge the gap I described above. If you've ever traveled to a foreign country and tried shopping, you'll know the sense of relief that you feel when you discover that the proprietor of the store you're in speaks English. I think it stands to reason that it's the same for kids and teachers. We are the proprietors and they are the customers; we need to speak their language if we want to do business.

Now, this certainly doesn't mean that we should absorb adolescent parlance so much so that we lose an aspect of our authority, but it's helpful to know--and sometimes use--the phraseology that our students do. It creates a connection and an understanding, and shows that we're interested in their lives. I worked at a school in the D.C. suburbs in 1999-2000 and the kids, most of whom were urban Latinos and African-Americans, got a huge kick out of me when I used their words, so at the very least, we can supply tension-breaking chuckles by going out on a limb with our vocabulary.

An education writer that I enjoy reading has some thoughts on this as well. She was the inspiration behind this entry (which really is about 21st century literacy after all). Read her musings here and subscribe to the RSS of Visual Thesaurus while you're there, it's a great site.