parents and grandmother spoke Tagalog all the time. When I talked with relatives with accents, I’d be secretly pleased that I didn’t sound the same as they did. At school, I’d join others in making fun of kids who were “fresh off the boat.” It was as though I was trying to distance myself from my linguistic heritage in an attempt to blend in and become more of what I thought a ‘Canadian’ should be. Recov- ering the loss of my home language is a jour- ney I will be on for years. As an educator, I took a lot of my nega-
tive biases and assumptions about newcom- ers with me. I’d fret over finding “something to do” for newcomer students from abroad, resorting to overly simplistic worksheets and activities while the rest of the class completed “regular” work. I missed valuable opportuni- ties to accommodate the English language learners who were more than capable of taking on new challenges. At the same time, I lacked a framework from which I could see that so much more was pedagogically possible.
OUTDATED PROVINCIAL POLICY
Deficit-oriented perceptions of ELLs likely continue to prevail as a result of the ESL/ELD policies still followed by Ontario educators. Current ESL/ELD policy in Ontario (2007) is woefully outdated and saturated with colonial and monolingual perspectives that uphold a hierarchical norm of “English as the standard.” In Race, Empire, and English Language
Teaching, Dr. Suhanthie Motha argues that the concept of “standard English” is an invention that “contributes unwittingly to inequitable relations of power among former empires and colonized nations and that continues to play an important role in the persistence of a par- ticular international racial status quo.” Lan- guage hierarchies, argues Motha, are neither constructed deliberately nor are they random, but develop within “particular racial and co- lonial patterns.” Echoing Motha’s assertions, Ontario policy maintains a core assumption that a “standard” of mainstream English exists that students must acquire to be successful.
As the policy states:
“English is an international language, and many varieties of English – sometimes referred to as dialects – are spoken around the world. Standard English is the variety of English that is used as the language of education, law, and gov- ernment in English-speaking countries. Some varieties of English are very different – not only in pronunciation or accent but also in vocabu- lary and sentence structure – from the English required for success in Ontario schools.”
28 ETFO VOICE | FALL 2023
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
