Bedtime Stories

I remember my parents reading stories to me but it was more because my sister and I thoroughly enjoyed books. Not because my parents felt reading to us before we could read to ourselves was going to help us succeed in our futures. One thing I thought about while reading this that does pertain to my personal life is when my sister and were younger, we loved to play school. We were constantly recruiting parents, grandparents, cousins, and eventually a little brother to be our students. my parents never formally enforced the importance of school, reading, or books on us and yet we would go to school 8 hours a day and then come home to play school. We also loved working in educational workbooks that my grandma would buy. it was like extra homework but we would work on those for hours. This doesn't pertain to language or English only but more the constructs of school itself in general. When reading this article, I definitely thought beyond just the English classroom to school in general.

Question

One of the questions I had came from the webpage about AAVE. It said that "contact language is developed through processes of second language acquisition." I'm wondering what exactly contact language is. I'm thinking it's like the "bridge language" that can connect the two languages. This web page also mention universal grammar playing a big role in processes and I would like some elaboration on "universal grammar" and how this should pertain to us as teachers because I have never heard this term before. I'm wondering what falls into universal grammar and how we can teach it.

Social Linguistic Divide

I must first admit I was guilty of making the assumption that colored people did not speak "correct" English. I have since learned this is certainly not the case. I've been pondering since we've been talking about A.A.V.E. why I held that assumption and I think it is primarily related to region. I grew up in Montana in a city where we didn't see many colored people at all. Therefore, my exposure was limited. As for keeping that assumption out of the classroom, I think exposing them to it right away can give them awareness. Exposing them to the dialect and letting them know it's accepted and making it clear it's not "bad" English rather just a different form. I do not think we will be able to completely keep the assumptions of society out of our classroom but I do believe we can keep our students well educated. I plan to teach middle school age and I think students are very easily influenced at that age so exposing them right off the bat will be beneficial to them in high school as it won't be a surprise.
I think we are quite ignorant however if we expect our students to speak "standard English" if they are raised with a different dialect. I also feel though that if the student is speaking a completely foreign language we can expect them to speak English. If we English speakers travel to a country where English is not their first language, I would expect to need to learn their language to function in society.

Introduction

I was born and raised in Montana in Helena until I moved in 2007 to come to MSU. I was originally majoring in nursing until I got a taste of an English course and pursued my long ago passion of teaching. This revelation took a year to discover- of course a year after paying for nursing courses. I was home-schooled all through middle school until my senior year of high school when I went to public school full time. I had the reverse experience that most future teachers have. Going to a public high school my senior year was the most disappointing and scary decision I made. I was not impressed academically and certainly did not fit in socially therefore I decided I would like to be a teacher to create my own environment students like me would feel welcome in. Granted, I had some good teachers but overall, it wasn't as good of an experience as home-schooling was. I think education is such a rewarding field and I look forward to helping students become successful in their futures while enjoying language!!!