The Cardinal

Cultural and Linguistic Lesson Learned 

Benjamin Hirt, French Teacher
Keystone School, San Antonio, Texas

It is hard to disagree with the notion that French spelling is extremely complex. The dictée nationale is less about completing a perfect dictation than having a score that is more accurate than that of those around you. Having written, emailed and texted native French speakers for decades and having lived with native French-speaking adolescents and adults, I’ve seen firsthand how inaccurately many French speakers spell, even highly educated ones. In light of this, how fair is it that we hold our students to such a high bar as to expect them to make past participles agree with feminine and plural subjects when using être or with preceding direct object pronouns in the passé composé with avoir, for example, when many French people can’t or don’t do it themselves? Are we doing students a disservice by sharing so many potential roadblocks with them? Add to this the “écriture inclusive” (inclusive writing) movement in French today where some French speakers and teachers are actively subverting spelling rules to more accurately express individual identity as opposed to the often out-of-touch rules imposed by the Académie Française, and one can see that French speakers themselves often either don’t use the accurate spelling by accident or by political choice. The existence of so many rules for hundreds of years makes the battle to simplify French spelling and unlock the hold of gender agreement seem impossible. Yet, in the face of these seemingly impossible challenges, there is a beautiful sense of liberation when comparing all this to the consistency between written and spoken forms of Alsatian, one of France’s most widely spoken, and increasingly more commonly taught, regional languages. Thanks in part to efforts by OLCA (l’Office pour la langue et les cultures d’Alsace et de Moselle), Alsatian is more accessible to all through extensive programs to clarify the language, account for its regional differences, and maintain and improve its presence and popularity in the 21st century. Continue reading →

Jing Tan, Miami University/ Under the Mask of Bilingual Education: Cultural Capital

In 1839, Ohio was the nation’s first state to formally empower bilingual education law to meet German immigrants’ educational needs at school. In 1968, the Bilingual Education Act was the first federal legislation to speak for bilingual students in the U.S. to have equal access to education. It seems like we have made progress in creating fair education for English as a second language speakers. However, it is important for us to look back at the impact of bilingual education policies in the past 180 years to reevaluate the policies and revise them to fit with current generation students. Are our students really bilingual? Is the policy constructing or assimilating diversity? I believe that bilingual policies have assimilated 1.5 generation students instead of letting them keep their identity and culture, which has silenced voices in our classrooms. Continue reading →