Language Variation and Technology

The students in both of the classes I observe all speak fluent English and are capable of speaking and writing in SAE. There is a lot of dialect speaking in the hallways of course, and the students just seem to know that in the classroom, the SAE hat goes on. West Anchorage is a very diverse part of town, so I know that many students at the school speak a different language at home, or a different dialect of the English language. I don't know about Romig, which is attached to West, but when I attended West back years ago, we boasted of 26 languages spoken in the homes of students in our school. In my particular classrooms however, I haven't seen so much exciting dialect things going on.

Technology is pretty basic in the classroom that I've been sitting in on. A television and a projector have been used as applicable to the curriculum. A movie summed up the Holocaust unit and projector pages are used to put daily quizzes up on the board for all to see. The only computer in the classroom is for the teacher's use to perform her necessary communications and to hold her documents. The school has a Mac computer lab, however, and I assume that each classroom signs up for time as needed. We were there for two days with the classes I have been observing, working on five paragraph essays. The MyAccess system, which is relatively new, has helped the students organize their ideas and revise drafts of their essays before presenting the product they are satisfied with to their teacher for "human" grading and feedback. The teacher I worked with explained to me the importance of continuing to give human feedback to her students about their essays, because the MyAccess program can make it all to easy to have your grading done for you, and students deserve some real attention to be paid to their hard work.

Discourse in Classroom

In my classroom, generally, unless the teacher is lecturing, she is actively encouraging students to participate in the conversational floor. Questions are often followed up by a short length of silence while the students get up their nerve to participate. Upon recieveing an answer, the teacher will often encourage other students to add on to the first reply, or give another idea. turn taking sometimes does not go super well in the classroom when multiple students are really excited about getting their answers or discussion contributions out. A lot of the questions being asked now are reading comprehension sort of questions, as we are reading Macbeth aloud. It is important for the students to be aware of what the intent behind the Old English, because they are taking a quiz after each act of the play. The more outgoing kids tend to be the ones who also have a higher social status, and as the children come into the room and choose ther own seating, they are often grouped together. The girls seem to be more prone to tittering while the teacher or a classmate has the conversational floor, and a couple times the teacher has had a student move or sent a student out for having their own chats during other people's talking time.