8/24

Diaz-Rico & Weed.

I found this article to be extremely interesting, but very typical to some other articles that I have read during my TESOL classes. What I loved about this article was the fact that almost the first 10 pages were about how the United States has been diverse since the very beginning. This makes me wonder why so many people think that anyone other than a white, middle class, english-speaking person deserves less respect and should be treated differently. It's a great eye-opening article because it shows that there are so many other types of people in this country that are in need of help. We started as a diverse country and we are continuing to be a diverse country, so we should be accommodating for all of the languages and backgrounds that we have here. It saddens me that the education of families that speak a language other than English is very poor. Is the country simply not educated about the high demand for teachers that can work with immigrant students? Clearly the population of "minority groups" is increasingly rapidly, so this makes me wonder why universities aren't promoting the high need for qualified teachers in this area. I've come across several articles similar to this one, and it makes me curious to know if we Americans are taking something away from these statistics and helping out the people that need it most.

Jenkins

I found this article to be much more complex and almost confusing. It did open my eyes a lot to how many people in the world actually do speak English. It was shocking. It really made me think about how many people around the world learn English as their second, third, or forth language and how most people in the United States that speak English as their first language do not speak anything other than English. This is why we are in such high demand for educators that can help these students who speak other languages. I also found it interesting to see how many varieties of English there are within regions. For example, even though we say that English is a common language in the US, we never think about how many different types of English there actually is like southern, black english, etc. It's crazy how in depth this article gets about one single language. It makes me assume that this is probably the same for several other languages across the world. I feel like when someone says they speak "English" I'll never be able to think about it the same knowing how many forms there actually are.