Andrea Sterzuk

I’ve exiled myself to my kitchen table in hopes of having a productive summer of writing.  Saskatchewan is experiencing twice the normal rainfall for the spring/summer season (which is seriously bad news for farmers.)  The only positive point I can see to all this rain is that it makes easier to be inside and to focus on writing.

This article in the Wall Street Journal describes an alarming decision by the Arizona Department of Education to police English language “fluency” in Arizona teachers.

Being a monolingual speaker of English does not make a person a “flawless” speaker or writer of English; more knowledgeable about English language rules; or a better example of how-students-should-speak-and-write-English.  No speaker of English–monolingual, bilingual, or multilingual–has an unmarked or neutral accent.  Such things simply do not exist.  Any statements or policies otherwise are simply examples of unchecked nationalism, xenophobia, and linguistic othering.  Positioning monolingual speakers of English as the linguistic ideal does nothing more than structure society in inequitable ways.  The decision of the Arizona Department of Education to interpret the No Child Left Behind Act in this way says more about the identities and internalized ideologies of educational gatekeepers and little about the linguistic abilities and realities of schools, teachers and students.

I’m in Atlanta for the annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics.  I’m very excited to be here and listening to some great papers.  I present tomorrow on my research on EFL student perceptions of English in globalized times.  Plus there isn’t any snow here!  Fantastic.

While reading Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s blog, I came across a link to this research by Clare Woods (Coventry University) on the relationship between texting and reading ability & phonological awareness.  This topic is brought up in every undergraduate and graduate class that I teach so I was interested to read the following:

“We began studying in this area initially to see if there was any evidence of association between text abbreviation use and literacy skills at all, after such a negative portrayal of the activity in the media.  We were surprised to learn that not only was the association strong, but that textism use was actually driving the development of phonological awareness and reading skill in children.  Texting also appears to be a valuable form of contact with written English for many children, which enables them to practice reading and spelling on a daily basis.”

I spent the last week in Villahermosa, Tabasco at UJAT – la Universidad Juarez Autonoma de Tabasco. I first visited this university in 2004 with Jesus Izquierdo Sandoval, one of my friends from graduate school.  He’s a professor there now and, thanks to this connection, I have had the opportunity to return and work with them on their new masters in English language teaching.  While there, I gave a lecture and several workshops. I also had the opportunity to visit a school in a nearby town where a U of R student will fulfill her internship requirements in Fall 2010 -  our first internship in Mexico.  It was a busy but productive week.  The change in temperature didn’t hurt either…

If you’ve been following this news story, you’ll know that  during the 2008 election bid, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid described Barack Obama as a “light skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”  and claimed that this would help rather than hurt Obama’s eventual presidential bid. (more…)

This blog entry, about the Netflix interactive map, has a really interesting discussion about movie rental choices and identity (race and social class, mainly).

I made the move to Apple.  I now am the proud owner of a Macbook Pro and I love it!  I don’t exactly know how to fully use it yet but I’m getting there.  Also, my cool hipster rating has likely sky-rocketed.  I just need an iPhone and I will have arrived.

I haven’t been much of a blogger these last few months, I’m afraid.  Classes end next week and I plan to take care of some much needed maintenance to this page then…

…which means that I have haven’t updated my status in 7 days.  This has never happened to me before.  It must be SSHRC season…