Code-Switching Lesson

Code-Switching Lesson

When teaching past time patterns to a classroom of students’, that may predominantly speak and/or write with a vernacular dialect, it is important to lay a solid foundation to ensure they have a complete understanding of the definitions; formal, informal, and code-switching. Many students may not realize the differences relating to formal and informal or why they use code-switching to adjust in various situations, especially writing situations. To help ensure students grasp the full concept of past time patterns, it is helpful to follow four basic lessons that include defining, classifying, practicing, and editing, informal and formal past time patterns. Each of the following lessons will help students to improve upon their existing foundation in order to become more effective writers.
The first lesson, defining informal and formal past time patterns,
concentrates on using the differentiation of formal and informal language. In order for a student to predominantly write in a formal language, they must have a firm concept between the two-formal and informal. Since we are concentrating on past times, one must also ensure that sentence examples are structured correctly to promote the clarity of time-word usage and common knowledge. A student will most likely not realize that a verb ending in -ed has been transformed to show past time, but they will most likely look for context clues that show when it happened by using time-words such as: yesterday, this morning, last month, etc. After acquiring a general understanding, methods for noticing and developing patterns should be introduced. One of the main pattern lessons is to allow students to observe that single verb sentences can have their tense changed by simply adding the suffix –ed to the end of the verb.
The second lesson, classifying informal and formal past time patterns, will give students the opportunity to apply what they have learned from the previous lesson, such as deciphering the sentence by using common knowledge and examining the verb to see whether or not it is displaying the past time pattern previously discussed. A good way for children to utilize this knowledge is by using a t-chart. In this lesson, students can create their own t-charts using frequently used words, which will provide an organized approach to identify and execute past time patterns. Furthermore, this is the perfect opportunity for students to label their word choices as formal or informal, and discuss the different setting in which they would use these words.
The third lesson, practicing the informal and formal past time patterns, is very likely the most important.
In this lesson, students will begin to be encouraged to apply their newly learned skills and develop an understanding that the majority of the writing they will do should to be done using formal language. In this lesson, student will have an opportunity to share in an exercise called peer review. Peer review exercises are a great way for students to read and correct a peer writing, all the while preparing themselves to complete their own self-review. The reason this lesson may be the most important is because this is an chance for students to use all of the patterns previously taught.
The fourth and final lesson, editing the formal past time pattern, is where we, the teacher, will begin to see which students have grasped the concept and are able to apply the patterns using past time and those who have not. In this lesson, children will begin to edit their own writing to decide if any informal language appears and how make necessary correction in order to achieve formal
language.
These lesson methods would be viable to use in all classrooms, whether you have a diverse classroom or not. The differentiation of formal and informal, and identifying patterns is definitely useful in this lesson; however, it can be applied to many other lessons in the future that have to deal with a student’s own writing. Therefore, knowing these simple strategies is definitely a tool that will promote growth in the student’s personal writing.
This method can still be utilized in a classroom that has more students speaking Standard English than a vernacular dialect. These particular lessons could be applied in small reading groups, in which several students need to become more aware of past time patterns in their own writing or to simply educate children how code-switching works and why our brains automatically do things for us.
Studies have shown that this approach is much more useful than the typical editing of students work because it allows for them to develop a sense of variation with in their writing and speaking without any feelings of being “penalized” for speaking in a way that is considered natural to them.