This textbook is edited by Samantha Looker-Koenigs, an associate professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and is ideal for a first-year writing course on linguistic difference and academic writing. The first first
Reading: Marjorie Agosin’s “Always Living in Spanish” and “English”
Marjorie Agosin is a professor of Spanish at Wellesley College as well as an essayist, poet, and human rights activist. In the essay “Always Living in Spanish,” translated by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman, and the poem “English,” translated by Monic Bruno, Agosin
Reading: Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence to Words”
“My mother withdrew into silence two months before she died. A few nights before she fell silent, she told me she regretted the way she had raised me and my sisters. I knew she was referring to the way he
Reading: James Baldwin’s “If Black English Isn’t a Language”
In this opinion piece, James Baldwin makes a cogent, well-reasoned, and passionate argument that Black English, or African American Vernacular English, is a language. Not a dialect, but a language. He begins by chronicling various reasons for languages to arise—the need
Textbook: What’s Language Got to Do with It?
This textbook comes from two applied linguists, Keith Walters of Portland State University and Michal Brody of Sonoma State University, and focuses on linguistic diversity, the politics of language difference, and how language influences identity. I used selections from this
Reading: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a modern classic and one of the most frequently taught memoirs. And for good reason. Kingston recounts memories from her early childhood as a first generation, Chinese American
Assignment: Discourse Community Translation
This is an assignment based on June Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan”, a translingual piece about Black English in academic settings. In that article, she writes about teaching Alice Walker’s The Color
Presentation: Discourse Communities
For any course dealing with language difference, I like to start by introducing definitions of language and discourse communities. While this presentation isn’t the most visually engaging, it is packed with information about common beliefs about language. I start by