Paul Suh October 4, 2012 Lesson Plan A #2 CI 403 Figurative Language with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao TIME The duration of the lesson will be 50 minutes. SETTING This lesson will be intended for 11th graders in non-honors Language Arts. They will be around 25 students typically achieving average or below average grades. It will be approximately half boys and half girls. It will also be a diverse classroom with 11 African American students, 7 White, 5 Latino, and 2 Asian/Pacific Islanders. They will be from middle to low socioeconomic statuses. One student will also have an emotional disability and most of the students (not just the African American students) will use African American Vernacular at home and in informal social situations as well. THEORY INTO PRACTICE BACKGROUND According to writers like H. Samy Alim, African American English (more colloquially known as Ebonics) has been made illegitimate and portrayed as a broken form of the “correct” form of English—Standard American English. This, even for many talented and well-meaning teachers, is a vehicle for reinforcing White hegemony within our schools. According to Alim, “The language of the Black child is consistently viewed as something to eradicate” (187). In contrast to this view, authors Teresa M. Redd and Karen Schuster Webb posit that African American English is actually a legitimate language and should, therefore, be encouraged and brought into the school setting. They write, “Linguistic research shows that
Paul Suh October 4, 2012 Lesson Plan A #2 CI 403 Figurative Language with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao TIME The duration of the lesson will be 50 minutes. SETTING This lesson will be intended for 11th graders in non-honors Language Arts. They will be around 25 students typically achieving average or below average grades. It will be approximately half boys and half girls. It will also be a diverse classroom with 11 African American students, 7 White, 5 Latino, and 2 Asian/Pacific Islanders. They will be from middle to low socioeconomic statuses. One student will also have an emotional disability and most of the students (not just the African American students) will use African American Vernacular at home and in informal social situations as well. THEORY INTO PRACTICE BACKGROUND According to writers like H. Samy Alim, African American English (more colloquially known as Ebonics) has been made illegitimate and portrayed as a broken form of the “correct” form of English—Standard American English. This, even for many talented and well-meaning teachers, is a vehicle for reinforcing White hegemony within our schools. According to Alim, “The language of the Black child is consistently viewed as something to eradicate” (187). In contrast to this view, authors Teresa M. Redd and Karen Schuster Webb posit that African American English is actually a legitimate language and should, therefore, be encouraged and brought into the school setting. They write, “Linguistic research shows that