Rewriting Teaching and Learning Narratives: How to Promote Student Embracement of Language Varieties

Focusing on two international, albeit differently globalized languages, the authors explore a nexus of culture and observed discourse practice still too often neglected in the second- and foreign-language classroom, to wit the thoughtful presentation and promotion of dialectal and sociolectal varieties of French and English. Their pedagogy encourages the integration of variations as part and parcel of the language study syllabus, rather than as tangential curiosities relegated to discretized vignettes. In this article, sample lessons from an advanced-level French language course and a first-year writing course in English are presented that home in on variational qualities deemed culturally pertinent in each linguistic sphere. In the French lesson, for example, students are invited to explore variation based on cultural concerns for surface structure through an activity on terminological innovation and the creation of properly "French" lexical items. The English critical writing assignment, in turn, comprises weekly discussion board posts in which students respond to garden-path prompts that ask them to react to both received ideas as well as research findings about varieties of world English(es). Students are required to draw on sundry wells of scholarship and experience, including their own linguistic trajectories and multilingual identities. The sample exercises outlined by the authors are but two among many utilized in their respective courses designed to make the conscious examination of variety and language (re)appropriation an integral part of course cultural content.