What Teachers Need to Know about Teaching Grammar in Diverse Classrooms: Teacher and Student Perspectives

Code-switching pedagogy has been found to be an effective approach to grammar instruction in linguistically diverse classrooms. However, contrastive analysis has come under criticism because it perpetuates the linguistic dominance of standard English at the expense of non-standard dialects, obscures power dynamics that privilege and marginalize language varieties, and discounts students’ attitudes and the close relationship between language and identity. These possibilities and pitfalls are made vivid by analyzing episodes of classroom interaction and interviews with a teacher and her students in this presentation.