Express Yourself: A Letter of Invitation to Language Teachers Everywhere

Dear Esteemed Colleagues:

I can say "Language is not a" in my honors class and the students will respond "word to word translation." This is one of my catch phrases this year, along with "staring is not studying" and "how you feel and where you are, always use the verb estar." I use them so often that I'm thinking of having posters made to hang in my room of what I dub as Cleggisms.

Language is not a word to word translation.

I began saying this two years ago when I collected journals from my students and found the rampant use of translators. It was frustrating and that's putting it mildly. I always start the year talking to the students about what cheating is and how translators are not acceptable. I talk to them about online dictionaries and have embraced wordreference.com as a mainly reliable online dictionary.

However given how trusting my students are of anything online, be it translators or online dictionaries, I started looking into Google Translator and how it works. I put together a twenty minute lesson on translators wherein I wrote a paragraph in English, put it through Google translator and then translated that back to English. We talked about how translators can sometimes give you an idea but they largely work on the idea that languages do translate word to word but languages don't. Languages require context and meaning, not simply a word for a word.

Literacy & Language

Literacy.

What is literacy? I have taken many classes on this and I remember when it first became really clear to me that literacy is not simply the ability to read. Literacy involves understanding the world's communications as well as the cultural and social contexts of those messages. We receive these messages via written texts or images as well as through body language and facial expressions. When we speak of literacy, more often than not, we are referring to the written texts or images of society. However the message and context are not mutually exclusive. In order to read these messages and interpret them accurately, one must understand how you create them and why.