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262 Ensuring social relevance
11.2.7 Shifting attention of language use at home to the workplace, ask your learners to read the following “News Brief” (you can either write it on the board or project it onto the OHP screen). It is taken from the Los Angeles Times, September, 24, 2000. Here’s the unedited version.
Spanish-Speaking Workers Win English-Only Ruling
Thirteen telephone operators who had been hired to field calls from Mexico won a record $709,284 judgment against a Texas company that fired them for refusing to abide by an English-only rule. The plaintiffs included a couple barred from speaking Spanish to each other in the lunchroom. A judge ruled against Premier Operator Services Inc., after a linguist testified that “code switching,” an un- conscious tendency to lapse into a native language, cannot easily be turned off.
11.2.8 First, help the learners comprehend the text. Have them talk about the rationale behind the Texas company’s decision to fire some of the employees—including a married couple—because they were speak- ing in their native tongue during their lunch break.
11.2.9 If the linguistic and communicative levels of your learners permit, ask them to discuss the two court rulings in relation to the dif- ficulties faced by minority communities in maintaining their linguistic and cultural identity. If not, then you should talk about them briefly.
11.2.10 Finally, give the students a take-home assignment in which they write an essay expressing their personal views on the issues raised in class.
Exploratory Projects
As indicated earlier in this chapter, one of the impediments teach- ers face in their attempt to ensure social relevance is that prescribed textbooks may not adequately deal with socially relevant issues. To overcome such an impediment, you may have to tap into (a) human resources, and (b) electronic resources. The following projects are designed to help you to explore both.
Project 11.1. Tapping Human Resources
11.1.0 We learned in this chapter that one way of easing the transi- tion from home language to school language is for teachers to form bridges between the two. It is profitable to involve learners themselves in the task of bridge-building. One area of difficulty for L2 learners is