Teaching languages

Hey everyone, sorry for the delay, I live out in the country and haven't been able to maintain an internet connection tonight until now.

I plan to teach high school language arts, hopefully in a rural area. This means I would be working with students who tend to come from low-income families and/or are part of a minority group. In light of this, Delpit’s article sheds some interesting light on the idea of teaching the language of power (formal English) while maintaining the heritage language. As a teacher, in order to implement this successfully in my classroom, I need to make the point, which Delpit also makes, that neither language is “better,” but each has an appropriate time for usage. In my classroom I would not restrict students completely to the language of power, but instead offer a variety of assignments which will force students to engage both languages by using the appropriate one based on the context of the assignment (formal or informal writing).