Every Unique Voice
Mary Nacey
Months ago, my kindergartner plopped a note on the fridge, which he made at school, which was lovely. It said:
“I love you mam.”
Underneath that, it said:
“I love you mom.”
As a former teacher, I recognized that he had written a note using inventive, or phonetic, spelling, and after conferring with a teacher, he was provided the correct spelling. I have loved this note…and then today I realized a different level that makes me love it so much more.
It will sound silly: I’m born and raised in the outskirts of Chicago. My extended family and I have the stereotypical “Chicago” accent. With my accent, “mom” is pronounced more like “maahm”...it’s a strange, back of the throat vowel, and it definitely aligns more with the sound of the letter “a” than the letter “o”.
My kindergartner’s teachers didn’t care or worry about this, they just moved along and helped him find the right way to spell it. For him, this was a small story, mostly not mentionable. But for many other students, the differences in language, in dialect, and/or in accent creates a difference between what a student is trying to communicate and what a teacher is understanding from them.
Every single student comes into the classroom with a different accent and dialect. Sometimes this is locally driven, and translation isn’t difficult. Sometimes this is cultural, or the result of having a different primary language than English, or family speaking a language other than English in the home. Sometimes it boils down to having parents and grandparents with a different regional dialect. These don’t even account for students who have distinct speech/language challenges, including my own 14 year old who, when she was small, was so often asked to repeat herself that she eventually began avoiding speaking to or in front of people she didn’t know.
Everyday, teachers welcome a classroom full of students, each with their own unique language, dialect, accent, lexicon, and bank of prior knowledge. Within a very short amount of time, those teachers learn the dialect and speech patterns of each individual student to facilitate communication in the classroom and beyond.
On top of this, because phonics is dependent on the association of sounds with the character that represents that sound, teachers translate the invented spelling that their students bring with them from home, and gently direct students into the correct spelling. This enables the children to express their thoughts and ideas on paper, in parallel with growing phonetic spelling skills.
Teachers do these things every day, as a matter of habit. To some, this may sound like an insignificant skill. For children who have a different regional accent or cultural dialect or children who have other speech challenges, it is a skill that saves them from frustration, social withdrawal and anxiety.
So thank you, to all the teachers and educators who work everyday to understand and celebrate every child’s unique voice.
If you want to read more about the importance of culturally responsive teaching to understanding kids' unique journeys through language acquisition and usage, check out this article: Why We Be Loving the “Habitual Be”.