The Influence Of Geneva Gay On Culture And Communication In The Classroom

There is an outgoing trend on social media where Central American Latinos make this joke where they state that they speak Central American Spanish, not Caribbean Spanish. The audio of an individual speaking extremely fast to the point that it is hard to understand. The reason behind this joke is a long debate about what is considered proper Spanish among the Latinx community. Many Latinos and Latinas argue that the most proper Spanish is Mexican Spanish because it has fewer dialects and they speak at a moderate speed, therefore is considered easier to communicate because everyone can understand it. In contrast, Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Spanish are viewed as an unprofessional way of speaking Spanish because we have a lot of slang and

In Geneva Gay’s work, she explains how the classroom environment upholds this notion that students must speak and write in academic standard English, preventing them from utilizing the language they may use in their daily interactions. She emphasizes that this ideology often perpetuates students of color who may have a different communication style than those students who express and behave according to the cultural mainstream norms of the school settings. Gay states that “Too many teachers operate on the assumption that there is only one acceptable way of communicating across all circumstances, audience and contests,”( Gay, 2018, P.91) but this ideology is certainly not true. Gay argues, “Teachers also need to recognize and respond to the fact that even when people speak the same language, cultural differences can affect how they communicate.”( Gay, 2018, P.91). In other words, forms of communicating in the same language are not universal, different styles and dialects emerged based on the culture, geographical location, education level as well socioeconomic

If a student can’t communicate with their teacher due to these language barriers, the student won’t succeed academically. Our job as teachers is to build and expand on our student learning, but to do so we have to build relationships through communication. According to Gay, by classifying a certain form of English as the expectation of classroom communication style and classifying all the other forms of English as non-professional, we are preventing our students from expressing themselves, building connection, and succeeding. Now, Gay is not arguing that Academic English should not be used in classrooms, nor that other forms of English should be the primary form of communication styles. She argues that both formal English and non-formal English are useful in the classroom and can bring many benefits to the students. She states, “These should be considered as assets to be respected and used to achieve educational success for culturally diverse students” (Gay, 2018, p.105). In other words, by integrating these other forms of communication styles students will be more engaging and feel integrated in the classroom concepts because there is a sense of