Dialect Feature Feedback

• 1. What key/central/core ideas are essential in answering the question?  In other words, what would almost all of us agree upon?
  2. What general advice would you give to the class (as a whole) about answering the question?  In other words, what makes a particularly strong answer?
  
  
  1. After reading everyone's essays, I realized that most of us are concerned with helping students "gain" an academic voice rather than erasing their home dialect. This idea of code-switching is prevalent in a lot of people's essays.  We all seem to agree that we need to help students to gain an academic voice, written language as a new language of power in academic field so they can better navigate this field with confidence. It seems that helping them recognize this power dynamic and the importance of gaining this voice would be difficult, however, necessary. I also noticed that most of us agreed on creating writing assignments that recognize different dialects and how to use them by utilizing lower stake assignments to higher-stake assignments.
  
  2. I think that in order to answer this question, best approach is to think about how can we help students "gain" a voice without hurting students' confidence in their home language? Once they recognize that there is a preference in academia, it would make them realize that the dialect they use at home is not really preferred because it may be considered "less powerful." In this case, would it be better to approach the subject as written English language as a new language rather than a language of power? It seems that when I read writing samples with emphasis on written English language as important "dialect" as home dialect made stronger answers.