Presenters: Salvatore Poier

This panel focuses on the importance of diversity of accents and English constructions in the classrooms. Goal: enriching our appreciation of foreign accents and "bad" English. We aim at promoting a more inclusive classroom, where everyone can feel welcomed and appreciated also because of their bad English. With a growing population of ESL students, it is fundamental for Pitt to nourish and appreciate different accents, sentence constructions. These often underline different ways of thinking and processing language that enrich us and our students. Moreover, many American students coming from unprivileged backgrounds also need to learn academic English almost as if it was another language. The panel, which will include ESL speakers, will focus on the difficulties of entering a “perfect” English dominated world, and how the preoccupation of speaking perfectly can get in the way of social and academic relations. How do we balance our duty to correct grammar? Isn’t it, often, more important to privilege communication over grammatical correctness? How can we encourage our students to look at grammatical errors as windows into a different way of conceiving the world? This panel aims at starting a conversation on tolerance, understanding, and exposure to diversity that leads to better communicating and accepting differences, breaking down a form of oppression that disadvantages both unprivileged native and non-native speakers. (Bad English used on purpose here)

Register

If you require an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact the Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at diversity@pitt.edu by July 21

This workshop is a part of the 2021 Diversity Forum.