After reading the article, we were surprised with Larson's perspective on language teaching because he had been an English remedial student in high school and now debunked the method he was taught in that class. We could also relate when Larson used a personal anecdote about attending a luncheon and being an outsider. His refusal to "be one of them" related to the English concept of accepting criticism for the way we wright, but that was not the case for Larson. We were impressed with Larson's idea of a "new class", one where students are taught to use different language codes with different audiences and use the language they had brought with them. We were taken back a bit with reading his new ideas of what a English class should use to teach students.
Larson approaches that the ways English is taught could be
different from the way it is. He
believes that it is not needed to force student to learn it in certain way. When
he became a teacher, Larson started out teaching in the manner by which he has
been taught. He gives example how he attempted to straighten his students’
grammar the way his orthodontist straightened his teeth by force. In what he called “nonsense rules of
grammar”, he asks questions that why is it a crime to end a sentence with a
preposition? What’s wrong with contractions? Larson uses comparison of how
students resist to learning of standard usage of English to his own experience
of attending luncheon a few years ago honoring a writer and how he felt like an
outsider because of not knowing the rules of a complex a meal. He wondered
which fork to use and for what? That is the same how the students seem to be
while not knowing the rules of proper grammar. Students feel that way the
moment they are forced to learn what standard English is.
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