In my first year of living in Italy, struggling to understand and be understood, so often I wanted to shout out: “This is not who I am!” A blog I read recently identified something of what was going on during that frustrating and sometimes demoralising time. This quote stood out: "Language can act as a lens of identity. While your personality is individual, your identity may change due to language, or perhaps rather how people perceive you in that language.” Lyn Wright Fogle So how can we as teachers make a difference to the way our students perceive themselves? Part of the struggle as a language learner is getting over the ‘feeling stupid’ sense of inadequacy at not being able to express yourself in anything but simplistic and possibly erroneous terms. We feel we can't express our feelings. We fear being judged as inferior. In the end we may well perceive ourselves as being inferior. The risk is heightened when you are the ‘outsider’, the stranger in a foreign land or the EAL/D learner in the dominant English-speaking group,
Francis Su suggests we do this by allowing our thinking and teaching to be shaped by what he calls the Lesson of Grace: Your accomplishments are NOT what make you a worthy human being. You learn this lesson when someone shows you GRACE: good things you didn’t earn or deserve, but you’re getting them anyway. That is: You can have worthiness apart from your performance. You can have dignity independent of achievements. Your identity does not have to be rooted in accomplishments. You can be loved for who you are, not for what you’ve done. He describes four ways that grace can shape our teaching: giving grace to students, understanding grace in our teaching, communicating grace in the struggle, and sharing grace in our weakness. Interested to know more? You can read the full article here I know for myself that the lesson of grace is one I need to keep on learning. I need to remember that God has extended grace to me and that ultimately my identity is found in Christ. My prayer is that this year we may understand grace and engage with grace in our relationships with colleagues and our students so that we build greater relationships of trust in which all may thrive. Libby Colla References: https://www.francissu.com/post/the-lesson-of-grace-in-teaching http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/12/bilingual-personality-change/
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