Narrating Their Lives: Examining English Language Teachers' Professional Identities within the Classroom

From English to Englishes: A Native English Speaker’s Language Learning Journey Jeremy C. Kelley

64 Narrating Their Lives From English to Englishes: A Native English Speaker’s Language Learning Journey Jeremy C. Kelley University of California, Los Angeles People are often surprised to find out that I view myself as a second language learner of standard American English (SAE), even though I was born and raised in Alabama and consider myself to be a native speaker of American English. This statement might be a little difficult to comprehend for some, especially since the majority of the world tends to view American English as a singular, cohesive variety; however , my linguistic and cultural explorations tell me otherwise. Through reflective analysis of my own personal experiences, I explore the concept of being a non-standard native speaker of English and what that has meant for me as a language teaching professional . Drawing on various aspects of my identity, I demonstrate how these experiences have influenced my teaching of second language pronunciation and how they have in turn led to the development and application of a range of activities designed to expand our awareness of linguistic diversity, all the while calling into question the myth of the elusive goal of native speaker articulatory proficiency. From English to “Englishes” Growing up in the rural South, I sounded just like everyone else around me. I had no concept of the distinct features that differentiated my English from that of the many other “Englishes” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 157) of both the United States and of the rest of the world. The neighbor called the thing that you push around the grocery store a buggy, just like me, and the principal at my high school would always make suggestions by saying things such as Y’all might should…, to which I would most certainly reply with a prompt, Yes, sir, I’m fixin’ to. I was comfortable with who I was and in the identity that I had developed 65 3 Autobiographies Problematizing Inner Circle Legitimacy as a native English speaker. In fact, I never knew that this way of speaking, this variety of English that I spoke, was in any way out of the ordinary because it was quite simply the only variety that I had ever known. I was certainly aware that southerners had an accent, also known as the southern drawl, but I had no idea that the language was, in so many respects, so distinct from other English varieties that it would one day come to be both a problematic marker of my differentness and a sense of pride in my life. My way of speaking was, for lack of a better term, normative, in that both I and those around me shared a linguistic intersubjectivity that reified and reproduced a local sense of belonging, manifest through a common experience of cultural and linguistic expressivity. In Eckert and McConnel-Ginet’s (1992) terms, we were a community of practice in which speaking southern was the norm, with all of our resulting linguistic practices representing a reflection of our common sense of shared identity. The moment I left Alabama and went to begin my new life in New York City as a cost engineer in the fashion industry, I realized how much my identity as a person was interconnected with my language identity. The northeastern United States, for a small-town country boy like me, was culture shock to say the least. The pace was fast, and the people slowed down for no one. To me, at least in the beginning, New York was a cold, lonely place. All I had was myself and my new job, and both of those elements were about to be culturally and linguistically tested. Upon arriving in New York, the few coworkers that I had had the pleasure of meeting in advance of my relocation had organized an informal dinner with drinks to follow. The dinner went well, with everyone getting along as if we had known each other for years. However, while having drinks at a bar afterward, I experienced my first taste of what it meant to truly be an outsider, and it all came down to the language that I spoke. While at the bar, our group had begun speaking with an adjacent group, upon which I entered into direct one-on-one conversation with one of our new acquaintances. Immediately after introducing 66 Narrating Their Lives myself, my southern identity became apparent through my accented speech...