{"id":5088,"date":"2017-02-08T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T16:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wou.edu\/westernjournal\/?p=5088"},"modified":"2017-02-07T17:48:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T01:48:34","slug":"dont-believe-myths-learn-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/dont-believe-myths-learn-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t believe the myths, learn the facts"},"content":{"rendered":"
By: Jasmine Morrow\r\nStaff Writer<\/pre>\n
The College of Education, the Spanish Department and the Bilingual Teacher Program at Western asked Kim Potowski, a professor of the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, to present her session: \u201cSpanish in the U.S.: Myths and Realities,\u201d in the Richard Woodcock Education Building. On Feb. 3, professor Potowski began the seminar by asking the group of people attending five facts or myths about the Spanish language.The trick was that they were all myths. The questions\/statements included: \u201cThe United States is the fifth largest Spanish-Speaking country in the world,\u201d \u201cSpanish is not \"\"recognized in the \u2018Diccionario de la Real Academia,\u2019\u201d \u201cSome things that people say in U.S. Spanish is ungrammatical,\u201d \u201cSpanglish is a random mishmash of English and Spanish and is destroying Spanish,\u201d \u201cThe goal of Spanish teachers should be to eliminate \u2018Spanglish\u2019 and have students pass for monolingual.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professor Potowski then explained why these were all myths. To begin with, the U.S. is the second largest Spanish-speaking country. It\u2019s impossible to be agrammatical when a whole community says it the same way, this is only possible with the first rule of grammar. Second, the first Spanish word was put in the dictionary on Sept. 30, 2012. Third, Spanglish is rule governed and there is code switching, word borrowings, extensions and calques.<\/p>\n
People usually think of U.S. Spanish as ungrammatical because it\u2019s not preferred. The reason why people who are fluent in both Spanish and English sometimes use both languages in a single sentence is because it is a marker of their identity. Sixty percent of the population is bilingual\/multilingual and 20 percent of the bilinguals are in the U.S. Studies show that two-way bilingual is the better way to learn English and Spanish, they can also be better readers and speakers. Professor Potowski concluded the presentation by saying, \u201cRespect the language and culture of U.S. Latino Communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contact author at jmorrow16@mail.wou.edu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By: Jasmine Morrow Staff Writer The College of Education, the Spanish Department and the Bilingual Teacher Program at Western asked Kim Potowski, a professor of the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, to present her session: \u201cSpanish in the U.S.: Myths and Realities,\u201d in the Richard Woodcock Education […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":937,"featured_media":5123,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-life"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/937"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wou.edu\/westernhowl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}