Blog Post 7 March 6

After reading the first paragraph to Construction of Racial Stereotypes in English as a Foreign Language Textbooks: Images as Discourse by Taylor-Mendes, I could relate the pre-reading questions to a conference I attended in Chicago, The National Conference for Teachers of English. The question “Which races are represented in the images, pictures or cartoons? Which race is represented the most frequently?” was a question that was posed in one of my smaller seminars. What I had learned is that when children draw people, they usually keep their skin color white or peach colored, even African American children do this. Does this drawing or coloring of people actually matter? Images that aren’t correct give non native speakers the wrong impression about certain groups of people.

Studies have shown (that were presented in my seminar) that the color of the skin on people that are drawn by young children doesn’t really have any effect on them when they grow up. I didn’t think that images would affect non-native speakers because I only learned about what images do to native speakers. The images in an English as a Foreign Language Textbooks can be very important to the learning process of non-native speakers. Fatima says, “I see more White people than Black people. I saw ... when I saw Black people, I saw them in a poor situation. Here they don't put a rich man for example who have a job and have a happy family. To me this is ridiculous ... it's like they show the majority who have money is the White people, and who have this lifestyle is the majority of people who have money ... and they are White. I think the [English language] books ... This people who study in ... schools very expensive want to see themselves, and to see themselves is to see White people ... White people and happy situations, a car, a beautiful beach, beautiful things.” So from these images Fatima comes up with the conclusion that white people are happy and rich and black people are usually in a poor situation, which isn’t true. Fatima doesn’t know about the African American athletes, actors, singers, etc. that make them rich so they can have a beautiful car, beach and beautiful things. Our society is trying to come from the long way of racist biases that black people are poor and rich people are white. It is not clear cut like that anymore because black people are not slaves, but are actual people and I think that some older generations have the notion that white people are still above black people and we are not all equal. I agree with the few TESOL professionals who say that “EFL students rely on textbooks to develop their knowledge about English-speaking nations”. I think that students would be able to learn better by experience, by talking to English speakers and understanding their culture and language. I feel the same way about English speakers; they learn better when they are immersed in something rather than trying to memorize something from a textbook. Writing down definitions does not really resonate with students because they just memorize them for a short period of time and then they leave their brain.