Most aspiring educators, particularly those who plan to work with the poor, read Ruby Payne’s seminal work, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, in which she argues that each social class (poverty, middle-class, and wealthy) employs “hidden rules.” By understanding those hidden rules, educators can more effectively close the achievement gap. She spends considerable time discussing the language of poverty and the need for students of poverty to learn to switch between registers, sometimes called code-switching. Although her argument has been much attacked, its basic ideas remain a key element of teacher education programs. For students in urban poverty, the language of home varies greatly from the language of the classroom. Students raised in a multi-lingual home, regardless of socioeconomic status, experience a similar dilemma, speaking one language at home and another language at school, often acting as translators for their parents, teachers, and administrators. In choosing literature for these children, many of whom read below grade level, educators strive to find a middle ground between the two linguistic poles, seeking texts that strive for complexity while maintaining the authenticity of racial and social identity. This paper examines code-switching in three best-selling works of young adult literature: Walter Dean Myers’ Monster, Matt de la Peña’s Mexican WhiteBoy, and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, in order to understand the relationship between code-switching, adolescent racial identity, and literary consumption.
About the presenterMarisa Behan
Marisa Behan has her undergraduate degree in Medieval Studies and Theology from the University of Notre Dame and her Masters in Teaching from Christian Brothers University. She is a Ph.D. student in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Memphis.