Part B Party
In my experience as the English Language Learning specialist, I’ve supported mostly First Nations students who speak English as their first language but use a nonstandard dialect. This is considered a deficit and the Ministry of Education provides extra funding for these students as if they were speakers of foreign languages. Why? Well, to be quite honest: because it’s the government that made them like that. The nonstandard “Rez English” is a direct result of the genocide of the First Nations peoples, especially those who experienced the Residential School system. These schools were meant to eradicate the native indigenous languages, but they did not succeed in replacing that language with English. The survivors of Residential Schools now no longer speak their native language fluently, nor English. There was no philosophy of second language acquisition at Residential Schools: you use English or you don’t communicate at all. English became the language of trauma, and yet it was ...