- Based on my discussion of important terminology related to Metz's article in the podcast, what would you consider yourself literate in other than writing/speaking Standard English? Why?
- Describe a moment when you experienced or recognized linguistic injustice. How would you explain what happened?
- Choose a section from Sitler's chapter. Write the title of the section you are choosing first. Then summarize the section and discuss your thoughts on it.
- Choose a section from Metz's article. Write the title of the section you are choosing first. Then summarize the section and discuss your thoughts on it.
See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320545438
Addressing English teachers’ concerns about decentering Standard English
Article in English Teaching Practice & Critique · October 2017
DOI: 10.1108/ETPC-05-2017-0062
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Addressing English teachers’ concerns about decentering
Standard English Mike Metz
Learning, Teaching and Curriculum, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
Abstract Purpose – This paper aims to address concerns of English teachers considering opening up their classrooms to multiple varieties of English. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the author’s experience as a teacher educator and professional developer in different regions of the USA, this narrative paper groups teachers’ concerns into general categories and offers responses to themost common questions. Findings – Teachers want to know why they should make room in their classrooms for multiple Englishes; what they should teach differently; how they learn about English variation; how to balance Standardized English and other Englishes; and how these apply to English Learners and/orWhite speakers of Standardized English. Practical implications – The study describes the author’s approach to teaching about language as a way to promote social justice and equality, the value of increasing students’ linguistic repertoires and why it is necessary to address listeners as well as speakers. As teachers attempt to adopt and adapt new approaches to teaching English language suggested in the research literature, they need to know their challenges and concerns are heard and addressed. Teacher educators working to support these teachers need ways to address teachers’ concerns. Social implications – This paper emphasizes the importance of teaching mainstream, White, Standard English-speaking students about English language variation. By emphasizing the role of the listener and teaching students to hear language through an expanded language repertoire, English teachers can reduce the prejudice attached to historically stigmatized dialects of English.
Originality/value – This paper provides a needed perspective on how to work with teachers who express legitimate concerns about what it means to decenter Standardized English in English classrooms.
Keywords English teaching, Literacy and identity, Critical language awareness, English dialects, English language variation
Paper type Conceptual paper
One recent spring afternoon, on the blossoming campus of a university in the Midwestern USA, faculty members in education engaged in earnest discussion of charged subject matter. One senior scholar, face reddening as the debate unfolded, finally exclaimed, “It makes me want to throw up!”.
What were we discussing to arouse such disgust? Was it blatant plagiarism from a doctoral candidate? Failure of a cherished colleague to receive tenure? Budget cuts that would eliminate valued programming? No. We were discussing grammar and usage in student writing. In this particular case, we were discussing the Associated Press validating the use of singular they as a gender-neutral pronoun in their style guide. While the APA, MLA and CMS have not yet endorsed singular they, it is likely those changes are coming as well.
Decentering Standard English
363
Received 12May 2017 Revised 7 August 2017
25 August 2017 Accepted 31 August 2017
English Teaching: Practice & Critique
Vol. 16 No. 3, 2017 pp. 363-374
© EmeraldPublishingLimited 1175-8708
DOI 10.1108/ETPC-05-2017-0062
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/1175-8708.htm
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For English teachers raised in a prescriptive grammar tradition – a tradition that promotes one “correct” form of English usage (Curzan, 2014) – changes such as these, which counter years of hard fought “error” correction, feel like betrayal. Many English teachers have taken on the role of language guardians, advocating the grammar of Standardized English[1] in students’ speech and upholding the writing conventions of historically sanctioned style guides.
Debates about standards for grammar and usage have existed since the first efforts at standardization (Wright, 2000), and these debates spill into English classrooms (take, for example, the heated and unresolved battle about the Oxford comma). In our current, polarized, political climate even grammar – the historically “objective” content of English language arts (ELA) classrooms – takes on heightened social and political meaning. As we witness a global rise in populist movements, demonstrated by the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump, along with a growing wave of xenophobia, the role of language in defining social insiders and outsiders carries significant weight. English teachers can play an important role in countering social prejudice by teaching about English language variation.
A growing body of sociolinguistic knowledge demonstrates connections between beliefs about language usage and social identities (Alim and Smitherman, 2012; Bucholtz and Hall, 2004; Eckert, 2000). The linguistic fact that all dialects and varieties of English are patterned, rule governed and linguistically equal, reveals that the concept of “correct” English is a language ideology, not a linguistic truth (Wolfram and Schilling, 2015). The emphasis on one version of English as “right” and others as “wrong” is based in social hierarchies rather than inherent characteristics of particular grammatical constructions (Lippi-Green, 2012). Increasing dissemination of these linguistic facts has begun to weaken the reliance on romanticized tradition in how English norms are taught.
Since I stepped out of the classroom after 15 years of teaching, I’ve worked extensively with new and veteran teachers exploring the relationship between language, culture and power in English classrooms. While most teachers I work with support the idea of valuing students’ cultural ways of being, they often balk at decentering Standardized English. By decentering, I mean removing Standardized English as the central focus of language teaching, and instead, including Standardized English as one, amongmany, Englishes at the heart of language study.
The reluctance on the part of many English teachers to embrace the English varieties their students bring to the classroom stands in contrast to the way these very English teachers embrace other aspects of cultural pluralism. I’ve worked with English teachers who eagerly adopt multicultural texts reflective of the students they serve, use young adult literature to engage students as active readers and develop students’ literary analysis skills through the integration of multi-modal texts; yet these very teachers hold tightly to grammar instruction that marginalizes and stigmatizes all Englishes other than Standardized English.
Perhaps more than any other content area, ELA teachers experience the importance of the relationship between students’ identity and the subject matter being taught. We know that students need to see themselves in the texts we study (Landt, 2006). We know that they need opportunities to express their own understandings and life experiences as they develop their skill as writers (Martin, 2003). Yet, we have been slow to take up the inclusion of diverse English varieties as legitimate content in our study of the English language (Mallinson and Charity Hudley, 2013). Over a decade ago, this journal devoted two complete issues to the theme “Knowledge about language in the English/literacy classroom” (Locke, 2005, 2006) yet progress incorporating those ideas plods tediously. How do we account for
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the slow pace of change in the way language is taught? My experience working with pre- service and in-service teachers in various contexts across the USA shows that teachers express similar, valid concerns as they wrestle with the idea of decentering Standardized English.
In the remainder of this article, I make the case for embracing multiple Englishes and teaching English language variation by addressing the thoughtful questions of concerned teachers and administrators I’ve worked with over the years. My hope is that by highlighting the political nature of choices to teach about English, and the resulting social consequences, English teachers will consider the impact of teaching English “as they were taught” and work toward integrating more linguistic research into their teaching and talk about language.
What’s the point? “Is justice the point of literacy? Are we supposed to build equality through our language? I’m not sure I agree with that.” (A veteran English teacher)
During a recent course I taught, a veteran teacher asked the above question on a discussion board in response to readings about language, culture and power. The question reveals that some reluctance to teach about language variation goes back to beliefs about the fundamental purposes of schooling. There are many English teachers who view language diversity as a problem (Curzan, 2014; Hancock and Kolln, 2010). These English teachers aspire to create a common culture that promotes national unity. This common culture takes the form of a monolingual, mono-cultural society predicated on White middle-class norms. This set of beliefs aligns with traditionally conservative views of what it means to be American, and what knowledge should be taught in schools to preserve American culture (Hirsch, 1988; Provenzo, 2006). For these teachers, Standardized English is a vehicle to create this national unity. The teacher quoted above sees her role as an English teacher as helping her students in gaining access to this national culture through language. I strive to help these teachers unpack that understanding.
It is important that this teacher invoked the principles of justice and equality in her question because historical efforts to promote a narrow view of national identity have led to unjust and unequal treatment of many Americans. Americans who experience injustice and inequality based on Standardized English ideologies in schooling practices are those who experience discrimination in other aspects of society based on their skin color, cultural practices and linguistic background (Alim et al., 2016; Hartman, 2003; Lash, 2017). Continuing to teach English the way we always have perpetuates this injustice and inequality for many Americans.
To this teacher and others who may wonder if we must politicize our teaching of language and literacy I reply, “What is the alternative?” If the point of literacy is not justice, what is it? If we are not building equality through teaching language, what are we building? None of the teachers I’ve worked with over the years would advocate injustice. That is not their goal. None want to hurt children. Teachers do what they think is best for their students. But they often view literacy and language as neutral; standing outside of issues of justice and equality. And that view is not sustainable in the middle of the twenty-first century, in increasingly multicultural and multilingual societies, in a time where speakers of world Englishes out-number speakers of American English (Canagarajah, 2006). Holding onto a romanticized and inaccurate view of a single correct, and unchanging, English, that follows uniform, rigid and persistent rules is not a neutral stance but rather a strongly ideological set of beliefs that is ultimately political in nature.
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As many before me have explained much more eloquently that I can (Appleman, 2015; Cochran-Smith, 2010), there is no neutral position in teaching. Even support of the status quo involves taking a position. The status quo for teaching about language in ELA classrooms positions students who speak historically stigmatized language varieties as deficient, uneducated and even immoral. (In their text for teachers, Dunn and Lindblom (2011) powerfully demonstrate and critique the societal link between language and morality through an analysis of “grammar rants”.) Continuing this practice contradicts established research in linguistics and promotes injustice and inequality.
I am transparent about subscribing to a view of schooling, which embraces our pluralistic society and values the diversity of languages, cultures and knowledge traditions represented by the heritage cultures in our immigrant nation, as well as the continually evolving hybrid cultural practices that result from the intermingling of those traditions. From my point of view, this plurality is the strength of the USA. I show teachers examples of people – Barak Obama being a prime example (Alim and Smitherman, 2012) – who employ varied linguistic resources to move fluidly through wide-ranging cultural communities. A goal of schooling should be to help students expand their repertoires of linguistic and cultural ways of being so that they can communicate comfortably across contexts. The goal of schooling is to give students more options, not fewer. Expanding the number of Englishes taught in school allows students to access mainstream culture if they choose, while validating and supporting the diverse cultures that make up the USA and other countries in our increasingly intermixed global society.
What do I teach? “So, you’re saying that when it comes to grammar and writing, anything goes?”
“If I can’t correct their mistakes, then I should just let them go?”
Once teachers accept the validity of multiple Englishes, they often feel stuck. I get questions like the two above from teachers at a summer institute I led in the San Francisco Bay Area. These are valid questions that represent honest struggle with changing a long-held belief about what counts as correct English, and the English teacher’s role in supporting it.
Error correction, in speech and writing, remains a staple of ELA classrooms (Shaughnessy, 1979; Smith and Wilhelm, 2007). When I ask teachers to stop thinking in terms of “errors” and “correction”, they’re not sure what to do instead. Many teachers express frustration through questions similar to the one above, “If I can’t correct their mistakes, then I should just let them go?” I tell these teachers there is a third option.
First, I emphasize getting rid of the terms “error” and “mistake”. Unless we are talking about a typo (which is an error and a mistake), the errors and mistakes teachers usually identify are not errors at all. They are alternative grammatical constructions or stylistic options that come from Englishes or registers different than what the teacher expects or accepts (Reaser et al., 2017). Using an alternative, and equally valid, language variety is a fundamentally different concept than making an error. Because they are not errors, they do not need to be, and should not be, corrected. That does not mean that students’ grammatical usage should not be addressed.
Identifying features of different Englishes in students’ writing creates opportunities to teach students about the English language (Chisholm and Godley, 2011; McBee Orzulak, 2013). Take, for example, the two variations of the sentence below.
(1) Ashley sing in the car. (2) Ashley sings in the car.
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Sentence (1) follows a rule in African–American English that regularizes verb forms by not marking third-person singular verbs with an “s”. Linguist John Rickford describes the grammar rule this way, “Thou shalt not treat present-tense verbs with third-person-singular subjects any differently from verbs with other subjects” (Rickford and Rickford, 2000, p. 112). This feature is increasingly used by a wide range of young people in urban schools in America (Paris, 2011). In Standardized English, the third-person singular requires an “s”, thus a Standardized English user would follow the pattern in sentence (2). Neither sentence is right or wrong. Each follows a clear grammatical rule. Even so, teachers, for generations, have “corrected” students “errors” like this in subject-verb agreement. Rather than inaccurately “correcting” students, a more precise and productive approach would be to for teachers to describe the different grammatical rules regarding subject-verb agreement. Teachers can then explain when andwhy they expect students to follow each set of rules.
The alternative to “correcting” is not “anything goes”. The alternative to correcting is teaching students accurate grammatical information that validates the patterned, rule-bound nature of all dialects of English. Of course, few teachers have been taught this information themselves, which puts them in a tough position.
What do I need to know? “But I don’t have the language knowledge to pick out these moments and build on them. Are you saying I need to go back to school to study linguistics?”
Many of the teachers I work with have fantastic content knowledge when it comes to literature, writing and even Standardized English grammar, but few have much knowledge of English language variation. Even fewer have studied sociolinguistics or linguistic variation in ways that would prepare them to recognize and describe features of the many varieties of English they will encounter in their classrooms. Clearly, schools of education need to dedicate more time and attention to English language variation in teacher preparation courses. At the same time, holding teachers responsible for knowledge they were never exposed to is counterproductive. We can neither ask all English teachers to pick up degrees in linguistics nor should we. We can, however, provide teachers with some guiding principles and resources to help them navigate and learn as they wrestle productively with multiple Englishes over the course of their careers.
The primary principle I ask teachers to adopt is that there are no errors in students’ language use. By its very nature, language is patterned and rule governed. Our job as teachers of the English language is to help identify and describe the patterns we encounter. When a distinct term, phrase, pronunciation or grammatical construction stands out as being “marked” in some way, it presents an opportunity to learn something new about how language works. I can do the investigation myself, or I can invite students to investigate with me. Thanks to the wonderful community of sociolinguists and others studying language variation, resources abound. (I’ve compiled a growing resource list on my website: www.metzteaching.com/resources-for-teachers.html.)
An example helps illustrate what this process might look like. The majority of students I taught during my 15 years as a public-school teacher in Chicago spoke a variety of African American English. One colleague of mine, a fellow English teacher, was very particular about making sure students pronounced the word ask with the “k” sound at the end. When students pronounced the word with the k sound in the middle (aks or ax), she would correct them. The demeaning tone she would use, and the way she described the alternative pronunciation as “wrong” or even “ignorant”, troubled me. I didn’t have the knowledge to describe the linguistic process at play, and wasn’t able to articulate what bothered me about her approach, so I did some digging.
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AGoogle search of “ask aks” returned over five hundred thousand results, but the top hit was a very accessible newspaper article from the LA times that lays out the historical and social journey of the word, with an eye to the impact of language on identity (McWhorter, 2014). Further research gave more detail. (Spoken Soul by Rickford and Rickford is an accessible explanation of Black English, while American English: Dialects and Variation by Wolfram & Schilling is a comprehensive tome.) It turns out that the inversion of the consonant sounds in a word is part of a linguistic process called metathesis. It is common in many words, but ask vs aks is one of the most socially marked forms. I learned that Shakespeare used both forms in his plays. There is debate about whether aks or ask is the original form and which version is the changed form. I found out that the same principle is at play in pronunciation of nuclear as “nu-cu-lar” and comfortable as “comf-ter-ble.” However, these examples are not socially marked in the same way as ask and aks.
As I read more, I learned that the reason certain features get stigmatized has less to do with language andmore to do with the social identity of the speakers (Lippi-Green, 2012). As educational linguist Jonathan Rosa recently remarked, “In reality, we are often not correcting students’ language. We are correcting their identity. We are correcting their race” (Rosa, 2017). The use of ax is as much about signaling racial identity as it is communicating other content.
I didn’t know any of this when my colleague corrected our high school students years ago. I did not need to take a linguistics class to learn it. When I started with the assumption that my students were correct, but applying a different rule, I was able to find out aspects of the rule with minimal investigation. And now I know. Like anything else in teaching, I encourage teachers not to let their current knowledge limit what they teach their students. Learn with them!.
What about the real world? “My students need to learn Standard English for tests and job interviews.”
“What about the Delpit question?”
One day, after I delivered a research talk about teaching critical language awareness at Stanford University, a prominent professor asked pointedly, “What about the Delpit question?” By “the Delpit question”, this professor referred to the issue raised in Lisa Delpit’s much cited article “The Silenced Dialogue” (Delpit, 1988). In this article, Delpit interrogates an approach to language teaching summed up by the statement: “Children have the right to their own language, their own culture. We must fight cultural hegemony and fight the system by insisting that children be allowed to express themselves in their own language style. It is not they, the children, who must change, bu