Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Critical Language Awareness 213
why particular varieties are associated with power, prestige and upward
mobility while their variety is not. The teacher’s answer to them is a frustrated
and apologetic: ‘I don’t know! You know, that’s just the way it is!
You have to learn how to play the game guys! I’m sorry’. The students, as
all speakers do, see their language as intimately connected to who they
are. If their language is not good enough for society, then the logical connection
to be drawn is that neither are they. Students continue to resist the
imposition of what are essentially White ways of speaking while the
teacher’s traditional focus on grammar (without a critical examination of
the social, cultural, and political forces at play in language use) continues
to fall short of the mark. In terms of helping her students think more critically
about language, she concludes by admitting that she honestly does
not know ‘how to provide that’.
This well-meaning teacher is indeed in a tough situation. Despite loving
her students and genuinely wanting the best for them, and ‘despite all that
time that’s been spent focusing on grammar’, she, like many of her colleagues,
continues to feel as if she has failed her Black students. Or as one
teacher put it, capturing the frustration that many teachers feel at not
being able to resolve the tensions that accompany the politics of language
teaching, ‘I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall with this standard
English thing’. As social demographics continue to shift and classrooms
become more ethnically and linguistically complex (Ball, 2009),
what is needed is a revisioning of language education, one that radically
departs from the traditional approaches which teachers often fi nd
limiting.
The rest of this chapter focuses heavily on pedagogical approaches that
might help teachers provide answers to their students’ critical questions
about language and to work through the tensions around language teaching
by confronting them head on with a CLA approach. Working as a
teacher-researcher in Haven High, and as a critical linguist, it was not
enough for me to uncover teacher’s ideologies about the language of their
students. CLA, at least as I have fashioned it here, requires the analyst to
engage the community in search of solutions to their expressed concerns.
Working with the school, I was given the opportunity to design my own
pedagogy, some of which I share below, and most of which is constantly
shifting and evolving. I want to emphasize that this is not a ‘one size fi ts
all’ curriculum; if critical pedagogies are to be relevant and effective, they
must be locally situated and constantly negotiated.
Applying CLA
In many respects, the specifi c critical pedagogy presented below draws
from the work of Norman Fairclough and colleagues (1995) and Alastair
Pennycook’s writings on critical applied linguistics (2001). Although these