Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

222 Part 3: Language and Variation
11:24 – Linguistic profi ling experiment at Stanford in Alim’s hip hop
class. Percentages of correct answers. Is this reality?
SUMMARY PARAGRAPH
[Open space for students’ summary of the research presented in the
news story]
ASSIGNMENT
Let’s design a series of interview questions. In the coming week, interview
3 or 4 people (or more, if you choose) – they can be family or
friends – about linguistic profi ling and record or take notes about their
responses. Compile your responses and submit for next week.
It is at this point in the developmental progression of the unit that students
begin to explore the relationships between language and discrimination,
as well as the connective marginalities across linguistically profi led
and marginalized populations. One brief example illustrates this point.
While one Black American student interviewed his aunt and discovered
that she had a very painful experience of discrimination in the housing
market (i.e. she would often be told that units were ‘still open’ only to be
turned away upon arrival), a Latina student shared a narrative from her
father in which he was fi red from his truck-driving job because of ‘phony’
charges of tardiness. In the fi rst case, the Black American aunt spoke
‘proper’ on the phone, but she was still often denied access to housing based
on the visual representation of her race (‘when they saw I was a Black
person’). And in the second case, the Latino father spoke English as a
second language and believed that he was fi red not because of his job performance
(or his race) but his ‘problem with English’, as he put it.
These narratives are sites of exploration and critical interrogation of the
links between language, discrimination and power. Further, students are
often animated through these explorations of linguistic profi ling in their
communities and they are motivated to engage in community activism
around issues of linguistic discrimination. Students are not only thinking
critically about language, but they are also putting their knowledge to
work for their communities by developing consciousness-raising campaigns
and helping provide resources for community members to engage
in the transformation of their neighborhoods. To paraphrase Janks and
Ivanic (1992: 305), ‘awareness’ is only helpful if it leads to ‘action’.
Conclusion
Moving from ‘That’s just the way it is’ toward a new vision of the
way it can be
In conclusion, CLA approaches can arm teachers with the knowledge
that is needed to radically change our conventional approaches to language