Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Critical Language Awareness 223
teaching. As a community of concerned educators, we need to seriously
consider the language ideological combat that is being waged inside and
outside of our classroom walls. Otherwise, we will continue to produce
language pedagogies that fail our students. Explanations of academic failure
as the result of students’ ideological opposition to formal schooling
and ‘acting White’ often miss the complexity and multidirectionality of
ideological combat. More directly, ethnographic studies (Alim, 2004a;
Carter, 2005) reveal that teachers can spend as much time devaluing students’
language and culture as students spend rejecting that devaluation
(which is not the same as rejecting ‘acting White’). Further, while Bourdieu
(1977[1993]: 63–64) insists that students will continue to maintain the laws
of the dominant linguistic market despite the intentions of ‘radical’ and
‘populist’ teachers, actual teaching experience suggests otherwise.
In order to address our students’ needs, we need to recognize that the
full body of available research on language, its structure, its use and its
role in constructing identities and mediating intergroup relations is not
produced solely for the consumption of scholars. Rather, this knowledge
can be used to develop pedagogies that create high levels of metalinguistic
awareness through refl exive ethnographic and sociolinguistic analyses
of speech. Further, this approach operationalizes the vast body of research
on language for the purposes of raising the linguistic and social consciousness
of all students with the goal of social transformation.
Recalling the conversation with the well-meaning teacher, students are
not the only ones who are frustrated. Teachers of linguistically profi led
and marginalized youth often struggle with the contradictions emerging
from their own ideological positions, training, lived experiences and
sometimes overwhelmingly antidemocratic school cultures and practices.
This approach aims to engage teachers in the same type of critical language
pedagogies outlined for students in this chapter. Teachers, too, can
benefi t greatly from refl exive analyses of their own language behaviors
and ideologies. In fact, it is only once teachers develop a meta-ideological
awareness that they can begin to work to change them – and be more fully
prepared to teach all students more effectively. This is the fi nal reason to
revisit the Obama example and the conversation with the well-meaning
teacher above.
Although the discourse on race and race relations in the United States
has expanded (at least quantitatively if not qualitatively) since the election
of the nation’s fi rst Black president, discussions about race are often highly
emotional and politically charged, fi lled with feelings of guilt, fear, distrust,
anger and anxiety. If my teacher workshops are a good indication,
I am certain that some readers of this chapter are still not sure how to
make sense of the conversation with the well-meaning teacher. While this
particular teacher is obviously not dressed in all white sheets, foaming at
the mouth and shouting out racial slurs (a limited depiction of ‘racists’),