Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

224 Part 3: Language and Variation
what I want to present next is an exercise that gets at the subtle workings
of racism evident in our examination of her language ideologies. At the
same time, this is also a refl exive exercise and an opportunity to turn this
critical examination inward upon sociolinguistics to fi gure out how we
may be complicit in this type of covert racism.
The fi rst step here is to ask the question: How did the teacher arrive at
the belief that her students absolutely needed to learn ‘standard English’
in order to succeed in society? First, while teachers are some of the most
hard-working members of society, and often seem to have supernatural
stores of energy, they do not have superhuman abilities. Teachers, like any
other members of society, are not immune to the language ideologies that
are part and parcel of our language socialization as Americans (we all
harbor discriminatory language ideologies unless we are explicitly resocialized
out of them). Still, it is interesting to ask how she might have
arrived at the following conclusion:
I know you might speak this way at home, but in an academic setting,
or if you’re interviewing for a job, or if you’re applying to college,
and you talk to someone like that, they will like not even give you the
time of day . . . that’s just the way that it is! You have to learn how to
play the game guys! I’m sorry.
Rather than agreeing for one reason or another, that we ‘absolutely
have’ to provide ‘these students’ with ‘standard English’, we might ask:
By what processes are we all involved in the construction and maintenance
of the notion of a ‘standard dialect’, and further, that the ‘standard’
is somehow better, more intelligent, more appropriate, more important,
etc., than other varieties? In other words, how, when, and why are we all
implicated in the elevation of one particular variety over all others, even
when all of our linguistic knowledge and theories tell us that ‘all languages
are equal in linguistic terms’? Why does this continue when linguists
know that ‘standard’ simply means that this is the language variety that
those in authority have constructed as the variety needed to gain access to
resources? Further, why does the ‘standard’ continue to be imposed
despite the fact that linguists can agree that what we have for a ‘standard
English’ in the United States is nothing short of the imposition of White
linguistic norms and ways of speaking in the service of granting access to
resources to Whites and denying those same resources to as many others
as possible, including poor, marginal Whites?
These are very complex questions. We can begin by taking a closer look
at the teacher’s training. This teacher was actually a student in one of my
teacher education courses in an elite, private university located within a
few miles of Haven High. In that three-week course, I taught preservice
teachers about Black language, linguistic diversity, language ideologies
and pedagogical strategies for linguistically and culturally diverse