Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

226 Part 3: Language and Variation
traditional approaches to language education of Black students, including
‘dialect awareness’ approaches – is that it does not challenge the current
sociolinguistic and sociopolitical order. Rather, it perpetuates it by allowing
the arbitrary elevation of ‘standard dialects’ to continue unquestioned.
Another less obvious problem is that we know full-well that language fl uency
alone does not guarantee upward mobility, and that factors such as
race, class, gender and sexual discrimination, etc. are equally as important.
Further, statements such as these ignore the fact that ‘racism’ is not
an individual problem, but that is a social and institutional process that
impacts marginalized populations, regardless of whether or not any one
individual engages in racist practices.
Let us paraphrase the teacher’s comments above with the following
exercise. Now, keeping race constant, imagine a male teacher telling all of
his female students:
Sorry, young ladies, in order to succeed in this world, you must adopt
a way of speaking that is modeled very closely upon male linguistic
norms and ways of speaking, also known as ‘standard English’. It may
not be fair, but that’s just the way it is.
Certainly, a statement such as this would fl y in the face of feminist
attempts to rid society of patriarchy and ideologies and systems of repression
against women. Why should women have to model their speech after
male ways of speaking in order to have a chance at success or upward
mobility? What is wrong with the way young girls speak that they should
be denied access to resources if they cannot learn to talk like young boys?
These are rhetorical questions, but they are stated here to point out the
connections between race and gender, and to raise the possibility that, for
whatever reason, we may be more willing to accept covert racism than
covert sexism.
Given that the struggle for equal rights for the LGBT communities in
the United States has gained signifi cant ground, particularly with several
states now allowing same-sex marriage, we can take this one step further.
Again, keeping race constant, imagine a heterosexual teacher telling all of
his homosexual students:
Sorry, gay students, in order to succeed in this world, you must adopt
a way of speaking that is modeled very closely upon heterosexual linguistic
norms and ways of speaking, also known as ‘standard English’.
It may not be fair, but that’s just the way it is.
Not much discussion is needed at this point, but clearly, something like
this would not fl y in most schools. In fact, while many Americans, like the
journalist in the beginning of this chapter, uncritically agree that Black
children need to speak a particular way in order to succeed in life, I wonder
if many of those same people would also support the linguistic coercion of