Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Critical Language Awareness 229
2001 textbook Language Diversity in Education (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.).
Both books are very clear and accessibly written and provide teachers and administrators
with much of the information needed to create a more responsive and
responsible language policy for linguistically and culturally diverse schools.
Useful examples and applications permeate the texts as does Corson’s goal of
social justice through education.
Finally, for those interested in Black language specifi cally, and other marginalized
varieties by extension, I would suggest H. Samy Alim and John Baugh’s 2007
edited volume, Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change (Teachers
College Press). This volume aims to revise our approaches to language and literacy
learning in diverse classrooms. One of the book’s strengths is that it presents creative,
classroom-based, hands-on pedagogical approaches (from Hip Hop culture
to the art of teaching reading comprehension) along with linguistic analyses by
leading sociolinguists and educators.
On a fi nal note, while this chapter has focused largely on ‘Black language’, it is
less about Black language and more about teaching marginalized students, regardless
of race or ethnicity, in a way that respects and take seriously the cultural and
linguistic varieties that our youth bring to the classroom. Further, as with Talkin
Black Talk, the issues here go beyond language teaching and into every aspect of
society, aiming to transform our way of thinking about language and to resocialize
students, teachers, sociolinguists – all of us – into a more critical view of language,
identity and power.
References
Alim, H.S. (2004a) You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of
Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community. Publications of the American
Dialect Society, No. 89. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Alim, H.S. (2004b) Hearing what’s not said and missing what is: Black language
in White public space. In C.B. Paulston and S. Keisling (eds) Discourse and
Intercultural Communication: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Alim, H.S. (2005) Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting
issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher
34 (7), 24–31.
Alim, H.S. and Baugh, J. (eds) (2007) Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and
Social Change. New York: Teachers College Press.
Ball, A.F. (2006) Multicultural Strategies for Education and Social Change: Carriers of the
Torch in the United States and South Africa. New York: Teachers College Press.
Ball, A.F. (2009) Toward a theory of generative change in culturally and linguistically
complex classrooms. American Educational Research Journal 46 (1), 45–72.
Ball, A.F. and Alim, H.S. (2006) Preparation, pedagogy, policy, and power: Brown,
the King case, and the struggle for equal language rights. In A.F. Ball (ed.) With
More Deliberate Speed: Achieving Equity and Excellence in Education – Realizing the
Full Potential of Brown v. Board of Education. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Baugh, J. (1983) Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Baugh, J. (1998) Linguistics, education, and the law: Educational reform for African
American language minority students. In S. Mufwene, J. Rickford, G. Bailey
and J. Baugh (eds) African–American English: Structure, History and Use. London
and New York: Routledge.
Baugh, J. (2003) Linguistic profi ling. In S. Makoni, G. Smitherman, A.F. Ball and
A.K. Spears (eds) Black Linguistics: Language, Politics and Society in Africa and the
Americas. London: Routledge.