Teaching Language Variation in the Classroom

Strategies and Models from Teachers and Linguists

Michelle D. Devereaux, Chris C. Palmer, Michelle D. Devereaux, Chris C. Palmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429943676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bringing together the varied and multifaceted expertise of teachers and linguists in one accessible volume, this book presents practical tools, grounded in cutting-edge research, for teaching about language and language diversity in the ELA classroom. By demonstrating practical ways teachers can implement research-driven linguistic concepts in their own teaching environment, each chapter offers real-world lessons as well as clear methods for instructing students on the diversity of language. Written for pre-service and in-service teachers, this book includes easy-to-use lesson plans, pedagogical strategies and activities, as well as a wealth of resources carefully designed to optimize student comprehension of language variation.

Part 1

Teachers’ Perspectives

Chapter 1

“Word Crimes” and Linguistic Ideology

Examining Student Ideas about Language in the English Language Arts Classroom

Amy L. Plackowski, Hudson High School, Massachusetts

“Of course there’s such a thing as correct grammar. I may not always use it, but I know it exists,” one student said.

“I finally learned the difference between their, they’re, and there when somebody shamed me on Twitter,” another student admitted.

“When I hear someone with a Southern accent, I immediately assume they’re at least a little bit racist,” acknowledged another.

Despite varied levels of fluency with Standard Written English, high school students, perhaps like the population at large, tend to be prescriptivists at heart—that is, they believe there is a “correct” way to talk and write and that any other type of language use is incorrect, substandard, or even an indicator of unintelligence. Even students who struggle with learning standard written grammar, or who speak nonstandard varieties of English, often believe that there are good Englishes and bad Englishes. Informal surveys taken by linguistics students in high school reveal that this attitude is perpetuated by parents, peers, media, and even other teachers.

That’s why the essential questions that students examine in my linguistics elective—all of which can be explored in language-focused units in English Language Arts (ELA) classes at multiple levels—are the following: What attitudes and beliefs do you have about language? How did those attitudes develop? and How do those attitudes and beliefs influence your worldview? Students engage in a broad study of language, with topics that include the elements of language (phonology, syntax, pragmatics, etc.), language acquisition, language change, and language variation. Whatever the topic of study, the discussion always returns to these essential questions, promoting self-reflection as well as a greater respect for language variety. By teaching about the social, historical, and economic forces that help drive language change, my hope is to promote the type of compassionate critical thinking essential to living in a diverse society.

For many students, the ideology of prescriptivism has been so ingrained—by their parents and other adults, by the media, and by their teachers and peers—that they rarely question it. To begin their examination of these attitudes, students complete an “opinionnaire” addressing attitudes about language on the first day of class (see lesson plan). After discussing their answers, I play the “Weird Al” Yankovic song “Word Crimes” and draw out a discussion about the attitudes expressed in the song (Yankovic, 2013, track 5). I ask if they’ve heard similar attitudes elsewhere, and we explore where these attitudes might come from. This activity can pave the way for further discussions about power, education, privilege, race, ethnicity, and class.

Once students are primed to question some of their basic assumptions about language, I lead them into direct teaching about prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. In short, prescriptivists believe that there is a correct way to use language, while descriptivists are solely interested in describing the various ways language is used in the world. Episode 1 of the PBS documentary Do You Speak American? provides illuminating perspectives from both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist (Cran & MacNeil, 2005).

Students then engage in an examination of attitudes about language in their communities by surveying their peers, parents, and teachers using the opinionnaire, which they have completed themselves on the first day of class. They begin to notice where attitudes about language are expressed in the media (e.g., In what contexts do they see people making fun of the ways other people talk? Where do they see people lamenting the downfall of the English language when another “slang” term is added to the dictionary?). Conversely, students also identify where they see people expressing pride in their language, especially in a local accent or other nonstandard form of English. Here in Massachusetts, for example, students point out the road signs that playfully remind drivers to “use yah blinkah!” or caution that there’s a “wicked stahm comin’!” These learning tasks introduce students to the various and sometimes contradictory attitudes people hold about language and encourage them to examine the factors that influence their own linguistic ideologies.

We revisit linguistic ideology later in the course during our unit on dialects. Once we’ve talked about the various geographic and social forces that contribute to language diversity, we turn our attention to the essential questions of the course. Knowing why people speak in different dialects is interesting, but examining attitudes about linguistic variation encourages an empathetic and questioning attitude useful beyond linguistics class.

One of the simplest but most effective activities replicates Dennis Preston’s 2005 study on “perceptual dialectology,” or how people perceive dialects. Preston gave subjects a blank map of the U.S. and asked them to draw lines indicating where various accents were located. He then asked subjects several questions about those accents, such as which were more “correct” or “pleasant,” or which were most and least similar to the subjects’ own dialects.¹

Students perform this same task, identifying different dialects, naming them, describing their attributes, and explaining which ones they think are more or less similar to their own (see eResources for assignment). By this point in the course, they usually understand the problem with labeling dialects as “correct” or “pleasant,” so I ask them to form a hypothesis about how people they know might answer these questions. They test this hypothesis by recreating Preston’s experiment with friends and family members. Depending on time, students might write up their findings in a formal lab report, or simply make notes of their findings and report them back to the class.

Students continue to study attitudes about language by examining how they’re implicitly expressed in media, especially in TV and films. One of my favorite activities involves presenting clips from several films where dialect plays an important role in the plot or the development of a character. In My Cousin Vinny, a Southern judge struggles to understand a New York lawyer’s pronunciation of “two youths” because the lawyer pronounces it “two yoots” (Launer, Schiff, & Lynn, 1992). The scene between William H. Macy’s car dealer and Frances McDormand’s sheriff in Fargo portrays a notably nonconfrontational, vulgarity-free police interview of a murder suspect (Coen & Coen, 1996). Alicia Silverstone’s character in Clueless provides a classic example of the stereotypical Southern California “Valley Girl” accent (Berg, Lawrence, Rudin, Schroeder, & Heckerling, 1995). My students recognize the class differences represented in the bar scene in Good Will Hunting, where working-class Will confronts a snooty Harvard student in a Cambridge pub (Bender & Van Sant, 1997). An investigation of Key and Peele’s sketch “Substitute Teacher,” in which a self-identified inner-city Black teacher substitutes in a mostly White, suburban classroom, examines the ways the creators and the audience perceive African American Vernacular English and naming traditions (Atencio, Key, & Peele, 2012). Students might also suggest their own ideas for clips to add to their study.

I present these clips not as accurate or factual representations of a dialect or the people who speak it, but to examine the attitudes the filmmakers express or exploit in the portrayal of those dialects. I ask students to describe how the audience is meant to perceive the characters: the judge in My Cousin Vinny is genteel if a bit of a hayseed, while Joe Pesci’s character is unsophisticated and aggressive. The teenage girls in Clueless are ditzy. Both characters in Fargo are courteous and deferential. Then I ask which characteristics of speech create this effect: the slow, deliberate drawl of the Southern judge; the sound represented by <th> in “youth” changing to “yoot” when spoken by the New York lawyer; the “upspeak” and slang of the California teenagers in Clueless; the rounded vowels and cheerful politeness on the part of the Minnesota characters; the r-dropping of the working-class Bostonian. A careful discussion about Key and Peele’s comedy and the intended audience of their sketch pushes students to question why names like Jaqueline, Blake, and Aaron are considered “normal,” while traditionally African American names and pronunciations are used as a source of humor. I also use this opportunity to point out that while nonmainstream names from the African American community are often treated with scorn by outsiders, nontraditional White names are generally met with less derision.

These discussions help students consider how, to varying degrees, the filmmakers and sketch writers have emphasized linguistic features to convey a shorthand for characters, and how the stereotypes are often played for laughs. We question whether these portrayals in popular media might influence people’s attitudes about dialects and the people who speak them. Students arrive at the conclusion that our perceptions of dialects—unsophisticated or posh, educated or ignorant, polite or vulgar—have nothing to do with the grammar or sound system. They readily identify these perceptions as stereotypes and, crucially, recognize language as an essential part of identity.

These activities ask students to confront and interrogate their own linguistic ideologies and to acknowledge the factors that have influenced these ideologies.² Students examine the forces that shape their views of themselves, their language, and other people, and the ways they see these ideologies playing out in their society. A student who has developed the ability to look beyond stereotypes and find interest, joy, and empathy in linguistic diversity is, for me, a student who has met the essential objective of a high school linguistics class.

Lesson Plan: “Word Crimes”—Examining Linguistic Prescriptivism and Attitudes about Language

Recommended Grade Level(s)

Tenth grade through twelfth grade

Context

This lesson prompts students’ examination of their own attitudes about language and the social forces that teach these attitudes. This lesson works best either near the beginning of an introductory linguistics course or at the beginning of a unit on language ideology in any ELA class. This lesson could easily lead into a lesson on linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism. Students may need a brief introduction to parody to access the activity.

Objectives

Students will be able to:

•identify commonly held beliefs about language, including their own;

•develop a hypothesis about why people hold certain attitudes about language.

Common Core Standards

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9–10.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9–10.1c

Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that relate the current discussion to broader themes or larger ideas; actively incorporate others into the discussion; and clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11–12.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Teaching Language Variation and Ideologies—Questions and Strategies
• How to Use This Book
• Part 1 Teachers’ Perspectives
• Part 2 Linguists’ Perspectives
• Part 3 Collaborations between Teachers and Linguists
• Index