Dialects at School

Educating Linguistically Diverse Students

Jeffrey Reaser, Carolyn Temple Adger, Walt Wolfram, Donna Christian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317678977
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Like its predecessor, Dialects in Schools and Communities, this book illuminates major language-related issues that educational practitioners confront, such as responding to dialect related features in students' speech and writing, teaching Standard English, teaching students about dialects, and distinguishing dialect difference from language disorders. It approaches these issues from a practical perspective rooted in sociolinguistic research, with a focus on the research base for accommodating dialect differences in schools. Expanded coverage includes research on teaching and learning and attention to English language learners.

All chapters include essential information about language variation, language attitudes, and principles of handling dialect differences in schools; classroom-based samples illustrating the application of these principles; and an annotated resources list for further reading. The text is supported by a Companion Website (www.routledge.com/cw/Reaser) providing additional resources including activities, discussion questions, and audio/visual enhancements that illustrate important information and/or pedagogical approaches.

Comprehensive and authoritative, Dialects at School reflects both the relevant research bases in linguistics and education and educational practices concerning language variation. The problems and examples included are authentic, coming from the authors' own research, observations and interactions in public school classrooms, and feedback in workshops. Highlights include chapters on oral language and reading and writing in dialectally diverse classrooms, as well as a chapter on language awareness for students, offering a clear and compelling overview of how teachers can inspire students to learn more about language variation, including their own community language patterns. An inventory of dialect features in the Appendix organizes and expands on the structural descriptions presented in the chapters.

1
An Introduction to Language Variation in America

Scenario

Students in your first grade class have been practicing telling and writing narratives in chronological order. One day during the second month of class, you read a story about two brothers who both wanted a toy train. You ask for volunteers to retell the story’s order of events. Darius, a 6-year-old African American student, enthusiastically raises his hand and you call on him. He says:

Once upon a time, a little boy wanted to play with the train. And he tryna get the train, but his mean brother holdin’ it up high. So the big boy put it under his bed. When the big brother in the kitchen eatin’ his sandwich, the little boy take he train and he put it in his toy box. Then the big boy came back and he thinkin’ of the train. And he look under the bed but he don’t find nothin’.

from Seymour, 2004, p. 4

What’s your first impression of Darius’ response? What strengths do you see in Darius’ response? What concerns do you have about Darius’ response? If you were Darius’ teacher, how would you respond to his retelling of this story?

Deficit Versus Difference

Darius’ narrative highlights a common challenge for teachers all over the United States: Evaluating language use can be a difficult task that requires knowledge of child development, language acquisition, and cultural diversity. Adding to the challenge is the fact that these evaluations can have a dramatic impact on students’ educational pathways—at every educational level—where misinformed or inappropriate evaluations and invalid interpretations can severely limit students’ chances of attaining high levels of academic achievement. Darius’ narrative employs, for his age, above average narrative markers (e.g., “when” and “then”) as well as knowledge of the language of thought (e.g., “He thinkin’ of”). In many ways, the narrative is exceptional for a 6-year-old; however, as it is easy to be distracted by Darius’ use of nonstandard language, teachers might overlook the fact that the narrative reflects developmentally advanced linguistic features. In fact, it would not at all be unusual for poorly informed teachers to recommend that Darius be evaluated for a speech disorder. And while diagnoses have become far less biased over the past half century, African American students are still about two to three times as likely as white students to be diagnosed with speech or language impairments and mental retardation (Aud, Fox, & Kewal-Ramani, 2010, p. 40).

This discrepancy in rates of diagnosis is a remnant of deficit positions with respect to language that were the norm until the 1960s and still common until the 1980s. According to the deficit position, speakers of dialects with vernacular forms have a handicap—socially and cognitively—because the dialects are illogical, sloppy, or just a “collection of errors.” Intelligence test scores and results of standardized language measures may be cited as evidence for this position (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), but issues of test bias are typically overlooked. Consider, for example, one shocking statement of deficit thinking by Florence Goodenough, a pioneer in the field of developmental psychology and standardized and IQ testing, who published findings in which bilingual school children scored lower on IQ tests than monolingual Americans. She offered two possible explanations for the discrepancy: either “The use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation” or . . . “A more likely explanation is that these nationality groups whose intellectual ability is inferior do not readily learn the new language” (Goodenough, 1926, p. 393). It is unimaginable today that an educated person would make such a statement about one national group being mentally inferior to another, but such thinking was pervasive not too long ago. We now know the real reason for Goodenough’s findings: The tests she was employing were culturally and linguistically biased, and they assessed differences as deficits or deficiencies.

Deficit positions still characterize personal thinking and permeate institutional policy, notwithstanding efforts to confront them, so it is essential that teachers, administrators, and other education practitioners are able to recognize potential deficit thinking and policies that reproduce this position. Perhaps nowhere has the deficit view been as strongly reinforced as in “language gap” studies such as Betty Hart and Todd Risley’s (1995) influential book, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, which claims to document a 30-million word gap for poor children—in terms of the number of words a child is exposed to—by age 3. In framing the rationale for their study, the researchers note:

Undertaking to remediate, improve, or add to present skill levels assumes the existence of some “difference,” “delay,” or “deficit” relative to a norm. But when we listened to the [children of poverty] talk during free play, they seemed fully competent to us, well able to explain and elaborate the topics typical in preschool interactions. We became increasingly uncertain about which language skills we should be undertaking to improve. We decided we needed to know, not from our textbooks, but from advantaged children, what skilled spontaneous speech at age 4 is in terms of grammar and content.

Hart & Risley, 1995, p. 8 [italics added]

Even while the researchers deemed the children to be “fully competent” and as “well able” to use language as other preschoolers, they knew these children must have a deficit. They asked, “What’s wrong with these kids’ language?” rather than “What’s different about these kids’ language?” Deficit-oriented, “language gap” research continues to this day (see, e.g., Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder, 2013) despite serious critique of Hart and Risley’s research methods and conclusions (e.g., Baugh, 2016) and decades of research documenting the differences in language and literacy practices among varied societal groups (e.g., Heath, 1983, 2012; Zentella, 1997).

The deficit position is gradually being replaced by the difference position, which seeks to understand sociocultural difference—including language difference—without the need for evaluating the alternatives. Such approaches might ask how one group uses language and literacy in different ways from another group, without judging one way to be superior (see Heath, 1983, for one such study). As applied to language, the difference approach might ask how the dialect patterns (such as pronunciation or word choice) of one group, say, rural Southerners, differ from another, say, urban Southerners, or how women use discourse strategies differently from men.

Pursuing the issue of difference versus deficit, we arrive at a core tenet of sociolinguistics: No variety of a language is inherently better than another in terms of its logic, its systematic structure, or its ability to express creative and complex thought. Extending this idea leads to the conclusion that no speakers have a diminished ability inherently to function cognitively and expressively as a result of the variety of the language that they acquire. This principle means that judgments about students’ academic abilities based on their dialect are always inappropriate. Notwithstanding this linguistic truth, the realities of social attitudes about language cannot be denied, and these attitudes strongly influence how language variation is interpreted in a variety of academic and non-academic situations. For example, we know that students speaking nonmainstream dialects lag behind Standard English speakers in achievement on standardized assessments, a fact that has attracted a deficit interpretation (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994). This apparent lag can be explained in a number of ways. Two interpretations are outlined here. First, it is possible that a vernacular- speaking student has had teachers who, because of deficit thinking, held low expectations of the student, perhaps interpreting vernacular forms as indicative of a social or cognitive handicap, based on a belief that the forms are illogical, sloppy, or just bad grammar. Such thinking results in a self-fulfilling prophecy of under-achievement (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).

A second interpretation is that the lag in achievement is likely to be an artifact of cultural or linguistic bias in the standardized assessment. The issue of test bias is critical, as discussed in the opening section of this chapter, as it can lead to negative educational outcomes, including recommendations for remedial language and other educational services (to remedy a deficit indicated by the test outcomes). To a large extent, the concept of compensatory programs evolved from test bias. Educational programs were designed to fill in the gaps in language and other skills caused by what was called linguistic and environmental disadvantage. Members of more powerful social groups—roughly, the middle class—often believe that members of stigmatized groups must change in order to be accepted. And members of these stigmatized groups often adopt positions passed on to them by language and school authorities. Success in school for children from these disenfranchised groups, for example, may depend on changing aspects of their language and language use, and adapting to school norms, which are generally more like the norms of the powerful groups than those of the stigmatized groups. For members of a mainstream, powerful group, no change or adaptation is necessary. As a result, children from some groups become more at risk for school failure even though they are not intrinsically disadvantaged. To put it succinctly: The educational system expects students from nonmainstream backgrounds to accommodate to the social and linguistic norms of mainstream students without much, if any, instruction on how to do so. Schools, effectively, require more of the students who arrive at school less prepared to meet the expectations of the mainstream educational context than those who have been born into privileged classes.

The contrasting perspective, and the one advocated here, is the difference position that views groups of speakers simply in terms of the differences among their language systems. Because no one linguistic system can be shown to be inherently better, there is no reason to assume that using a particular dialect is associated with an inherent deficit or advantage. The difference position calls into question the evidence from test scores and school performance that is used to prescribe remediation. If educators assume that a particular dialect is best, if they formally accept and encourage only that dialect, and if they test ability and achievement only through the medium of that dialect, then it should not be surprising that students who enter school already speaking it fare better than those who use a different dialect. An understanding of the social attitudes and values concerning dialects and their speakers is thus essential for dealing with language differences.

From time to time, these contrasting positions, which have been discussed for decades now, produce acrimonious debate in the public arena. For example, in 1996, the Board of Education of the Oakland (CA) Unified School District adopted a resolution that recognized Ebonics, or African American English, as a language system to be taken into account in teaching schoolchildren Standard English. Taking the view that Ebonics, the language spoken by many of their African American students, is a legitimate linguistic system (albeit different from Standard English), the Oakland school district proposed to use the students’ knowledge of Ebonics in teaching Standard English. In this way, the schools would respect and take advantage of students’ linguistic competence as a resource for language development rather than viewing it as a deficit. Their intention was neither to eradicate Ebonics nor to teach it, as some thought, but to help students add another language system.

The resolution provoked wide comment, much of it scathing denunciation of vernacular dialect (and its speakers) and the school system’s acceptance of what was viewed as deficient language. Everyone had something to say—prominent persons in government, civil rights, entertainment, and education; ordinary citizens; national organizations concerned with linguistic research and language teaching; and many, many reporters and editorial writers. In fact, the debate even extended to a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the topic in which academic linguists defended the program while others on the panel, including a journalist and a preacher, attacked it. At the heart of the Ebonics controversy was the long-standing conflict between the deficit and the difference positions. It further illustrated that anyone who uses the language can be seen as an expert, even if he or she has never studied the language scientifically. Claiming authority is a key component to maintaining language subordination (Lippi-Green, 2012).

The principle of linguistic subordination is straightforward: The speech of dominant groups will be viewed as superior to the speech of socially subordinate groups. But the effects of linguistic subordination can be subtle and insidious. Linguistic subordination is perpetuated through seemingly common sense notions and propositions. This process is described by Lippi-Green (2012, p. 70). When non-experts claim language authority—as seen in the Ebonics case—misinformation about language and language norms can be spread. For example, a set of prescriptions may take on authority through means such as historical usage and arguments about logic or aesthetics. The corollary process is that all other usages are deemed inappropriate or dis-preferred. Language varieties that employ these other usages are then deemed inappropriate or dis-preferred, or they are trivialized in some way. These steps create a language-based system of value in society b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Keyword lexical set for English vowels based on Wells (1982)
• Preface
• 1 An Introduction to Language Variation in America
• 2 Exploring Dialects
• 3 Variation in Dialect Systems
• 4 Languages in Contact
• 5 Establishing Language Norms
• 6 Dialects and Language Assessment
• 7 Dialect Policy and Oral Language Program Development
• 8 Dialects and Writing
• 9 Language Variation and Reading
• 10 Dialect Awareness for Students
• Appendix
• Index