The summer after earning my undergraduate degree in English education, I was hired to teach tenth-grade English at a high school in a small, low-income, predominantly African American community. I was excited for the opportunity and was confident that I would make an excellent teacher. Every day, I would go into my classes prepared with excruciatingly planned lessons, ready to employ the strategies I had honed during my teacher training. I would execute my plans with as much passion and energy as I could, but my lessons always seemed to fail, and my students were not progressing in the ways that they needed to, especially because many of them were reading and writing well below grade level. I could never identify exactly why this was happening; in essence, everything I tried failed, and in the end, my students sufferedâas did I. Week after week and month after month of this failure, as I had deemed it, led me to believe that I was not the right teacher for my students, and I resigned my position at the end of the school year.
At the time, I did not understand the large-scale systemic problem I was facing, and I wouldnât until after I decided to enter an English graduate program the following fall. My very first semester, I enrolled in a course called Language in the African American Community, and after only a few weeks, I discovered what I had been missing the year before: my students and I were speaking and writing in two different language varieties. I was speaking a socially privileged variety of English, having, by accident of birth, grown up in a middle-class White family in a suburb of Detroit. And they were speaking a socially stigmatized variety of English I would later come to identify as African American English, also by accident of having been born into the families and community of which they were a part. While I had recognized the linguistic differences between my students and me, I had not been trained to comprehend the significance of those differences in the classroom or to teach using culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogical practices. In my four years of undergraduate teacher preparation, I had not been required to take a single course in linguistics and thus had no specific preparation for how to best teach speakers of socially stigmatized Englishes, nor was I even able to identify that my failure to take into account our language differences was a major contributor to my studentsâ struggle to master the academic literacies I was teaching. Instead, I was seeking to âcorrectâ what I saw as âproblemsâ with my studentsâ language and behavior, and, of course, they resisted.
In short, I had failed my students, and I wasnât the first one to have done so. I was merely reinforcing a message they had heard for years leading up to that point and would hear over and over again after taking my class, in both their schooling and in their everyday lives: that certain (White, middle/upper class) ways of speaking, writing, behaving, and being are right, and all others are wrong. They were being told, whether intentionally or unintentionally, day in and day out, that who they were was not accepted or valued, and that to be accepted and valued, both in school and in society, they would have to change important aspects of their identities, starting with their language.
My story is not the only one like this. This same situation has played out, is playing out, and will continue to play out in classrooms across the United States and beyond: well-meaning teachers with good intentions enact harmful pedagogical practices that place certain students in positions of privilege and others at a serious educational disadvantage. It is also true, though, that teachers and schools are not the only people and places implicated in the production and maintenance of linguistic inequality; examples of linguistic prejudice and discrimination can be found across all facets of society. And, to further complicate matters, linguistic prejudice and discrimination are inextricably linked to other forms of oppression, such as xenophobia, racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia, among others, despite the fact that the role of language in these other systems of inequality often goes unacknowledged.
In recent years, the United States has seen a resurgence of public discussion about issues such as racism and sexismâas exemplified by the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, for example. On news outlets, in social media, and in sociopolitical discourse from the debate stage to the kitchen table, people in the United States have been discussing just how far we havenât come in addressing race- and gender-based inequality in this country. Yet linguistic prejudice is less well understood and thus is infrequently a predominant topic in public discourse about social oppression and inequality (Wright & Bougie, 2007). Moreover, many peopleâeven those who understand and work toward dismantling other kinds of inequalityâhold fast to problematic views of language that contribute to bias and discrimination against people with specific linguistic backgrounds (Alim & Smitherman, 2012). Though socio- and applied linguists have been advocating for linguistic equality for decades, seeking to make their research on stigmatized language varieties and their speakers accessible and applicable outside academia, such efforts have yet to come to fruition. The vast amount of research in the field of linguistics on linguistic (in)equality (Alim & Smitherman, 2012; Baugh, 2000; Brown, 2006; Canagarajah, 2006; Delpit, 2006; Godley et al., 2006; Lippi-Green, 2012; McBee Orzulak, 2015; Nero, 2005; Reaser, 2006; Reaser et al., 2017; Rickford & Rickford, 2000; Siegel, 2006; Smitherman, 2000; Sweetland, 2006; Wheeler & Swords, 2004; Wolfram et al., 1999) is grounded in important and indisputable facts about language variation, such as: (1) all dialects/varieties of a given language are equally rule-governed, systematic, and legitimate; (2) everyone speaks a dialect of their language and has an accent; (3) a standard spoken language variety does not exist, as it is no oneâs native language; (4) people do not have a choice regarding which language or variety of that language they learn from birth; and (5) the languages we speak are an integral part of our identities. A profound ignorance of these facts among lay people (coupled with the effects of other kinds of social inequality) has led to a population in the United States that predominantly holds misinformed, harmful language attitudes and ideologies. As a result, people in certain linguistic groupsânamely, nonnative speakers of English, speakers of English with stigmatized foreign accents, and native speakers of stigmatized varieties of Englishâdaily experience linguistic inequality: prejudice, profiling, and discrimination based on the way they speak, which manifest as a lack of access and opportunity in social domains such as employment, housing, and education.
Language Variation and Education
To continue exploring this systemic problem, I first return to teachers and schools, as the Kâ12 educational system is often considered the beating heart of linguistic inequality in the United States. In an autobiographical essay, Smith (2002: 17) reflects on their1 experience entering school as a speaker of what they call âEbonicsâ: âThere was a gross mis-match between my informal, everyday language style and the formal school talk required by teachers. TeachersâŠused such terms as âtalking flat,â âsloven speech,â âcorrupt speech,â âbroken EnglishââŠand âlinguistically deprivedâ to describe the language behavior of my Black classmates and me.â For Smith (2002) and many others, the reality in school is not much different from Smithermanâs (2000: 141) depiction of teachers who are focused on âcorrectingâ studentsâ stigmatized speech and writing practices, which can cause them âto become truly nonverbal.â Being frightened and forced into silence is only the beginning for some students. According to Smitherman (2000: 141), many speakers of stigmatized Englishes are excluded âfrom regular classes in order to take speech remediation for a nonexistent pathology,â as teachers struggle with how to teach these students whom they erroneously perceive as being linguistically deficient. Further, students who speak stigmatized Englishes are frequently assigned lower level or remedial work because many misinformed educators think âthatâs the best they can doâ (Smitherman, 2000: 141). All of these practices deny opportunities to students based on their linguistic identities (as well as, often, on their racial backgrounds and/or socioeconomic situations), an unfortunate reality that they will likely struggle against throughout their lives, unless they commit to learning the linguistic practices expected by their teachers, often without the pedagogical support needed to help them master these skills while maintaining their home language, culture, and identity. And even if they succeed in mastering socially prestigious language practices, success in society is still not guaranteed; after all, they will still have to contend with racism and/or classism. Their other option is to decide that school is just not for themâand theyâre not wrongâcausing them to disengage, âmisbehave,â and/or drop out, which is why language is an integral component of the school-to-prison pipeline (Martin & Beese, 2017; Rubin, 2014; Seroczynski & Jobst, 2016; Winn & Behizadeh, 2011).
The long-standing challenge of how to teach students with diverse stigmatized language backgrounds has been met with a range of different potential solutions and pedagogical strategies but also with a range of attitudes toward the students, teachers, and language systems in question. In 1974, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) adopted the âStudentsâ Right to Their Own Languageâ (SRTOL ) resolution, which argued: (1) that all varieties of English are systematic, rule-governed, and logical and (2) that students should have the right to use their home varieties in their speaking and writing in school (Committee on CCCC Language Statement, 1974). While this statement was a ground-breaking step toward educational equity for students with diverse language backgrounds, educators have failed to implement the statementâs recommendations in schools across the country; moreover, where districts have tried to implement policies in the spirit of SRTOL, changes have been met with skepticism and controversy.
A famous example is King v. Ann Arbor (1979), in which a case was brought against the Ann Arbor School District for failing to meet the educational needs of the minority population of African American students within the predominantly White, upper-class district in Ann Arbor, MI (Smitherman, 2000: 133). In particular, the plaintiffs claimed that the school had inaccurately placed African American students in special education and speech pathology classesâin addition to disproportionately subjecting them to suspension, other disciplinary action, and grade retentionâall while failing to address the language barrier that was preventing them from attaining academic literacy (Smitherman, 2000: 133). During the trial, which came to be known as the âBlack English Case,â the main question debated was whether the studentsâ language (referred to during the trial as âBlack Englishâ) was legitimate and whether this language should be considered a significant barrier to learning to read and write in school. The court eventually ruled in favor of the students, giving the district 30 days to design a solution that would take into account the existence and legitimacy of the studentsâ language and better meet the literacy needs of the students (Smitherman, 2000: 135). The ruling created an uproar of misunderstanding about and negativity toward âBlack Englishâ among teachers, parents, and outside observers for years after the case. Many people were concerned about the legitimization of the studentsâ language, African American English (AAE ), viewing it only as a broken, incorrect form of English, and others were upset that AAE would be taught, misunderstanding that, because students came into the classroom speaking it, there was no need to teach itâinstead AAE would be used as a part of the instructional strategy for teaching standardized English. As Smitherman (1977: 1) puts it, âI mean, really, it seem like everybody and they momma done had something to say on the subjectââand most of what they had to say was linguistically inaccurate.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1996, the same uproar echoed in response to what came to be known as the âEbonics controversyâ in Oakland, CA. The school board in Oakland adopted a statement (similar to the ruling in the King case) that legitimized the language spoken by its African American student population and further stated that these studentsâ language should be tak...