Michael Stubbs sheds light on the possibility (and, let's face it, reality) that the negative impacts of language on education comes from attitudes towards language and not the language itself. It's easy to look at the achievement gap in US schools over the last... well... since schools were made public, and determine that alternative or nonstandard dialects are strongly deficient when it comes to educating students. After all, it may be one of the strongest correlative factors between low achievers in schools on a national scale. Nevertheless, as Stubbs indicates, the negative attitudes towards not only nonstandard dialects but towards the speakers themselves is a more likely cause.
Given the clear bias against nonstandard dialects of English, would it be more appropriate to simply change attitudes in schools or to change standards of appropriateness throughout the entire social structure of the nation? (In order to genuinely answer the question, pragmatic concerns should probably be discounted for the moment.) Is there any value to having different standards of speech in different social settings, i.e. a job interview and a break room at work? Or would it be more beneficial and equalizing to deconstruct them altogether? The answer is undoubtedly a difficult one, so you'd better get started.
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"Would it be more appropriate to simply change attitudes in schools or to change standards of appropriatenedd throughout the entire social structure of the nation?"
ReplyDeleteI was considering when reading "No Kinda Sense" how as a teacher I could best address the issue of social stereotypes of language. I think that we cannot realistically change the way that society as a whole views certain dialects and accents, but we have the opportunity to address they way that our students view them. I think we can address code switching, talk to our students about when it's socially appropriate to speak "standard English" and still be accepting and understanding of their own natural language.
I do think it's something that we should actually (and tactfully discuss with our students though. Lisa Delpit's daughter had a concious understanding of code switching, but most of our students will not have linguists for parents.