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Student language narratives and discrimination.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Traditional language instruction has focused around the binary of prescriptive/descriptive grammar, and thus issues of correctness, sociolinguistic research highlights language practices within social contexts. An increased awareness of language in context has resulted in a concomitant understanding that language discrimination is rooted in social inequities. Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is discussed, along with the recent increase in language discrimination suits. The importance of communicating to students their rights and responsibilities regarding language diversity is explored through school and workplace narratives.

Introduction

While the debate over the role of language instruction in education has traditionally focused on the tension between traditional, prescriptive approaches to teaching grammar--the belief that a standard exists, that the standard represents a superior, desirable, and stable form of the language, and that all students should learn that standard for both economic and patriotic reasons--and descriptive linguistic accounts that point out that all varieties of a language are logical and capable of communicative competence, recently discussion has turned to looking at language through the lens of sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguists point out that language and society are linked, and, therefore, mutually interact in a variety of ways that reflect back to us the ways we as speakers and listeners construct our interactions. The sociolinguistic turn in grammar studies has led to the catchphrase "grammar in context"--either in the context of writing, where choices of correctness and appropriateness are made in the context of rhetorical purpose, genre, and target audience (Weaver 1996)--or in the context of culture, where students examine the ways in which language shapes our individual and cultural identities (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 1998). As postmodern and poststructuralist scholarship provide us with the theoretical background to contextualize the way that language functions as a social construction of our perceptions of reality, sociolinguistics provides specific data to test the hypotheses of these theories. In addition, sociolinguistic studies can help build the foundation of a social justice approach to dealing with language difference.

With its origins in the identity movements of the 1960s and 70s, social justice theories ask us to think critically and carefully about what we consider the norm. An early outgrowth of this movement would be documents such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication (1974) position statement, Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) and an increased emphasis in the stated standards in the field to help students develop respect for language diversity (NCTE/IRA 1996). These shifts in educational focus were concomitant to one of the most significant pieces of legislation in US history--The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of this act, through a variety of court decisions, has come to be interpreted as providing limited legal protection to speakers of "non-standard" English...

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