WRITTEN ENGLISHES
Diversity and Inclusivity
in the Writing Classroom
The majority of my students are, as you say, Standard English speakers/writers. Why should I care about other language varieties/Englishes?
On this page, we offer answers to questions writing teachers may have.
Start small. Suppose one of your assignments asks students to write a literacy autobiography. Check out the McCrary article, which you’ll find on this website. He shows you how he prepared his students to draw on their own language in producing what he calls a “hybrid text,” and his assignment is for them to write, yep, a literacy autobiography! If you have students from disparate backgrounds—a pretty good chance at an urban university—you can provide readings like the ones in McCrary’s article that are written as hybrid texts. Students will need these texts to see how writers blend their own language with standard English. McCrary also shows you how the literacy autobiography provides the space for students to write about their literacy development, starting with their home language. The only factor in your assessment that has to change (i.e., become more inclusive) is “grammar and style”; all other factors stay the same (e.g., focus, development, effectiveness). You can provide other writing assignments that call for less blending and more standard language.
Grade for content and meaning before grammatical structure. Respond to the meaning the student is communicating. As the semester proceeds, you can focus on writing addressed primarily to standard language readers, and you can work with your students to understand the differences.
That’s the short answer.
The first challenge is to convince your students that you really do want them to write using their native tongue (and you’ll need to work hard at this), you’ll find them tapping new resources for content. That’s good. Because once you have the content, you can help the student shape it. Writing does not have to conform to “standard” English to be meaningful, and we have many examples of such writing on this website. So helping students to write meaningfully is a large part of teaching writing. You can teach focus, organization, development, argument, description, analysis, etc.—all without ever having to comment on grammar and spelling.
“But when does a teacher start to work on grammar and other conventions?” you ask. When you determine that a piece of writing is meaningful, and when you and the student know that it’s targeted for standard language readers, you can begin to identify patterns in the student’s grammar that don’t conform to standard language. Have your student keep a notebook with these grammatical patterns, contrasting the student’s native grammar with standard grammar. Working with two or three patterns at a time is more than enough. Leave the rest alone. And then let the student know that readers will expect “standard” language, and s/he should focus on the grammatical patterns you pointed out.
But suppose the student doesn’t want to change the language form throughout the essay, and for good reasons? Suppose the student wants to use his own language, barring any obvious inconsistencies, along with standard English? If you mean what you say about the legitimacy of his own language, you should allow the student to draw on his own language, as long as you hold the student responsible for the grammatical patterns you identified. Writing is about making good choices, and choice involves having a command of more than one style.
No. We believe students’ success is encouraged by allowing them to use their home language to develop their ideas. Students learn to access the wider world through their home and family identities; it gives them a place to stand, not an excuse for navel-gazing.
However, from the perspective of Richard Rodriguez in his chapter, “School and Home: Public and Private Identity,” providing a multilingual classroom encourages separateness and hence discourages public individuality. A student's identity is intertwined with his/her home language or dialect and Rodriguez agrees. Although he believes that students need to shed their home language or what he refers to as private individuality, so they can assimilate into public society.
Contrary to Rodriguez, in his article, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging,” Canagaraja suggests students have multilingual choices and they need to know when they can negotiate these choices and when they can’t. The teaching strategies he discusses to address these choices are recontextualization, voice, interactional, and textualization.
As globalization continues, multilingualism is a growing reality for teachers and students. Despite America’s ambivalence towards the subject, the U.S. is a linguistically diverse nation (see Trudgill).
Even Standard English users will be called to communicate with people who use other languages and other Englishes or who use English as a second language as globalization increases these contacts in our workplaces and communities. As Suresh Canagarajah relates in the essay “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued,” speakers of English as a first language have been long outnumbered by those who speak it as a second language, and it is becoming necessary to prepare students for this multilingual world in which English is used according to multiple sets of rules and standards. Horner et al., in “Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach” also address this question; they note that essentially every student who speaks even Standard English is familiar with other varieties of English through their home and community environments which they can draw on, and it is important that students consider that their audiences will not always consist exclusively of American Standard English speakers. As Horner et al. continue, a multilingual approach is especially important for its “disposition of openness and inquiry […] toward language and language differences” (307). Thus, an awareness of linguistic diversity is an important part of preventing Standard English users from creating monolingual assumptions about language and assuming that anything different from Standard English is inferior; awareness will ensure that they see alternatives to Standard English as effective, complex communicative systems, as resources instead of deficits. Even if the student is not necessarily using or learning another language variety in their writing, exposure to and respect for other varieties is important to prevent language prejudices.
This is one of the fundamental questions to consider as we strive to be more inclusive in our writing instruction. We may face resistance from colleagues, other stakeholders, and even our own students as we promote the validity and relevance of the home and community languages that students bring with them to the classroom. ‘Using anything other than Standard English (SE) is a barrier to upward social mobility and a hindrance when seeking employment,’ they may say. ‘No other professor will let me write the way I talk,’ students might protest. Certainly there is a place for instruction in the current accepted norms of edited academic English, but it is possible to shape writing instruction so that is does not present one immovable ‘right way’ to write in English.
When we embrace inclusive instruction, we empower students by acknowledging and valuing the linguistic resources they bring with them to the classroom. This empowerment may mean the difference between success in college and ‘slipping through the cracks’ for some students, which in turn will help create leaders of tomorrow who are aware of and open to language diversity among their own students, employees, and co-workers. If we want to respect all the varieties of English that students bring into the classroom, we have to “walk the walk” and not just “talk the talk.” It boils down to this: should we prepare students for the status quo, or work to bring about a different future? Even taking small, well-considered steps toward language inclusivity in your writing classroom will help to break down the “long-standing tradition of elitism in American life and language matters” (Smitherman, 16) and change the status quo!
How can I balance the concept of respecting and acknowledging language diversity in my classroom while giving students the kind of writing instruction that will benefit them in the future? Don’t my students need to know the rules of Standard English to succeed in college and the business world?
Doesn't a multilingual classroom just encourage students to stay in their home culture and let the wider culture cater to them?
Questions about
Language Inclusivity
Why should we teach African American Vernacular English if students already use it?
Don't my students need to know the grammar of Standard English?
What are some considerations of race and power that I might be faced with when dealing with language difference in the classroom?
We are not actually teaching this language form to students, but rather, we are recognizing and respecting all students’ home languages – including AAVE – and allowing students to use them as sources and inspiration for better writing. The misunderstanding that students were being taught to use AAVE or Ebonics in place of Standard English was perpetuated during the Oakland debates of the 1990s by the misinformed claims of reactionaries and the media. Rather, when a student’s identity is affirmed through legitimization of his or her home language, the student is empowered to achieve and, in the case of writing, to learn how to harness the discourse of academic Standard English; you can see evidence of this in Lisa Delpit’s essay “No Kinda Sense.” In the case of AAVE, what is actually being taught is its grammatical legitimacy; students are shown that it follows rules, just not the same ones that Standard English follows. When AAVE is recognized as a valid language variety in itself – far more complex than incorrect or informal Standard English and more than “just slang,” as it is often assumed to be – students can then be encouraged to draw upon AAVE’s nuances, even inspired by them, as they endeavor to write in a way that is truly meaningful and moving for their audiences.
Students need to learn the grammar of Standard English to some extent. However, it should be more important that students learn how to decide what situations demand Standard English and how much code meshing would be acceptable. More and more, Standard English is being considered as “the language of wider communication” rather than the “right” way to write. Students need to learn awareness of their rhetorical choices.
Language can be a sensitive issue, but language diversity can be addressed in the classroom without the concern of race or power. We think it makes sense to include all language varieties-- while its speakers acquire Standard English at the same time they are gaining facility with their own language. Standard English is appropriate for some situations and inappropriate for others. As part of our teaching approaches, students should be allowed to respond according to their audience and purpose rather than some prior mandate. According to Suresh Canagaraja in the article, "Codemeshing, in Academic Writing: Identifying Teachable Strategies of Translanguaging," students should have the freedom to make rhetorical choices in the classroom.
Vershawn Young’s chapter, “Linguistic Double Consciousness” in the book titled, “Other Peoples English,” supports the use of code-meshing to assist with the underlying issues of race and power in our classrooms. According to Young, “code-meshing presents an alternative vision of language to teachers, one that offers the ‘disempowered’ a more egalitarian path into Standard English, a route that integrates academic English with their own dialects and that simultaneously seeks to end discrimination” (56). Also from “Other Peoples English,” Dr. Kim Lovejoy writes about code-meshing in much the same way as Young in his chapter, “Code-Meshing and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy for College Writing Instruction”. In this piece, Dr. Lovejoy suggests, “A teacher and classroom that privilege code-meshing are not prejudiced against the narrower Standard English or those who idealize it. They simply provide the opportunity for others to be heard as well” (129).
While it is true that AAE has a distinct vocabulary, AAE is much more than just slang. As Redd and Web demonstrate in their chapter, “What are the Distinctive Features of AAE?,” AAE is a language variety that has its own semantic, grammatical, pronunciation, and rhetorical patterns. For example, Redd and Web state, “Compared to Standard American English, AAE relies less on word endings to convey grammatical information, boasts a more complex verb system, and accesses a wider range of sentence patterns” (28). In “African American Language: So Good it’s Bad,” Geneva Smitherman discusses how the features of AAE came out of U.S. slavery, “Ancient elements of African speech were transformed into a new language forged in the crucible of enslavement, U.S. style apartheid, and the Black struggle to survive and thrive in the face of dominating and oppressive Whiteness” (pg. #). From Smitherman, we see that AAE is not a broken form of English, but a variety of English that was created from necessity when African and English speech styles were forced together.
How can an English or Writing teachers be expected to learn all the languages their students might speak at home? How would they ever actually have time to teach?
If I allow my students to code-mesh in W131, won’t that give them a false impression of the expectations of college work? What is the overall benefit?
How will code-meshing help me to prepare my students for the 'real world', rather than focusing on Standard English that they will need to know?
Code-meshing is a rhetorical technique that is not meant to be used arbitrarily. For instance, when students effectively code-mesh they are making rhetorical choices to respond to a specific audience. Because code-meshing encourages students to utilize language varieties and features outside of standard English, students who do not identify with standard English as their primary or home language will be more receptive towards the writing concepts being taught in W131. In other words, students are more likely to become active participants in their learning and writing when code-meshing is introduced into the classroom. Code-meshing is also beneficial to students because it pushes them to view writing in a multilingual form, instead of the narrow monolingual form many students have been conditioned to think of it. It is more and more rare that a student will be encountering a solely monolingual audience, so pushing students to recognize writing as a multilingual activity will prepare them for other college writing experiences, as well as writing in the “real world.”
The teacher doesn't need to be fluent in every student's home language; rather the teacher respects and becomes familiar with them, allowing students to learn more about their own languages by explaining their rules and usages to the teacher. The teacher focuses more on the conveyance of ideas to a specific audience and helps students learn how to use their home languages or dialects to get there.
Identity is tied to language and students are liable to internalize the way in which their language is treated, which is why it is important to respect language diversity in the classroom.
Do I really need to learn more about sociolinguistics?
How is African American English (AAE) more than slang or broken English?
How can I embrace the language diversity of my students when I have so many constraints in terms of content and assessment? If we allow students to submit their work using their home language, it seems to me we will be allowing non-standard grammar and spelling.
In the most general sense, sociolinguistics is interested in the diverse ways that language and social situations interact. It is through sociolinguistics that scholars have gained an appreciation for language varieties that are often viewed as inferior or improper, such as African American English (AAE), Appalachian English, or Hawaiian Pidgin. Because your students come from many different language backgrounds, learning more about sociolinguistics will definitely help when responding to student texts. Having a basic understanding of different English varieties will help you understand the difference between error and the student’s own language. For instance, a student who primarily speaks AAE will demonstrate different grammatical patterns that may transfer over to their writing. By knowing some of the grammatical features of AAE, you will be able to see when the student has made an error as opposed to when the student makes the decision to use his or her home language.
If Standard English is so oppressive, why teach it at all? Why haven’t I heard about language varieties before and what am I supposed to teach?
Wouldn’t an English-Only classroom and/or society be much more efficient than a multilingual one? Why can’t we all just learn to communicate the same way?
Every teacher’s strategy may vary somewhat when they are deciding what to teach in the classroom. As we suggest elsewhere, start small—teach from the perspective of Standard English as one variety of English, consider inviting students to codemesh or explore codemeshed materials.
There are many varieties of English that are used in published writing, not just Standard English. As our culture becomes more diverse, our standard should reflect such diversity, and that’s where we’re going—in fiction and nonfiction. What’s “oppressive” about Standard English is the teaching that misleads students into believing that only Standard English counts, that if they can’t learn the rules, they can’t write. Being honest about language and practicing what sociolinguists have taught us about different varieties will go a long way in helping our students understand language and the role of Standard English, even if it’s a hybrid that includes some meshing of the student's home language.
After all, students learn over a period of time—years, even decades. So there’s no point in insisting they learn to produce flawless papers in one semester. It makes better sense to teach them how to communicate their ideas in focused, well developed writing that also shows an increasing awareness of audience and purpose.
(For an illustration of attitudes regarding incorrect usage, read Dr. Lovejoy’s testimonial here.)
Note: here, an English-Only classroom is defined as one in which Standard English is the sole mode of instruction.
It is unlikely that an English-Only classroom (or society) would be more efficient than a multilingual one. While the U.S. is often imagined as speaking a single language—English, or some might say “Standard English”—in reality, many languages are spoken within U.S. borders. Perhaps in your own community, you can name neighborhoods or shopping plazas where another language is primarily spoken, such as a variety of Spanish or Ebonics. If efficiency must be a measure, ignoring this multilingual reality may cause more delays and costs than adopting a pluralist approach. (See our annotated bibliography for more on “Standard English,” its origins, and its status.)
While we can all learn to communicate the same way, linguists have long known that language serves as more than a way to communicate—it signals a person’s identity and community. In addition, other authors have observed that English-Only amounts to an attempt to eradicate languages that are not Standard English, rather than an attempt to build on existing language strengths. Furthermore, multilingual speakers develop “attitudinal resources” like patience, tolerance, and humility (see Canagarajah 2006). As Canagarajah states, “A refusal to deal with difference (or cooperate with an interlocutor) is not congenial for communication—even when the language of both speakers is the same!” (2006).
In short, no, an English-Only society would not be more efficient. And yes, in theory, we could all learn to communicate the same way—but aren’t we just asking others to communicate like us? And is that really fair?
© 2013 by the students of IUPUI's ENG-W600 - Written Englishes: Living Cultural Realities, Dr. Kim Brian Lovejoy, professor.