This article is also accessible as a Word document: Voices of Dissent.

 

The United States, with its far-flung borders and immigrant history, has developed not only its own version of the English language but also fosters a wide array of regional and cultural variants of the language. This richness of language, however, is undercut by the overwhelming misconception that there is only one “correct” way to talk and – even more so – only one way to write even within a land of such diversity. This “correct” way to speak and write has become one predominately associated with white, upper-class, educated Midwestern Americans, leaving the vast majority of the population with an “inferior” dialect or grammar system. While there are many students who come to school with a desire to learn this standard of communication and who purposefully wish to shed their stigmatized home dialects and consequently do, there are many students who study through the same schools, with the same teachers, and on the same tests who never attain so-called Standard English proficiency in either their speech or writing. This “problem” as Lisa Delpit (39) and Rebecca Moore Howard (276) describe is one rooted in group solidarity and even dissension as a response to cultural oppression, not in a lack of intelligence or poor grammars. In any case, this is an issue that must be addressed in every writing classroom; I suggest that the writing classroom should work to give voice to those oppressed, not further suppress them.

           

A key reason students continue to use their home dialects is that it is associated with a culture or group that welcomes and accepts them. Most of the time, the Standard English academic culture keeps them on the fringes, pushes them out because of their differences, and refuses to allow them access unless they conform; as a result, these students have no incentive to join the elitist academic culture they encounter in school. Lisa Delpit explores this issue in her article “No Kinda Sense” as she works out for herself the ease with which her Standard English-speaking daughter adopted African-American English as well as the chagrin she felt as a mother at this turn of events (34). Delpit’s conclusion is that her daughter’s quick language-switch was a result of the acceptance and fun that her peers showed her that encouraged her to learn their dialect or speaking style (39). When she realizes this, Delpit begins to encourage a change in pedagogical style in order to bring in those students often left on the outside, to make them want to join the “culture” of Standard English just as Delpit’s daughter identified with and wanted to join that of her friends. She suggests using topics the students are interested in, making learning “fun,” affirming their identities while simultaneously wanting them to change them (40-43).

 

Though Delpit’s method of encouraging academic engagement is good in some ways, it also seems a bit like a ploy to me, a wolf wearing lambskin asking to be let in the door, because if students accepts this invitation the result is that they learn the Standard English culture and dialect and still never learn to connect their home culture and dialect with academic development, and as Rebecca Moore Howard writes, it may even “leave speakers without a strong sense of group identity” (276), connecting fully to neither their born or learned dialect cultures. Besides its aptitude to create this split identity of sorts in students, Delpit’s proposed pedagogy also seems better suited for early grades of school than as a way to teach students who have learned from a decade of schooling that their cultures and communication styles are “substandard.” Even if the student has studied for years in a curriculum Delpit would support, the supposed benignity of the code-switching encouraged by such a pedagogy also sends the message that “only the standard counts, because non-standard varieties are inferior” (Howard 266).  As even Delpit describes, “since language is one of the most intimate expressions of identity, indeed, ‘the skin that we speak,’ then to reject a person’s language can only feel as if we are rejecting him” (47). Students may, in fact, be clinging even more tenaciously to their home dialects in response to the rejection Standard English academic culture has shown them. In order to maintain solidarity with their accepting home culture and its dialect, students may well turn to rejecting Standard English, acceptance of which means a rejection of one’s identity (Howard 276); this impossible choice is put before most speakers of dialects other than Standard English: success through Standard English or identity in their home dialect. And yet we wonder why students so often reject the world of Standard English.  

 

Delpit’s “friendly” code-switching pedagogy also seems ill-equipped to handle those situations where students have moved past simple rejection of Standard English to outright opposition. As Howard brings forward, using a language form other than Standard English when Standard English is the accepted norm “functions as an oppositional practice” (276).  This may happen as easily among students in Appalachia whose isolation from the larger world promotes a strong sense of cultural pride and who have no desire to “talk uppity” but would rather use the speech of their family and friends or among the students with ingrained regional pride who exaggerate their already-strong Texan drawls as among inner-city African-American youth who embrace the dialect of their community notwithstanding the derision it faces. In speech, even I have experienced this use of the home dialect to oppose the larger “mainstream” culture; my family does not have a strong accent, having roots in the foothills of the Ohio River rather than the deep, remote mountains of Appalachia, but even so there has always been a sense of solidarity, familial unity, and – indeed – pride in the way we speak together in the shade of an ancient white oak along a small creek. I felt this even more acutely as a preteen in the flatlands of northwestern Ohio, rebelling against the prescribed ways of dressing and talking that friends insisted I should conform to, and I clung to everything that reminded me of the Appalachian hills.

 

As Delpit has written so well, it is clear that our pedagogies must not reject our students, though, as Howard explains, her proposed method of code-switching is only a more friendly-faced rejection of the student’s language identity. As countless linguists and even Delpit and Howard attest, “nonstandard” dialects are by no means lesser ways of speaking; they are only lesser in the eyes of the powerful and exclusive Standard English culture. So why, even when we are progressive enough to admit this, do we still require students to write in Standard English? I propose that teaching a student to write is more important than teaching him or her the grammar rules or syntax structures of Standard English. What would happen if we met the student where he or she is, even at a point of opposition to Standard English and all it represents? Teaching students how to develop their ideas, support them, apply research, be creative, and communicate clearly and effectively – even if it is with their home communities – is of paramount importance. We can see examples of this in the writing of Geneva Smitherman, of Sapphire, of Junot Diaz, of Mark Twain who all wrote beautifully, clearly and effectively in something other than the Standard English that they were expected to use. When students are allowed to develop their skills of writing in this way, they can then far more easily be brought, not to a choice of accepting Standard English culture, but to a point of speaking into it, of wanting and learning how to communicate with audiences who are not a part of their home culture or dialect, who perhaps they may still vehemently oppose.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Delpit, Lisa. “No Kinda Sense.” The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. Eds. Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. New York: New Press, 2002. 31-48. Print.

 

Howard, Rebecca Moore. “The Great Wall of African American Vernacular English in the American College Classroom.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 16.2 (1996): 265-283. Print.