One day in early 2021, deep into my very first high school practicum teaching experience…

I was asked by my Cooperating Teacher to take a look at the analytical essay of a 10th-grade student named Lia.* All the students in the class had been working on an argumentative essay centered around whatever book the student decided to read, and crunch time was upon the cohort. Even though my Cooperating Teacher and I couldn’t directly see our students, due to the realities of Zoom-based teaching during the coronavirus pandemic, we knew that stress levels were high.

Lia was different from other students. She and her family had recently moved to the Bellingham area from South Korea, and—while she seemed to be doing fairly well adjusting to the difference in social scenes—it was clear she was still standing on relatively shaky ground when it came to Academic English and the English language in general. When I spoke to her about her writing, before even reading a word she had written, she assured me that it wasn’t strong writing and that she knew she still had a long, long way to go before it was ready to be turned in. When I took a look at her essay, though—I was stunned. Not only had Lia selected a far more difficult English text to read, analyze, and subsequently write about, but she had done it in such a way where she was mixing different media representations of the text—juxtaposing two different film interpretations of the book with the book itself in order to make a convincing thematic argument.

“Lia,” I remember asking, “where did you get the idea to compare and contrast the film and book versions?” 

“Oh,” she said, “the book was hard for me, so the movie helped me understand.” Then, after a moment, she added, “is that bad?”

* All names have been changed.

Lia was, quite seriously, the student that all English teachers dream of.

When faced with something complex and seemingly outside of her wheelhouse, she actively took steps to seek out additional relevant information and splice the new information into her existing knowledge. She was comparing different ideological interpretations across decades of literary history in order to make a novel argument about a canonical text. 

But Lia didn’t see it that way. Her vast success in the areas of abstract conceptualization and thematic relevance were lost behind the thick veneer of Academic English and its chokehold on our educational institutions. As I continued to read through her essay I realized that this student had already done all the work necessary for the assignment, and then some. Lia had been so conditioned to second-guess her own grammatical competence within the setting of an educational system that she was engaging in a sort of linguistic self-flagellation. What she really needed was someone to tell her that her writing was good already, even if it could get better. After working with her for a half hour that day, Lia turned in three more drafts to me by the assignment’s due date—200% more than she had in any time period previously.

While Lia’s example may seem straightforward—of course a student attempting to learn to use English more fluently as a second language is going to have more difficulty with grammar than students speaking English from birth!—there is much more to this concept than meets the eye. What does it mean for our students when the mere idea of grammatical correctness is paralyzing to the entire act of writing? What happens when students speaking a different dialect of English in their communities are suddenly forced to fluently participate in a dialect they have never previously utilized? What makes a language a language and a dialect a dialect? What does it mean when we send students to “English class?” How and what do our students expect to learn, and, perhaps most importantly; how can we, as leaders of our educational communities, facilitate the creation of a more global definition and purpose of the English classroom?

This essay will attempt to put forth answers to these questions through the reference and citation of applicable educational research, linguistic philosophy and cognitive poetics, and a sprinkling of personal anecdotal stories from the English classroom.

Kenneth Burke was a 20th century linguistic philosopher.

He conceptualized and coined the idea of “terministic screens” in his collection of essays Language as Symbolic Action in 1966. These “terministic screens” are, in essence, the ways in which people’s characteristics, personalities, moral and social leanings, and opinions are put on display within their production and reception of language. This theory is a bedrock principle in modern understandings of rhetorical power: that because the words a speaker uses are interpreted differently based on the characteristics and makeup of an audience hearing them, care must be taken in order to select only those words that further a speaker’s point or prompt the intended images in the heads of the listeners.

A simple example of this phenomenon in action can be helpful: imagine a room with one speaker and two listeners. The speaker says the word “dog.” As soon as the listeners hear the word, they begin to think of a dog. 

Three very different dogs are being thought of at the moment: the dog that the speaker has in mind, the dog that listener A has in mind, and the dog that listener B has in mind. The speaker, for instance, may be thinking of the tiny, fragile-looking toy poodle that they saw walking to grab a coffee that morning. Perhaps listener A had a border collie when they were a kid, and so the default “dog” that appears in their head is something that closely resembles their childhood companion. Maybe listener B is afraid of dogs, and the mere mention of that three-letter word conjures up images of gnashing teeth and ragged black fur standing four feet tall. If the speaker was intending to make the listeners think of the same dog they were thinking of, the speaker has failed in that pursuit—that would take an utterance more along the lines of “think about a tiny, tiny puppy with curly black hair and big eyes that makes no noise at all.” But that takes more words, and therefore more effort, and even here there is room for misinterpretation (is the dog cartoonishly small or realistically so? Is the curly hair shorter or longer?).

Common definitions are helpful. With this idea in mind, it’s no wonder that so many of our students in English classes fail to feel like they are getting any sort of applicable skill out of these classes. If many of our students will never have to demonstrate mastery of every nuance of Academic English grammar, why are we combining grammatical proficiency and demonstrated content knowledge in our gradebooks?

Settling on a shared definition of the purpose of English class allows teachers to more successfully meet students halfway.

In the 2017 article “Debating ELA’s Economic Mission,” author and high school English teacher Ross Collin attempts to figure out a common answer to this question. Frustrated with the lack of research on what career-readiness goals ELA education actually assists with, Collin interviewed over a hundred ELA professors and educators and looked at copious documentation—including primary and secondary documents from the National Council of Teachers of English—in order to find out “what [the field’s economic mission] entails and how important it appears when compared to the field’s missions of promoting cultural awareness, personal development, and citizenship” (Collin, 13). Through Collin’s research, four main theories began to emerge:

(1:) that the English classroom’s purpose is teaching basic literacy skills—what essentially amounted to basic reading and writing suited for most professions,

(2:) the purpose is to teach advanced literary skills, such as creativity, abstract thought, and certain basic types of rhetorical analysis,

(3:) the purpose is teaching critical literacy skills—teaching justice-oriented curricula using texts that focus inequality and fraught social relationships, and

(4:) that there is no economic purpose and the teaching of ELA is purely a humanist activity that focuses on personal relationships with art and identity (Collin, 13-14).

All four of these potential aims came from interviews and surveys from current and former English teachers; however, Collin also puts forth an applicable pedagogical recommendation regarding how to invite students into this debate.

Students in his class are given four different narratives from four different imagined people, all advocating for a different stated economic aim of ELA education. Students engage in whole-class and small-group discussions on these differing viewpoints, selecting which views they agree with or disagree with the most, and connect the chosen goals to projects, books, or activities they can remember doing in past English classes. This allows students the opportunity to “ground their ideas in familiar experiences” (Collin, 16). Then students write letters to public education officials and ELA teachers; the students put the problem in their own words, promote or criticize one book or activity they have done in the past, and show their disagreement toward one of the four potential narratives around the economic mission of English class. Collin’s entire assignment is built around directly engaging students in writing and thinking assignments focusing on English class itself. Who better to have these conversations with than students? “By viewing their coursework in the light of societywide debates and by intervening in those debates,” Collin writes, “students can gain greater understandings of the world and take greater control over their own lives” both inside and outside the English classroom (Collin, 17).

Collin’s conceptual backbone for this lesson targets the heart of this confusion around what is expected of students in English class and what areas the students should be looking out for their own progress in. How do we as teachers expect our students to commit themselves fully to a classroom discussion or a particular activity—potentially one that highlights a skill the student has no functional use for in their community—if we cannot have frank and candid conversations with them about what they want to get out of our class? How can personal reflections in the English classroom hold any weight or relevance when students are not sure what performance they should be reflecting upon?

I broke out Collin’s research last month in a conversation with a student of mine—Petra.

Petra, in our World Mythology class, was getting increasingly frustrated with an assignment where students were asked to pick a particular folklore archetype, find a mythological character that fit said archetype, and write a one-paragraph summary on why they do fit the archetype. She is a student who has significant problems with spelling, and both writing and typing are fairly difficult for her. 

“One of those days?” I remember saying as I sat next to her and looked at her work. She (somewhat obviously) had been playing a game on her phone instead of chipping away at the assignment before her. 

“I just don’t get it,” she said. “I’m not a good writer. I don’t even like reading that much. Why am I writing a paragraph about some mythic figure?”

“Is it more the writing or the topic that’s putting you off?”

“The topic. I guess.”

As we talked through her qualms with the assignment, I brought up Collin’s research and the activities that he had his class do. Petra resonated heavily with the idea that English class is specifically for the promotion of abstract thought. She commented that—in the “only good English class” she ever had—a teacher had asked her to compare and contrast a static image with a song. Petra remarked that she had never thought about the ways that sound could “look like anything” before that assignment, and that she had colors for all types of sounds now. One comment led to another and soon enough I realized that what Petra was missing was a connection to something outside of history or literature, and that there existed a directly relevant one staring her in the face. She ended our conversation with the new understanding that “archetypes” aren’t something exclusive to mythology or English and that the concept was applicable to many other things than just this one particular assignment. By the end of the day Petra had finished her paragraph and had even begun to sort her classmates into different archetypal categories. When we moved onto a new unit, Petra wasted no time in finding one aspect—this time the definition of a hero—to stretch outside the walls of the classroom. She had found her place within the curriculum of an English class, and she had a newfound sense of purpose in fostering her abstract thinking skills.

Petra’s anecdote serves to illustrate the importance of these shared definitions, goals, and our current failures to thoroughly position students in the proper mindset to view ELA materials. Every student is different and views classes through the lens of their own terministic screen. We, as teachers, must understand that these terministic screens exist and actively work to mold them into a more holistic image of English class, tuning our classrooms to be looking for specific pieces of content that our students can apply to help them achieve their own educational, linguistic, verbal, and communicative goals.

Of all the contributions Yiddish sociolinguist Max Weinreich made to the study of language and its social implications, perhaps his most well known is this quote:

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

No one really knows if Weinreich actually said the quotation in question or if it was one of his students at the time. But the quote has gone down in the colossus of sociolinguistic knowledge as being one of the simplest and yet most prescient explanations of the false sense of legitimacy certain dialects are offered based on the power of the people utilizing them. We all speak in one dialect or another, but a “language” has legitimacy conferred through power, normally political. Take, for example, Norwegian and Danish. Aside from some phonological differences, the languages are as mutually intelligible as a Pacific Northwest English dialect and a Southern English dialect.

So why are they considered two different languages and not two dialects of the same language when the two use nearly identical vocabularies? At the risk of oversimplifying a deep well of research and scholarly discussion: it comes down to borders and political power. Norway was held under the rule of Denmark for hundreds of years, and nationalistic impulses in the 19th century created a linguistic schism that was exacerbated by political tensions. Language is an intrinsically communal experience, and communal experiences can be quickly and easily swept up in state pride.

In this same vein, the presence of American Academic English—more specifically white, upper-class, American Academic English—in our public educational system has never been more militantly felt. Yes, this is a white power construct. Who and what else other than white neoliberals and conservatives made this prescriptive grammatical form the “proper” form of English, one that must be sought after with reckless abandon? Who decided that dialects of English spoken by predominantly black or hispanic communities were intrinsically inferior? How did we move far enough away from teaching content applicable to all of our students and their lives to make many of them engage with a form of English that does not pertain to them or their communities?

While the answers to many of these questions can be traced back through years of policy decisions, one does not need a thorough understanding of the history of our public education system to understand how deeply we are failing to support our students. Even if all of the students in a given English classroom have a white-knuckle grip on the ins and outs of Academic English grammar, they will still graduate and move on with their lives imbued with the cultural reflex to see this specific form of English as the ultimate expression of the language and not merely one dialectical node in the vibrant web of linguistic expression offered to humans. English teachers have a critical role to play in the fight against these imbued cultural reflexes, and it begins with recognizing the primacy of nonstandard dialects in the class, allowing students to participate in dialogue and writing-based classroom activities in these aforementioned dialects and registers, and providing opportunities for student debriefs about how multiple dialects of English can be used together to achieve rhetorical prowess.

A successful example of this comes from Sarah Beck.

In her 2009 article “Individual Goals and Academic Literacy: Integrating Authenticity and Explicitness,” Beck describes a case study with one particular black student—Sheila—who attended a school within a district grappling with “standards-based reform and the accompanying pressure surrounding high stakes testing” (Beck, 261).

The paper contains interviews with Sheila as well as documenting the activities and tasks she was being given in her classes, showing both her resistance toward recognizing Academic English—the so-called “standard English (SE)”—as a requirement for a high quality piece of writing and distinct moments (and the lack thereof) in which her own pursuit of knowledge intersected with teacher action. Beck writes that “finding a way to integrate authentic learning experiences and explicit instruction is essential if teachers are to adapt to the current policy environment”—the policy environment in question being one in which English teachers are required to teach SE as the be-all, end-all of English education—“while at the same time acknowledging the rights of students to determine their own goals in literacy learning” (Beck, 261). Perhaps the moment most illustrative of this is when Sheila is handed back an essay she turned in, complete with copious grammatical and lexical errors. Sheila is observed to understand the grammatical rules and how to fix her writing, given that, as Beck writes, “she recognized [the errors] when given an opportunity to review her writing [... but] she didn’t want to [correct the errors] because she didn’t feel conventional syntax, punctuation, or orthography was important to successful academic writing. In our final interview, she removed the item ‘no grammatical mistakes or spelling mistakes’ from her list of [academic] criteria, stating, ‘that don’t make a good essay, just because you don’t have spelling mistakes—just because you have spelling mistakes, that doesn’t mean it’s not good” (Beck, 275).

Sheila’s active resistance toward seeing SE as a legitimate construct is rooted in a comprehensive understanding of the goals of language and communication. As humans, we all use different dialects at different opportunities to achieve different goals—these are called registers, and are the reason teenagers can shout expletives down a microphone in a competitive first-person shooter game and, five minutes later, carry a thoughtful and respectful conversation with an older relative on the phone. We all have intrinsic social knowledge about what language is appropriate in which setting. But, while other students would be comfortable merely wading through the eccentricities of Academic English and taking its rhetorical status in our institutions as an immutable fact, Sheila is actively asking critical questions about why that status has been conferred, pushing back on the status quo and forcing others to accept her dialect of English as no less legitimate than any other.

Sheila’s example may be true for one student in one particular location and mindset. However, in support of these ideas, Amanda Godley and Allison Escher wrote “Bidialectal African American Adolescents’ Beliefs About Spoken Language Expectations in English Classrooms” in 2012, surveying an entire English class at a high school with a 99% black student body. In this classroom, the teacher, Ms. Lang, was engaging students in a debate about if so-called “informal language” (e.g. predominantly black dialects of English like African American English [AAE]) should be allowed to be used in ELA classrooms or if SE should only be used. There was quite a range of answers from those participating in the study:

45% of students argued for only using AAE in the classroom, 35% argued for utilizing both AAE and SE interchangeably, and 20% argued for only using SE in the classroom (Godley & Escher, 707).

Many of the 45% of students who advocated for using only AAE cited similar arguments to Sheila, such as a “lack of purpose to asking students to speak SE in ELA classes when AAE is the preferred language variety among students” and an expression of “peer-group identity” that students are “willing to defend” (707). The students who argued for utilizing both AAE and SE at different times thought that the teacher should make “distinct expectations [known] for spoken dialects and registers during different activities. [One student] wrote ‘I think sometimes it is appropriate to use slang in class—group project, having a free day, or writing about things’” (707), showing an understanding of authority and the different powers attributed to certain registers in different situations.

Most interestingly, though, are the 20% of students who advocated for only using SE in their ELA classrooms. Many of the students who took this position cited points similar to two of Collin’s economic aims of English class—in this case “describing their English class as a place to learn SE for future academic or professional endeavors. [One student] described this view: ‘I think SE should be spoken in English class because it will teach you how to talk when you go out into the world instead of talking in slang all the time.’” The paper goes on to say that “[this student] and the other students [in this 20% group] seemed aware of the isolation of their communities and of the different language expectations outside of their communities. However, these students also seemed to equate the ‘real world’ with dominant culture and mainstream society” (708). In the case of these students, the reflex to Other their own community’s dialect through a contrast in representation already seemed to have been culturally ingrained. Peering deeper, though, the researchers discovered a shocking yet illuminating truth: there existed a “statistically significant relationship between students with high academic achievement (semester grade of 85% or greater) [...]. In other words, students who received a semester grade of B or better were more likely to believe that students should only speak SE in their English classes” (708). This revelation was critical: students who already had the knowledge to succeed within the prescriptive grammar of the dominant culture were far more likely to put stock in the idea of one singular, dominant form of linguistic expression than their comparably struggling peers.

Either way, there is agreement amongst scholars on one point: no dialect is in any way inferior to any other.

“From a strictly linguistic perspective,” writes Brown et. al. in 2015’s “Impact of Dialect Use on a Basic Component of Learning to Read,” there is absolutely no reason AAE should be thought of as inferior to SE. “AAE is unremarkable: it exemplifies very general processes by which language variation creates identifiable dialects of spoken languages. Which dialect functions as the ‘standard’ is not a linguistic issue but rather is determined by demographic, economic, and cultural considerations” (3). In this paper, Brown et. al. describe a study of 22 black children and two computer simulations, examining how the act of decoding languages and sound—a crucial stage in the process of learning how to read at a young age—can be made exceedingly difficult in children who are expected to speak in a different manner and with a different pronunciation depending on if they are in their homes or their educational environments. 

After asking the children to speak words on a screen and repeat sentences which emphasized both contrasting and identical pronunciations between AAE and SE, the study found that the “achievement gap”—the discrepancy on national evaluations between the grade-level and student achievement between white and minority students—may be attributed to task overcomplexity. Having to decode two separate dialects of English speech while learning how to read and speak is an inherently more complex task to negotiate. The computer simulations backed up these claims, showing that “the existence of two pronunciations for a word creates additional complexity both with respect to spoken language (learning different pronunciations of a contrastive word [...]) and in learning the relations between spelling and phonology” (Brown et. al, 12). While the study emphasizes that they had a specific focus on decoding and that having to negotiate two separate dialects does not “predict outcomes for individuals” (12), the fact remains that layering complexities atop already complicated tasks early in a bidialectal student’s educational career does the student a great disservice. Even though one task is significantly more difficult for one student because of their cultural background not matching the dominant culture’s, students are “evaluated against the same achievement milestones. Given these differences in task complexity, an ‘achievement gap’ often ensues, placing children at risk for educational failure” (13).

The instinct to overcorrect a young student’s grammar or pronunciation must be checked alongside a deeper knowledge of the dialectal variance in one’s community.

Another example of this phenomenon in action comes from Jeff Siegel’s 1999 article “Creoles and Minority Dialects in Education.” In it, Siegel outlines some challenges facing the discussion of dialectal supremacy in the classroom, settling on four main obstacles:

“(1) negative attitudes and ignorance of teachers;

(2) negative attitudes and self image of the students themselves because of denigration of their speech and culture;

(3) repression of self-expression because of the need to use an unfamiliar form of language; and

(4) difficulty in acquiring literacy in a second language or dialect.” (Seigel, 509 - 510)

Seigel references many different pieces of research into these nonstandard dialects into his article—for instance: a 1986 study showing that British teachers had negative biases toward immigrants from the Caribbean directly because of their dialect, a 1993 study in which children speaking Jamaican Creole in New York City were often placed in special education classes, and a 1968 UNESCO study showing that “children’s cognitive development is repressed if they are not allowed to use their own language to think about things and express themselves” (510)—in the service of bringing this deeply embedded problem to light.

Last year, I was talking with a student named Arthur over Zoom.

He was having some difficulty writing his topic sentences for an essay he was planning. We went back and forth for a while, with me asking questions about the book and what he was thinking and him responding with fairly well thought-out arguments about his positions. I pointed out the fact that he had essentially written all of his topic sentences just through talking about his arguments with me, highlighting the sections of casual notes he had taken down on our shared Google Doc. 

“Not really,” he said. “The words aren’t good.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They’re not fancy.”

The cultural structures of some dialects being more legitimate forms of communication than others needs to be removed with surgical precision. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch, in her seminal book Because Internet, outlines this problem in simple terms. “When we think about writing,” she writes, “we think about books and newspapers, magazines and academic articles, and the school essays in which we tried (and mostly failed) to emulate them. [...] We learned to write with a paralyzing fear of red ink and were taught to worry about form before we even got to consider what we wanted to say, as if good writing were a thing of mechanistic rule-picking rather than of grace and verve” (McCulloch, 3). Because of this over-emphasis on the content of an essay being dictated by form and dialectic identity in our most formative of writing classes, students are being taught that casual writing is not a true form of writing, and that true writing must pass through a gauntlet of tears and knowledge that exists outside of the immediately accessible reach of students. Arthur was able to articulate his thoughts on a complex text easily and accurately and even wrote down his biggest claims in a casual form of English, but was unable to see the work he did as a completion of the assignment—the “writing” hadn’t yet happened. And yet there it was, on the page, for all to see. 

There are ways we can redirect students to the vast quantities of writing they already achieve success in their lives with. The blossoming of social media was truly a social revolution for much of human social connectivity, and—as such—it has enraptured our youth. Text-based forms of communication are the primary conduit of information, and students are both reading and writing out copious amounts of information on a near-daily basis. From Facebook posts to Tweets, from Instagram infographics to WhatsApp groups: teens are writing, and they are writing well. So well, in fact, that teens have invented their own dialects based on the physical realities of phone-based communication and the very corners of the internet in which they inhabit. For much of the rest of her book, McCulloch outlines the myriad ways technology has shaped both the spoken and written dialects of teenagers, including syntax rules governing which emojis go where in a message, different established text-based registers of communication, when and why the “full stop” of a period is often taken as passive-aggressive, and many more data-driven examples of the ways teenagers are inventing their own codes governing language. These revelations alone give teachers an entire toolbox of methods to engage students in English classes—pointing out separate text-based registers and rhetorical purposes they are used for, quarantining learning about Academic English grammar behind knowledge of its social power and how it achieved it, and engaging students directly with the written forms of communication they are most comfortable with before asking them to make their content match some prescriptive, ideal form. With Arthur, I was able to ask him to write the rest of his essay as if a friend had messaged him saying that his arguments were completely incorrect. His output and engagement improved, and while the content of his essay began as a somewhat crass diatribe, he was able to refine the language into something academically rigorous once he was liberated from the overcomplexity of form.

Androula Yiakoumetti’s 2007 article “Choice of classroom language in bidialectal communities: to include or exclude the dialect?” outlines an intervention-based study in certain Greek-Cypriot primary schools that taught bidialectal students.

Yiakoumetti argues that a bidialectal education is actually beneficial for student learning, especially when utilized in contrast to a primary dialect later in a student’s educational career.

“Prior to any intervention,” Yiakoumetti writes, “the choice to exclude the [nonstandard] dialect from the classroom in line with current educational policy in Cyprus has resulted in ‘negative transfer’ of dialectal features to learners’ production of the standard. [...] The study also revealed that the choice to include the [nonstandard] dialect in the classroom alongside the standard variety does not result in dialectal interference. On the contrary, dialectal interference is reduced and the two codes are better separated” (62). While the features and social considerations of Greek/Cypriot dialects may not perfectly align with the social implications of AAE/SE (the study also found that the location of a student resulted in a statistically significant change in the data), the research is clear that honoring and including the community dialect of the students in our classrooms in direct contrast to SE is a critical step in teaching better categorization of language concepts and features. If the goal of English classes is to promote abstract thinking and content complexity, we as teachers must promote a general critical literacy regarding registers and dialects instead of focusing on forcing one dialect down in favor of promoting the legitimacy of another. 

In regards to critical literacy and self-expression, Nadia Behizadeh’s 2014 article entitled “Mitigating the Dangers of a Single Story: Creating Large-Scale Writing Assessments Aligned with Sociocultural Theory,” named in direct reference and response to Chimamanda Adichie’s 2009 speech “The Danger of a Single Story.” The “single story” is a sociocultural idea coined by Adichie that points out the dangers in cultural outsiders assuming they know everything there is to know about a certain culture after reading or hearing one account from one member of that culture. In Behizadeh’s article, she connects this idea of the “single story” to one-time, standardized writing assessments that are ostensibly meant to gauge a student’s writing ability. These standardized writing assessments, just like the stereotyping of the “single story,” are “incomplete. They make one story the only story” (Adichie). In these standardized assessments, the only dialect of English that is honored is SE, meaning that the assessment fundamentally cannot appreciate the nuances of a student’s writing ability because of its lack of recognition of nonstandard dialects and registers. “Overall,” Behizadeh writes, “two related main dangers of the single story of direct writing assessment exist: This practice has negative effects on instruction and negative effects on students” (126). Behizadeh notes that, similar to Burke’s idea of the terministic screen, writing is an act of adopting a very specific set of sociocultural practices that fundamentally rests on who the author is and what language and words they grew up with.

“What is untenable,” she writes, “is to continue the cycle of inauthentic, standardized tests driving instruction, and then allow the resulting poor instruction to contribute to low test scores and detrimental labels for particular groups of students” (Behizadeh, 133).

To combat this, Behizadeh suggests using the assessment strategy of the “sociocultural portfolio,” an assignment that asks students to write multiple different writing samples in different dialects with the student choosing which dialects to use in which writing scenarios. Then, the students critically reflect on their choices of dialect and what their rhetorical goals were for their decision, ultimately allowing the students to achieve a greater understanding of the power of register and the specific power innate to their own community’s dialect. The assessment system is “designed to capture the multi-voiced, dynamic nature of writing, including some of the context that enriches writing and makes it meaningful” (Behizadeh, 134). 

As a companion to this idea of assessing students through a method that removes weight from knowledge of SE, John White’s 2011 article “De-centering English: Highlighting the Dynamic Nature of the English Language to Promote the Teaching of Code Switching” is fundamentally concerned with erasing preconceptions of what language is “proper” or “correct” in an academic scenario. Through observations of his own high school English classroom and their activities in relation to language and dialect, White puts forth a series of activity-based pedagogical recommendations to achieving student excellence and self-reflection in the area of “code-switching.”

In one scenario, White takes on a strictly authoritarian role as his students read Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales in their correct Old English or Middle English pronunciations, “frequently stop[ping] their reading to correct their pronunciations and emphasize their English language ‘deficits,’” forcing the students to realize that English is an ever-changing collection of features and their stringent view of SE as the most legitimate is unfounded (White, 46). In another activity, White has his students intralingually translate a Tupac Shakur rap song from AAE into SE, taking every single line from the verse and turning it into a form that would fit into the lexicon of an essay. “Though each passage—the original and its translation—says the same thing (each has the same literal message), the original, non-Standard English passage invariably holds far more emotional and rhetorical power regardless of audience.” Students are left describing the translated version as “the language [the professor] would use,” “white,” and “like antiseptic, boring” (47). White goes on to target pop culture icons for their disregard of grammatical rules, showing how Star Trek’s “to boldly go” is more monumental-feeling than the grammatically correct “to go boldly,” and even asks his students to decipher a passage from Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought that “rates a 10.6 grade level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability measurement,” yet “ironically, interpreting this passage proves exceptionally difficult for virtually all [his] students” (48).

These activities are meant to dissuade students from thinking that SE is a simply more understandable form of English than other forms, a prevailing attitude among old-guard English educators. One student responded that “it gives [him] a headache just trying to figure it out… it’s like the author is trying to make the concept impossible to understand by the way he has written it.” White comments that “this student had the right idea; philosophers do sometimes use obtuse language to get readers to wrestle both with the text and the ideas inherent in them. They know that uses of language have an effect on the meaning one takes from the text” (48).

In my one-to-one work with students this year, I have had to conduct the “prescriptive versus descriptive views of grammar” conversation quite a few times.

Each time, it produces measurable results. The student seems to understand more of what is being asked of them and has more vocabulary words to describe the areas they need to focus on improving within. The student understands that there is more than one specific knowledge of English, and that all are valid and welcomed in their own interpretive contexts. The student knows that I am not here to scold them for their small mistakes and oversights but to guide them in honing their skills as a thinker and communicator. The student knows that everything they have to say and write is welcome. 

In all of White’s activities, Behizadeh’s assessment systems, Yiakoumetti’s observations on the presence of nonstandard dialects in the classroom, McCulloch’s recognition of the disconnect between the writing abilities of teens inside and outside the classroom, and the myriad other ways Beck, Godley & Escher, Collin, Brown et. al, and Seigel have focused on the role of the classroom and the students therein, the de-centering of SE’s institutional primacy is shown to be an important part in teaching students how to use the dialects they have at their disposal and the rhetorical power inherent in each. Emphasizing this reality alongside a redefinition of what English class is truly built for unlocks a new level of discussion, understanding, and common purpose within the classroom. Imagine a place where students are taught the power intrinsic to the words they have used since birth. A place where polysemy and linguistic forms can be explored in multiple dialects as a way to broaden linguistic knowledge. A place where intralingual translations between nonstandard dialects and SE are a routine procedure to gauge student expression and thinking. A place where assessment systems are altered to take into account the whole student, not merely the small window current standardized writing assessments offer into student ability. 

Above all else, our goal as teachers is to prepare students to be citizens of the world in which they live.

This demands meeting them on their linguistic playing field before introducing linguistic overcomplexity and redefining the concept of the English classroom to better address student needs, wishes, desires, and visions of their own growth.

— Gabriel Stenson Pehrson, 2021

Works Cited*

Beck, Sarah W. (2009). Individual Goals and Academic Literacy: Integrating Authenticity and Explicitness. English Education,41(3), 259-280.

Behizadeh, Nadia. (2014). Mitigating the Dangers of a Single Story: Creating Large-Scale Writing Assessments Aligned With Sociocultural Theory. Educational Researcher, 43(3), 125-136.

Brown, Megan C, Sibley, Daragh E, Washington, Julie A, Rogers, Timothy T, Edwards, Jan R, MacDonald, Maryellen C, & Seidenberg, Mark S. (2015). Impact of dialect use on a basic component of learning to read. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 196.

Collin, Ross. (2017). Debating ELA's Economic Mission. English Journal, 106(5), 12-17.

Godley, Amanda & Escher, Allison. (2012). Bidialectal African American Adolescents' Beliefs About Spoken Language Expectations in English Classrooms. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 55(8), 704-713.

McCulloch, Gretchen. (2019). Because Internet - Understanding the New Rules of Language. Riverhead Books, 2019. 

Siegel, Jeff. (1999). Creoles and Minority Dialects in Education: An Overview. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 20(6), 508-531.

White, John W. (2011). De-centering English: Highlighting the Dynamic Nature of the English Language to Promote the Teaching of Code-Switching. English Journal, 100(4), 44-49.

Yiakoumetti, Androula. (2007). Choice of Classroom Language in Bidialectal Communities: To Include or to Exclude the Dialect? Cambridge Journal of Education, 20(1), 51-66.

* Trust me—I can do hanging indents, but SquareSpace gets angry when I try.