Dichotomies, Dialects, and Deficits

Abstract

This study bridges the dichotomies between the study of multilingualism and multidialecticism to explore the mythologies surrounding what is often called Standard English (*SE). While literacy and teacher education have made progress toward preparing teachers to work with linguistically diverse populations, such preparation is usually geared exclusively toward multilingual learners. Through this study, I argue that the field must also prepare teachers for the dialectal diversity that characterizes U.S. classrooms but is often framed through racialized deficit ideologies. To fulfill this goal, this study outlines a module on multidialecticism embedded into a course on teaching multilingual learners. Drawing on survey data, participant reflections, and classroom observations, I explore the affordances and limitations of this module, asking how teachers' conceptualizations of linguistic diversity developed over the course of the semester. Initial findings highlight participants' reliance on surface-level structural features, commonality arguments, and cosmetic word exchanges in conceptualizing *SE. While varying degrees of complexity and sociolinguistic analysis emerged through participants' engagement in the module, changes were generally minor cosmetic shifts through which underlying deficit ideologies were maintained. This study brings into question the extent to which the field has made progress in

“It’s Not Really My Job”: A Mixed Methods Framework for Language Ideologies, Monolingualism, and Teaching Emergent Bilingual Learners

“…I use the phrase monolingual ideologies to denote ideologies through which a certain group of language practices become idealized. In the United States, these idealizations generally map onto monolingual English usage, particularly through dialectal features associated with the White, middle class (Alim, 2004;Bacon, 2017a;Baker-Bell, 2017). The links between monolingualism and language ideologies are illustrated through Silverstein's (1996) expansion of his earlier work on language ideologies to what he called "monoglot standard" as linguistic hegemony:…”

Mentoring to transgress: practicing inspection, reciprocity and hope in teacher education

“…Creating a curriculum around the funds of knowledge, particularly those that reflect the political experiences of students such as immigrant youth, is another current example (Comber, 2015;Gallo & Link, 2015). Another form is close analysis of classroom discourse and other texts using frameworks of power resulting in teachers' and students' direct actions to make practices more equitable in and outside of classrooms (Bacon, 2017;Godley et al, 2015;Medina and Costa, 2013).…”

Mixed-heritage individuals’ encounters with raciolinguistic ideologies

“…Findings also highlight the way some MHIs are, like many Black, Latinx and other racialized minorities, pressured to learn and use 'standard English' (*SE) in order to succeed in academic and professional workspaces. Even though the existence of a distinct, agreed-upon set of conventions for 'proper' use of spoken and written English has been debunked (Bacon, 2017;Hill, 2008;Lippi-Green, 2012), the myth of *SE has been perpetuated through raciolinguistic ideologies that stigmatize racialized populations and their linguistic practices (e.g., African American English and Chicano English; Flores & Rosa, 2015).…”