The Educational System

Education: viewed as the key to success

• built on the cornerstone of literacy
• mandatory
• create an informed electorate which will perpetuate the values of the nation-state
• Primary education's goal: acquisition of literacy with the adoption of spoken and written SAE

Role of Teacher:

• authority figure and role model
• teacher's ideology has a huge impact on students
• may inadvertently perpetuate inequality
• see student errors as laziness, carelessness, incompetence (rather than nonstandard competence)

Focus: 

1. Students who speak nonstandard english and how successfully they cope
2. language spoken by teachers

Even though policies recognize the legitimacy of nonstandard forms and children's right to use them, this is often not translated into educational practice.

Arguments:

• appropriacy
• children are potentially productive members of literacy communities rather than language communities where the primary focus is on testing and teaching written language
• "communicative competence" child learns to adjust their speech and writing to the appropriate context (public context SAE (WIDER COMMUNICATION),  home langauge for home (NARROW, LIMITED, PROVINCIAL))
• problem may arise when we do not question what is appropriate
• ideologies and judgements may come from both sides

Ideologies are reflective of the fear of EMOTIVE responses to certain ways of speaking, NOT MUTUAL INTELLIGIBILITY. (language focused discrimination)

STRATEGIC THEORIES IN EDUCATION FOR NON-SAE CHILDREN:

• Monodialectal Approach (verbal deficit)
• Bidialectal Approach (appropriacy)
• Dialectal Appreciation (change ideology by bringing it to light)

Impact of "Verbal Deficit Model-Bernstein):

• see children who do not speak SAE as having a deficit of language
• see children who do not possess SAE as having a deficit/different cognition 
• see that children need to be helped to overcome these handicaps

Underlying Principles of "Appropriacy"

• based on supporting economic structures
• teachers discriminate and "reject" childrens home speech
• children internalize negative evaluation of themselves
• decreases chances of thriving in educational setting
• believed by most students by the time they complete elementary education/see their accent as "hurting" them in some way and see the need to stop it
• "separate but equal"

Bidialectalism based on

• seeing other two options as surrendering to prejudice
• teacher discriminates because the EMPLOYER does
• child pays the price of discrimination by accommodating
• never suggests that the speakers of SAE stop to consider THEIR prejudice
• Does separate but equal policy make discrimination go away? (if not, or if we don't care if it does, it means that we think that the variety/people are inherently inferior).

Cleansing Native Americans of their LANGUAGE & CULTURE

• without tribal languages which functioned as a marker of social identity and provided a cohesive force in the face of so much turmoil in the USA, indigenous peoples could be more easily drawn into the fold
• Also led to dialectal Native-English, which is surrounded by its own prejudices
• Bidialectalism/Bilngualism (Also with Mexican Americans). 
• Arizona

TEACHER TALK

• Standards and the "accent test".
• no longer required but other competency tests that do the same thing
• teachers blamed for students failure or failed ideologies
• winnow out teachers with-non-SAE accents
• acceptable for a phys-ed teacher, but not an english teacher
• Parents fear not that the teacher will be incomprehensible, but that the students will pick up their substandard accents
• Graduate Students: 
• about power (questions/lack of clarity)
• about perceived ethnicity
• then about accent (comprehension)
• evaluate those with a perceived accent as a poor teacher
• students respond most positively to teachers with the greatest homophily  
• pronounced in "hostile" subject areas (math, science)
• shifts communicative burden entirely to the teacher