Some Stuff About Language

Coming from my fishbowl in small-town, USA, observing and teaching in such a large, diverse district has been quite the learning experience each day. One of the most noticeable things about my students are the multifarious manners in which they communicate with each other. Maybe it’s too much time in linguistics classes that has made me so sensitive to these nuances, but I love walking through the hallways every morning and listening to the murmurings occurring before the first bell rings and between classes. Listening to students communicate with each other is kind of like music; the way their voices rise and fall melodically, sentences sometimes overlapping. Now, it’s not always pleasant, as I’m not the hugest fan of shrill laughter or screaming, but I never realized how different and wonderful language really is before I came here. What is so intriguing about language, you ask? There is much to be learned about language, and our students based on how they speak and write. But, I wonder, how do we teach language/grammar to students without forcing them to abandon their own?

I remember being a kid and abhorring anything language or grammar related at school because I grew up in a household where African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was spoken, so any time we discussed the “right” and “wrong way to say or write something in class, I was constantly told the way I communicated was incorrect and needed to be fixed. For anyone who is not familiar with African American Vernacular English, it is a social dialect that is typically viewed as an inferior mode of communication because it utilizes double negation (ex: couldn’t nobody) and loss of verb inflection (ex: ‘he go’ instead of ‘he goes’) among other properties that proponents of Standard English frown upon. In Randy Bomer’s Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms, he states, “As citizens in a democracy, students need to learn ways of thinking about language variation that will allow them to respect other citizens across differences. They need to learn to think about language variation in order to understand the intelligence and value of linguistic patterns different from their own” (267). In my own experience, the language variation that I brought to class was not respected and I was forced to abandon it, and the same thing happens often to the students we serve now. I don’t know what it is about English teachers as a collective, but we have to let go of that superiority complex when it comes to language to let our students know that their language differences are valid, which in turn could encourage them to learn how to utilize registers that are appropriate in particular conditions. 

Teaching language does not have to be the same boring, predictable exercises that we suffered through as students. There is no one way to interact. Language is exciting and should be celebrated as such. There should never be a “right” or “wrong” way to use language, but there are certainly “wrong” ways to teach it; silencing students for not using Standard English, invalidating their ideas because they are not spoken or written in a manner that you expect, and making it clear that their language differences are to be abandoned when they cross your threshold are examples. I want to explore the dynamics of language with my students and help them understand that the ways in which they communicate are beautiful. If they have something they want to share with me, their peers, or the world, I never want to silence that just because they use a double negative.