Main Takeaways
Valuing and leveraging students’ linguistic experience and competence increases inclusion
Acknowledging individual and dialect variation is an important part of celebrating linguistic diversity
Decentering Standardized American English can disrupt discriminatory narratives
Quick Wins
Changes you can easily implement to make a difference in your teaching and in the learning and experiences of your students
- Leverage students’ linguistic capital: Acknowledge individual and dialect variation and encourage students to share their own judgments and intuitions
- Consider what your example sentences communicate: Be mindful of the implicit messages in the content of the examples you use (for instance, choice of names and pronouns, gender roles, violent or otherwise disturbing content)
- Explicitly acknowledge linguistic discrimination: In emphasizing the linguistic equality of different language varieties, acknowledge the unequal status of varieties in society and discuss how this is rooted in factors like racism and classism
Bigger Impact
What more can be done to have a long-term, positive impact in your teaching and on your students’ learning and experiences in linguistics?
Suggestion #1: Use dialect variation in English to introduce syntactic variation
Approach the topic of variation in syntactic structure through examining different varieties of English to maximize accessibility and relevance.
Why?
- Especially in introductory courses, using English as a starting place to discuss linguistic variation can make the concepts more accessible to a wider range of students
- African American students are historically less likely than their white peers to have exposure to non-English languages, so starting with English variation can be more equitable (Calhoun et al. 2021)
- Discussing variation in English provides opportunities to discuss linguistic discrimination and provide students with the knowledge to confront discriminatory language ideologies
- Incorporating varieties beyond Standardized American English that students use can help them to recognize the relevance of the course material to their own linguistic experience
How?
- Create an acceptability survey assignment for students to survey people they know and use this as a way to discuss variation with opportunities for students to report their findings in class
- Incorporate lectures or problem sets focusing on features of minoritized varieties to motivate certain structural assumptions or to introduce parameters of variation (possible topics include inversion in embedded questions, negative concord, and for to infinitives)
- In addition to analyzing structural differences, be sure to explicitly challenge discriminatory views of certain varieties as being “incorrect” and discuss how these views are often the result of things like racism and classism and are not linguistically grounded
Suggestion #2: Decenter Standardized American English
Make examples from multiple English varieties and multiple other languages as central to your teaching as possible (see the Syntax II Case Study page for an example of this).
Why?
- Focusing mainly on Standardized American English can inadvertently reinforce attitudes of some languages and varieties being more “correct” or more worthy of study
- Introducing all content with Standardized American English can lead to a problematic assumption that its properties are a “norm” that other languages or minoritized varieties of English “deviate” from
- Increasing the number of languages and varieties studied, and especially incorporating languages and English varieties used by students, can help students to see the relevance to their own multilingual or multi-dialectal linguistic experience
- Exploring the structure of a wider range of languages and varieties can help students to develop a stronger understanding of natural language syntax and a greater appreciation for linguistic diversity
How?
- Incorporate lectures or problem sets using data from languages and varieties beyond Standardized American English and try to include local language(s) and languages used by students as much as possible
- Consider having students select a language to work on for the term based on data from a descriptive grammar and design scaffolded assignments that incorporate both description and analysis (see this sample list of languages and grammars)
- In more advanced classes where students have experience with syntactic analysis of unfamiliar languages, try to move away from relying on Standardized American English as the introductory or comparison point for all concepts and use understudied languages to introduce concepts or phenomena where possible
Resources
Syntax and Semantics in African American English. Green, Lisa J. and Walter Sistrunk. 2015. In Bloomquist, Jennifer, Lisa J. Green, and Sonja L. Lanehart (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of African American Language: 355-370. Oxford University Press.
African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Chapters 2 & 3 (Syntax Part 1 & 2). Green, Lisa J. 2002. Cambridge University Press.
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project – Database of variation across North American English varieties
ValPaL (The Valency Patterns Leipzig Online Database) – Useful source for finding simple somewhat parallel sentences for illustrating basic syntactic differences (focus on valency but can be useful to illustrate multiple things like word order, case, etc.)
Diverse Names Database – Database of names for use in linguistic example sentences