Linguistics in the Classroom: An Ethnographic Recording by Audra Cormack

Linguistics in the Classroom

            “Are there still dialects?” an inquisitive soul might ask.  According to Professor Kirk Hazen of West Virginia University’s Department of English, the answer is simple: “We’ve still got humans!  If you kill off all the humans…language itself would stop existing as we know it.”  In our February 29^th class meeting, we took Kirk’s answer as a resounding “yes.”  Within the walls of our Allen Hall classroom, Kirk’s guest lecture was accompanied by a discussion of all things language, including dialect identities, prescriptively correct vs. rhetorically correct perspectives, and exciting application possibilities for those very human students of ours.

Kirk has been a professor for fifteen years, is the founder and director of the West Virginia Dialect Project (WVDP), which studies language variation and change in the state, and is the author of three books and over thirty articles.  Speaking to us about his role as an English teacher, he said, “[It] has to be the weirdest of weird teaching jobs.”  It seems the nature of his English research is no less strange…and wonderful.

LANGUAGE AND WRITING

“The perception of dialect study in Appalachia is very different from the actual study of it,” he said.  To help our class understand these foundational differences, Kirk took us through the linguistic study of language variation and how it is primarily based upon language instead of writing.  While writing is a technology, “language is a biological endowment that other species don’t have,” he told us.  Going on to describe writing as a way of recording, Kirk kept up an already ongoing joke of my ethnographic recording of everything he was saying.  This humor set the atmosphere of our meeting that night and helped ease the tension of some of the very serious issues we would later discuss.

PRESCRIPTIVE VS. RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVES

According to Kirk, Professor Charles Fries of the University of Michigan wanted teachers to understand the important difference between language and writing and to stop teaching prescriptive rules as moral code.  A prescriptive perspective approach says that there are such things as “absolute corrects” in English.  This perspective is all about judging language and is done to supposedly teach students to be “morally upstanding as people.”  A rhetorical perspective, however, says, “it may be wrong or right, depending on its achievement of rhetorical purpose.”  In other words, English has too many complexities to simply filter it down into “right” and “wrong” categories, without taking context into account.  Kirk said, “I argue for a more complex understanding of language and how it works.  That doesn’t always work well for folks.”

STIGMATIZED PRONUNCIATIONS

“Language,” Kirk explained, “is one of the last parts of academia that has right and wrong morality still.”  Through a chapter from his latest book and a YouTube video of David Beckham, we discussed the occurrence of socially marked pronunciation.

Stigmatization is a strange beast, as we learned that it doesn’t exist when everyone has the same, (seemingly “different”), pronunciation.  In southern North Carolina, in Warren County, for example, /f / is pronounced in place of /th/ in “birthday.”  The pronunciation is completely unstigmatized, however, and no one knows about it because everyone shares the same pronunciation.

TEACHING METALINGUISTICS

After listening to Kirk’s opening lecture, we all began to warm up in our understanding of language and dialect, and several class members wanted advice for how to start implementing these ideas in our classrooms.  Carmen expressed some anxiety about teaching linguistics in rural communities, where students may have never before been exposed to in-depth language study.  She asked Kirk for his opinion on how best to begin introducing linguistics to these students. Kirk said that it is a very slow process, but that there are many strategies we can use to begin.  He shared the following ideas for classroom application:

            IDEAS FOR TEACHING:

·      Have students look at their own speech, at certain bits of variation:

o   For example, have them look at English inflectional suffixes, such as the “g-dropping” coronal nasal -in [ɪn] versus the velar nasal -ing [ɪŋ].

§  “Walkin’ is fun.” vs. “Walking is fun.”

§  “I was walkin’.” vs. “I was walking.”

“There is a greater preponderance to get ‘walkin’’ when the thing is verby vs. when the thing is nouny,” Kirk told us.  Gerunds, it seems, are even cooler than their grammatical title.        

·      Talk about their grandmother speaking or words she uses versus what they say or what words they use.

·      Ask them, “What are some of the vocabulary terms that are actually different throughout your community or that differ between your community and other regions?”  This approach will teach students about regionally specific lexicon. 

o   Examples could include:

§  “pop” vs. “coke” vs. “soda”

§  “firefly” vs. “lightning bug”

§  “frying pan” vs. “skillet”

·      Get them some texts from Shakespeare and before.  Find language differences.

·      Teach them about multiple negation.

o   For example:

§  “She didn’t want no candy.” 

According to Kirk, “This used to be the standard preferred genre convention to use.  For various social reasons, it became stigmatized.”  He emphatically told us (blowing our minds) that, “Multiple negation has ALWAYS been a part of English!”

·      Inform our students and ourselves about the Great Vowel Shift.  It is vital for understanding the concept of spelling.

o   Kirk explained that, in the time of Chaucer, you have words like this: “book.”  You spell a word with the vowel cluster <oo>; wouldn’t it be nice if this digraph represented the long o sound /oː/?  It did!

o   If you have a word like “meet,” wouldn’t it be nice if it represented the long a sound /eɪ/?  It did!

During the Great Vowel Shift, these long vowels moved up, and the actual pronunciation of tens of thousands of words changed.  In fact, all pronunciation changed, but spelling didn’t, and length no longer made a distinction in meaning.

Jon asked what accommodations we, as teachers, should make for our students’ dialects in writing.  Kirk said that this is a matter of teaching and training our students in genre conventions.  Audra added that the importance of this genre convention approach is that our actions become “an editing issue rather than a value judgment.”  Brandi gave us a clear example of an Appalachian college teacher who noticed that her first-generation students were spelling words in the same manner in which they pronounced them.  To address the issue, she had them make a list of the words that they commonly misspelled, how they said them, and how they thought the words would be written academically.  This allowed the students to differentiate between speech and writing. 

Audra said that, with speech, normalization is the needed approach.  If we teach our students the various genre conventions in which to use speech, we can “normalize difference, rather than stigmatize difference.”  Our students need to learn from us what is socially acceptable in various contexts instead of being fed devastating ideas that their language is socially stigmatized.  Awareness, according to Kirk, is key to our students’ success.  “ I want these students to learn more.  They should be metalinguistically aware – aware of what their own variations are,” he declared.  I would agree.  As teachers, we have the power to help build our students’ minds and confidence or to contribute to their destruction.

Along with learning teaching “dos,” we also went through a few major “don’ts.”

o   For example, we might look at an instance when the infinitive “to be,” as in: “My car needs to be washed” disappears.  With this regional construction, “needs” is directly followed by a bare passive participle: “My car needs washed.”   

§  Which is correct?  Kirk said he had a teacher from Ohio ask him, “So what do we do about this problem?”  Kirk’s answer?  “What problem?”

§  It seems we need to understand that our students’ speech patterns may be regional markers but are most certainly not criminal!

o   Having students “translate” text into different dialects of which they may be unfamiliar could also be a potential teaching pitfall.  An example of this risky activity would be when teachers direct students to rewrite a Shakespearean play in different dialects.  The resulting writing sounds like different “types” of people.  Audra said that this is a common but problematic teaching exercise because it can affect students’ perceptions of people and encourages dialect stereotyping.

DIALECTIC IDENTITY, STIGMA, AND RACISM        

Awareness of stereotypes surely leads us to consider identity.  Carmen shared a relevant personal story about her boyfriend’s dad, Sam, who “plays up” his dialect in conversation.  Raised in Nicholas County, WV, Sam traveled all over the world, even living in California for a period of time, before returning to Nicholas County.  He has clearly been exposed to a variety of dialects.  Carmen said she thinks Sam emphasizes his home dialect because “he doesn’t want to see it go away.”  Kirk did not seem surprised by this behavior, saying, “[His dialect is] part of his identity.  Performing it will be part of what he does.”

            What happens to identity, then, when people move away from their homes?  Is their dialect lost?  What about their identities?  Audra revealed an example of a student who had left her home county to complete her dissertation work but had returned home to find that she no longer “fit in,” linguistically, in either her home northern city or back in the southern region to which she had moved.  The student clearly experienced displacement.  Kirk said that the dark side of dialectic identity is that social stigmatization of the dialect usage “reminds people of who they don’t like.”  Someone’s dialect, in other words, can be used as a tool for discrimination.

            When dialect is being used to discriminate against someone, deeper issues are exposed.  Our next question from Jennifer, (after pondering what we, as teachers, do about things like code switching and curriculum changes), involved the Oakland, California school board decision to define Ebonics as the native language of their African American students.  “What was the explosive part [of this situation]?” she asked.

Both Brandi and Kirk blamed the uproar on racism.  “It gave all too many people opportunity to make overt criticism of black America as part of humor – a way to openly make fun,” he said with chagrin.  His next statement made us feel how deeply important it is to be dialectically aware – not only as teachers, but as citizens in this world.  “Dialect discrimination,” he claimed, “is the last open back door to racism or discrimination.”

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:

·      Language Log – great archive resource for language in the media

·      tysto.com/uk-us-spelling – resource for teaching spelling genre conventions

·      Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English by John Russell Rickford – highly recommended book on the Ebonics firestorm

·      Ebonics timeline:

http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/timeline/

·      An Introduction to Language by Professor Kirk Hazen

·       “Unvernacular Appalachia: An Empirical Perspective on West Virginia Dialect Variation” by Professor Kirk Hazen, Paige Butcher, and Ashley King 

·      “Variationist Approaches to Language and Education” by Professor Kirk Hazen