Like every other conference this year, AAAL 2021 was online, and the format that the organizers chose required that we record and upload our presentations rather than present live. The upside of this is that I now have a shareable form of my presentation:
But as this project is still very much in progress (and the ‘conclusions’ offered in the presentation are more like snapshots of how I was thinking about this a month ago), I wanted to flesh it out a bit. Hopefully this post will offer some context to anyone who watches my presentation, but if anything, I’ll let it serve as my first attempt at getting some of these ideas down in writing.
This presentation represents part of my larger dissertation project, which looks at conceptions of ‘English’ in adult ESL/ESOL in the United States. My questions are rooted in the idea that named languages (like ‘English’ or ‘Spanish’ or ‘Arabic’ or ‘Catalan’) are not natural objects, but are ideological constructions with fuzzy and contested boundaries.
I started with classroom observation, to get a better sense of how this was playing out on the ground in the contemporary moment. I spent a year and a half observing two English classes at an adult education program in New York City. There is a lot to say about what I observed there (and you can read more in the accepted version of my forthcoming Language in Society article) but in the presentation, I focused on how the curriculum and the teachers treated different linguistic features.
With this focus, I don’t mean to imply that we can definitively say which features belong to (Standard) ‘English’; as I said before, the boundaries around ‘languages’ are fuzzy and contested. Instead, I’m interested in how the treatment of linguistic features reflects larger ideas about society and personhood, to think about what kind of world our language teaching builds toward. Is it a just world? Is it a world in which our students and their communities are safe, are valued, are powerful?
So, what linguistic features get attention in these classes, and what ideologies does that reveal? As I describe in the presentation, linguistic boundaries are established in these classes through the pathologization of forms typically associated with racialized varieties of English, reinforced through teachers’ meta-linguistic/pragmatic commentary. This points to the continued relevance of race – and particularly, anti-Blackness – in the conceptions of ‘English’ that dominate these classes and others.
These classrooms are a microcosm of dominant society at large and so, it’s not surprising that they recreate the ideologies of white supremacy and settler colonialism which frame whiteness as the ideal. Many teachers are aware of this dynamic, and recognize its violence, but also view it as somewhat necessary, as part of equipping their students to ‘navigate’ systemic racism; they might recognize that this approach does little to disrupt systems of inequality, but often argue that it can allow for success (or at least survival) on the individual level.
A raciolinguistic perspective questions the value of this approach on even an individual level, since conceptions of race and language constantly shift to maintain an unequal and exploitative hierarchy. With this in mind, I became interested in how the conceptions I observed in these classes developed over time, leading to the analysis of historical English language curriculum in the latter half of my presentation. This historical lens underscores the inadequacy of an approach to language teaching that prioritizes the acquisition of ‘Standard English’ because ‘Standard English’ itself is a moving target, and is connected to a social order in which racialized people (including immigrants and other English learners) are exploited. (That isn’t to say that teaching students how to manipulate institutionally-valued forms of language can’t be part of a more liberatory approach to education, but that’s another conversation for another day.)
This analysis is still on-going, but so far, a couple of themes have emerged:
One, that institutionalized language education has operated as a tool of social control in the United States. While language learning on a smaller scale has always happened in North America, large-scale English language educational regimes emerge in moments of social and political anxiety to ‘civilize’ racialized communities. We see this in white-led education of African Americans after the Civil War, in the education of Indigenous and Native Americans during the boarding school era, and in the emergence of adult immigrant education in the early 20th century. English education is a vehicle for the suppression of ‘other’ cultures, as well as socialization into capitalism as a worker and consumer.
Two, that features of ‘nonstandard’ English have remained remarkably consistent in the popular imagination, but that they have been associated with different people and communities over time. Many of the features that were pathologized in the contemporary classrooms I observed were also treated negatively in earlier curricular texts and writings about language, but earlier texts tended to associate them with general colloquial usage rather than racialized or ‘non-native’ varieties. By the mid-20th century, however, these features were routinely identified as African American and/or Black in both academic and popular writing. Based on the dates of these different publications, including Mencken’s two works that I cited in the presentation, I suspect this might be connected to the Great Migration of African Americans out of the southern United States, but I am still looking through documents to better understand this development. Regardless of the timing and exact social context of this shift, I think it represents a larger pattern in the relationship between language and race. While entire ‘languages’ were and continue to be racialized, individual linguistic features have become increasingly racialized. It is not enough to learn ‘English’; you need to learn the ‘right English’.
I’m sure these thoughts will continue to change and develop as I learn more, but that’s where I’m at right now, and I invite you to wrestle through these ideas with me; email me or find me on twitter to share your thoughts!
Have you observed similar patterns? Where else should I be looking? What questions does this raise for you?
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