Torrington (and Hercula) Hiphopopotamus

Torrington: Language Ideologies Response

This week, I want to take seriously Gee's claim that "Theory and meaning are moral matters" (20)--that is, I want to consider how such an injunction serves to frame inquiries into language ideologies toward the goal of social justice. For me, the readings this week remain connected by the idea that the study of language must be an ethical endeavor, grounded in the notion that the many languaged beings we share our world with not only stand as equally "correct" in their semiotic systems, but also equally agented to communicate through them. Such an endeavor, as Matsuda and Matsuda note, is particularly complicated, as "[t]he dominance of codified varieties of English is constantly being reified by well-intended teachers and editors who try to help students and authors learn features of standardized written English" (371). In other words, in an effort to help students "compete" with native speakers on a global scale, teachers often end up reproducing deeply held beliefs that the English language is a great equalizer.

The problem with the fact that such a commonplace has not only become stuck in popular rhetorics but also in the institutional channels that comprise much of contemporary education around the globe is that this belief inherently does violence to others by failing to account for the agencies they posses--or, as Gee puts it, the discourses they posses, as    “Discourses are ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing . . . Discourses are ways of being ‘people like us.’ They are ‘ways of being in the world.’ They are ‘forms of life.’ They are socially situated identities. They are, thus, always and everywhere social products of social identities” (3). In some ways, then, failing to recognize the agency of another's language by valoring "standard" English equates to failing to recognize their personhood. Such a failure indicates, to paraphrase Bamgbose, a collective allowance of the opportunity offered by globalization "to denegrate into opportunism" (360). 

How, then, do we as teachers and scholars and researchers reclaim for both ourselves and our students the linguistically diverse resources offered us by globalization? As Matsuda and Matsuda argue, we can begin by  refusing "to overly valorize either the dominant discourses or alternative discourses. Furthermore, we as teachers and researchers need to play a greater role in challenging the undue privileging of the dominant discourses that have been institutionalized as the status quo" (373). Important to this refusal is Pennycook's "pluralization strategy," which demands that we "locate [world] . . . Englishes within a more complex vision of globalization . . . [one that] seeks to understand the role of English both critically--in terms of new forms of power, control, and destruction--and in its complexity--in terms of new forms of resistance, change, appropriation, and identity" (5). We can also, as a wise woman once told me (shout out to Sarah Hercula!) draw upon the rich linguistic resources our students carry with them in order to open up conversations about language, power, writing, and speaking. 

But I argue that it is also imperative for those of us interested in taking up Gee's call at the beginning of this post to reframe our thinking about/approach to teaching and researching language. Just as access to the English language has come to signify a level playing field (so to speak), so too has access to technology (the myth of the so-called digital divide). In her book Digital Dead End: Fighting For Social Justice in the Information Age, Virginia Eubanks talks about her work with a local YWCA. She details her efforts to provide the women of the YWCA access to technology, believing that access was the key to helping these people succeed in securing better jobs. Yet her assumptions proved to be wrong, as the majority of these women already held low-paying, long hours tech-support jobs where they accessed and used technology daily, and they also used technology extensively in their interactions with social services offices. Lack of interaction with technology was not the problem, then--the limiting and often exploitative nature of these interactions was. As such, Eubanks learned that in order to empower a group of people by giving them a tool/teaching them a particular skill, it is necessary to meet people where they're at. In terms of language use/English language instruction, I argue that the same theory applies--and I am confident that such a theory remains firmly rooted in a morality focused on social justice. 

A Bit of Fry (minus Laurie) on Language Use...