It's not bad, it’s marked: exploring dialect usage in the American classroom

Let’s put an end to linguistic discrimination in the classroom.

My goal in writing these blog posts (see my previous post on the problem with ALM-ers) is to bring an applied linguistics lens to some of the cultural issues we face in modern American society, often with a focus on education. Over the years I’ve taught mostly BIPOC students with home languages that ranged from Spanish dialects to Haitian-Creole infused English to Black English. Through my work with Shondel Nero I’ve learned about dialectal pluralism and how to leverage a students’ linguistic funds of knowledge to help them grasp the course content. In the eyes of less linguistically-minded professors, my students shared stories of linguistic discrimination, and I think I know why. 

Marked language is any feature (a sound, a letter-pattern, a syntax) that deviates from the expected rules of a particular speech community or genre

Today I’d like to tackle the matter of vernacular (non-standard) dialects as a legitimate (if not beautiful and sacred) part of the American cultural experience. To achieve this goal, I’ll be discussing marked vs. unmarked language use. Like most concepts from linguistics and communication studies, this is a thing my readers will already “know” but didn’t realize had a name and associated social consequences. See, marked language is any feature (could be a sound, a letter-pattern, a syntax) that deviates from the expected rules of a particular speech community or genre. That would mean there’s also unmarked forms: sounds and phrases that are considered ‘normal’ according to the implicitly agreed upon rules for that particular group. When linguists study language use, they avoid judgements and evaluations (at least the good ones do). Utterances aren’t seen as good or bad: they’re systematic, methodical and predictable.  Teachers, on the other hand, arrive to the profession after a lifetime of exposure to particular beliefs, attitudes towards and ideas about what kinds of language sounds educated, sophisticated, and correct (h/t Lippi-Green for her book).  This is where applied linguists and teachers tend to differ: on the value-judgements of what “counts” as legitimate language use in the classroom. 

An example of marked language use from the gamer speech community should drive home the point. I am not a gamer, but my husband’s childhood friend is.  Mike knew I was getting a degree in languages and he brought me this juicy nugget he observed in a MineCraft chat room.  The language of gamer culture derives from a fascinating combination of ESL speakers who’re relying on partial understandings of English to communicate to a largely international audience. Which means that proper grammar usage is actually the marked form in this context! So Mike tells me that some Karen (or is it Ken?) was being heavy-handed, pointing out all the gamers' inadequate grammatical forms in the chat room. You can imagine how that worked out for him…

This is because in schools, standard English wins the day. Not because it’s better: because its unmarked.

Why does marked vs. unmarked language matter for the American teaching force? It’s because standard English wins the day in schools, especially as students advance through the grades all while acquiring academic forms and structures. Most teachers would admit that teaching literacy (or the entire language system made up of academic forms and structures) is the entire point of schooling! The problem is, study after study shows that language-minoritized learners tend to clam up in these spaces- with silent admonitions from their well-meaning teachers that their language use is improper or even a threat to the pursuit of literacy. This is because most teachers see BIPOC children's languages as marked, while White middle-class kids’ natural language usage represents the unmarked kind of English. 

All of this to say that any teacher reading this post can opt to view dialectal language use as marked or unmarked rather than evaluate language forms as proper/bad. This move reduces an (unintentional) judgmental gaze to allow for you and your students to engage in some truly ass-kicking contrastive analysis exercises. What would this do for your BIPOC students? At a minimum it does no harm and at maximum it invites students to explore (or even interrogate) dominant language structures and gives them the opportunity to choose whether or not to code switch across their speech communities (FWIW Obama is a master class in code switching.) Ultimately, language use is about making informed choices about how you communicate. It’s time we (teachers) do a better job presenting our students with choices about language use in the classroom.