The White Listening Subject: Part 2
WELCOME BACK, HERE’S WHAT WE COVERED IN PART 1
This is part 2 of a series on the role of sociolinguistics in helping teachers notice some of the forces in the US education system that harm our bilingual learners. In the first blog (click here) I establish the following claims:
The Monolingual Bias promotes a narrative of rapid assimilation to mainstream US culture, by putting pressure on teachers to accelerate their MLL’s acquisition of academic English.
Experimental research cannot link deficit attitudes of teachers to an MLL’s low academic performance.
Sociolinguistic research can explore relationships between teacher attitudes and student behaviors. This kind of work is qualitative in methodology and research design.
One example of sociolinguistic research is Dr. Geneva Smitherman’s scholarship circa the 1970s. Her work illustrates how slippery language ideologies emerge in everyday class talk. See the transcript below:
By the end of that post, I proposed that a modern sociolinguistic concept could help us tease apart Ms. Jones’ beliefs about language that implored her to interrupt Bernadette’s story time and again.
The White Listening Subject
In 2015, Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores developed a helpful sociolinguistic concept that maps colorism onto teacher perceptions of how Black and Brown students speak. It’s called “The White Listening Subject” (Flores & Rosa, 2015). It’s worth noting that the field of applied linguistics has been reluctant to draw a direct line between racism and linguistic analyses, especially in education. So, what does Whiteness have to do with how teachers evaluate a student’s potential? And what’s language got to do with it?
The White Listening Subject goes something like this: teachers who overly scrutinize any dialects or versions of language that deviate from the standard is an act of linguistic profiling that leads to disastrous outcomes for BIPOC students. Again- linguistic profiling in the way we saw Ms. Jones do above leads to disastrous outcomes for marginalized students. For teachers, this may look like an aversion to calling on certain students during class discussions or simply marking their writing samples a few points lower due to “bad grammar”, “they sound like they’re texting” or “they don’t know how to spell.” Consider the outcomes on the student side, perhaps they’ll stop raising their hands (she never calls on me anyways) or they’ll misbehave to get negative attention.
In the excerpt above, Bernadette was using valid linguistic practices of her Black Speech (Baker-Bell, 2020). And notice she initiated the talk “excitedly”. But since her speech didn’t correspond to the standard, Ms. Jones interrupted her 3 times, claiming “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you”. Bernadette’s speech is stigmatized and Ms. Jones- the White Listening Subject- believes it’s her calling to sanitize Bernadette’s speech. Ms. Jones, a well meaning teacher doing the best she can with the beliefs she carries, is unaware she is listening to Black and Brown students through a warped filter.
“And it’s sociolinguistic concepts, like the White Listening Subject, that can help us see how ineffective language-focused PDs can be when they ignore teacher beliefs and attitudes. ”
The Monolingual Bias harms Black students, like Bernadette and makes the pursuit of high-quality education for these students an illusion, and it requires our courage and creativity to disrupt it.
HOW CAN SOCIOLINGUISTICS BE A CATALYST FOR CHANGE?
For starters, once you begin seeing your classroom (and curriculum, and assessments etc…) through a sociolinguistic lens, you can’t unsee the ways in which power, status and linguistic hierarchies infiltrate every inch of schooling policies and practices. Which is why I’ve developed a helpful Language Ideologies Guide so you can begin to SEE and HEAR how these beliefs emerge through school-based interactions and decision-making.
Armed with this foundational knowledge, turn to some of the greats in our field. Begin with Courtney Cazden’s research on talk in the classroom, or check out April Baker-Bell’s disruptive book about Black speech and youth literacy trajectories in Detroit high schools. Both texts offer powerful accounts of beliefs and attitudes about language that shape BIPOC student experiences in the classroom.
And finally, shift the dialogic space in your classroom culture by establishing clear norms around language use. Check out these 6 rules that one bilingual teacher established to elevate the role of Spanish in her transitional bilingual classroom:
As always, I am here to help you design your teaching practice with linguistic equity at the core. Booking a free call to celebrate victories, strategize for disruption, or simply talk about a tricky sociolinguistic concept is just one click away. Hablamos pronto…..
