Engaging with Language | For Students

Accent and accentism

Everyone has an accent. Because accents are intertwined with geographical origins, race, class, and even gender, how we speak forms an intimate aspect of our identities. Accentism, discrimination based on accents, is a form of racism and classism, and it often shows up as a form of unconscious bias.

English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. Rosina Lippi-Green. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012.
Thinking with an Accent. Ed. Pooja Rangan et al. U of California Press, 2023.

Code-meshing and code-switching

Code-meshing involves using all of the linguistic varieties at one’s disposal in any written or spoken context. Such a blending among varieties can serve a range of valuable pedagogical and communicative purposes. The code-meshing speaker can exercise more agency than when code-switching, which requires shifting between language varieties to meet the demands of one’s audience.

Code Meshing and Code Switching. Jay Hardee. American University, University Library, Subject Guide, Anti-Racist Praxis.
Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching and African American Literacy. Edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young, et. al. Teachers' College Press, 2014.

Critical language awareness

Critical language awareness generates a deeper understanding of how language interacts with other social and political dynamics. It is an educational approach, and it is also something that people can develop on their own inside and outside the classroom, by paying informed attention to how people use language: What real-world effects (constraining or liberating, empowering or disempowering) do we see the language around us creating?

Critical Language Awareness. Norman Fairclough. Taylor Francis, 1992. Ebook 2013.
Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. Shawna Shapiro

Linguistic justice

Linguistic justice is an aspect of social justice. Dominant language varieties can reinforce the marginalized status of some racial, social, national and economic groups. In education, issues of linguistic justice are especially complicated: the language or dialect of instruction is often that of a dominant group. People from marginalized linguistic communities often find themselves in a double-bind: exclude themselves from educational success and social power by resisting the forms of the dominant discourse, or, adopt them and thereby lose or compromise an essential aspect of their individual and communal identity. Working for linguistic justice necessitates changing social structures to mitigate these oppressive circumstances.

Resolution on Affirming the CCCC "Students' Right to Their Own Language" - National Council of Teachers of English. The NCTE/CCCC’s 2003 reaffirmation of their 1974 position statement on students’ having the right to their own language.
Should Writers Use They Own English? Vershawn Ashanti Young, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 12.1, 2010.
Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell, Routledge, 2020.

Translanguaging

Translanguaging occurs when a multilingual person or a community of speakers is using all the languages available to them. It enables access to a wider range of linguistic resources than monolingual interactions or texts. As a result, it can offer not only a valuable pedagogical approach but a multi-dimensional way of experiencing the world.

"Translanguaging: origins and development from school to street and beyond." Gwyn Lewis, Bryn Jones & Colin Baker (2012) Educational Research and Evaluation, 18:7, 641-654.
“Translanguaging.” Sara Vogel and Ofelia Garcia, Cuny Academic Works, originally published in “Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education."

Writing Center Engaging with Language

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Accent and accentism

Code-meshing and code-switching

Critical language awareness

Linguistic justice

Translanguaging