English With An Accent: Language, Ideology and
Discrimination in the United States
And Companion Website, by Rosina Lippi-Green.
Throughout the course of the semester, I have focused my
research on nonstandard dialects and multilingual students in the writing
classroom. One of the questions I keep finding unanswered is how to put the
many theories of code-switching, pluralism, or code meshing to use in the
pedagogy of the writing classroom. The answer keeps coming back to preparing
instructors to handling the growing linguistic diversity of students in the
English classrooms, which in turn leads to multiple written discourses that
need to be addressed.
Instead of focusing my efforts on building a course
curriculum for an English class, I plan on focusing my course curriculum
project on building a workshop on linguistic diversity for English instructors,
to aid them in putting theories of multilingual, pluralistic ideologies into
practice in the classroom.
At the core of my instruction, will be the 2nd edition of
the textbook English with an Accent:
Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States by Rosina
Lippi-Green by Routledge books. I used
the 1st edition (1997) in a Master’s level Sociolinguistics course
and found it particularly helpful in engaging the ideas of nonstandard dialects
in American culture and in academia; however the 1st edition text
was only broken into three main parts, discussing Linguistics, Language, and
ideology, institutionalized language ideology, and the third section which
narrowed in on Black English and Southern dialects as those that are the most
stigmatized in American culture.
The 2nd edition, which just came out in January
2012, shows significant expansion and changes to provide more in-depth coverage
of issues regarding language ideology, literacy, discriminations against
nonstandard dialects, the differences between written and spoken English, and
especially provides more real-life applications with chapters on workplace use
of language, use in the American court systems, and even several recent case
studies about the debate over teaching Ebonics in Oakland, CA public school
systems, as well as a case study on linguistic profiling.
The addition of discussion questions throughout the textbook
really moves this from a text for a graduate level seminar to a pedagogical
tool that could be used in an undergraduate classroom, even if the instructor
just wanted to create a pdf file of one chapter that relates to a discussion
his/her students are having in class about literacy, language, diversity, or
nonstandard dialects. The text also
provides exercises, such as Chapter 16 on the Case Study of Oakland, CA, and
shows a letter to the editor written by Lippi-Green in regards to AAVE and the
responses she received that argue against her advocating “talking black” (319).
These are great case studies to bring up to students in a workshop setting, an
undergraduate or graduate level course in order to get conversation moving
about linguistic diversity.
In regards to a workshop setting, it would be most
significant to review the basic linguistic knowledge in the first five
chapters: 1) The Linguistic Facts of Life, 2) Language in Motion, 3) The Myth
of Non-Accent, 4) The Standard Language Myth, and 5) Language Subordination. It
would be especially beneficial to discuss the differences between spoken and
written communication in an English studies workshop or graduate course,
especially her notion that “Written language and spoken language are historically,
structurally, and functionally fundamentally different creatures” (15). It is
also significant to cover her in-depth discussion of the changes in spoken
language over the past few centuries. Most important for a workshop on dealing
with language use in an academic setting, would be chapter 6 on “The
educational system: fixing the message in the stone” and chapter 7 “Teaching
children to discriminate.” This, in combination with a discussion and exercises
related to written versus spoken language, would help to put into motion
further a connection between theory and practice in the English writing
classroom.
As a secondary pedagogical aid, it is important to also use
the companion website, which takes students chapter by chapter through the
different available dialects that Lippi-Green discusses. These samples come
from the International Dialect of English Archive, as well as the Speech
Language Archives. It also provides students with chapter-by-chapter additional
links, blog postings, videos, discussion questions, and further references. The
ability of students to go beyond the basics of reading the text to interact
with examples, video clips, and further resources, would help workshop students
to make real life connections to the material.
A significant piece of the companion website is the
availability for instructors to fill out a form and submit it to Routledge for
a free instructor sign-in that provides additional resources and aids for
teaching each chapter. Alongside the same set of videos, blog postings,
discussion questions, and references, the instructors are provided pdf files
for each chapter that include more in-depth discussion questions and sample
answers to help guide instructors throughout the process. The website also
offers a complimentary exam copy, although if this pedagogical tool were to be
used in a classroom setting, it needs to be noted that students would either
have to purchase the text, purchase an e-book, or the instructor would need to
follow copyright regulations with only copying a certain percentage of the text
for in-class use. On a positive note, students and instructors have free access
to the information available on the companion website, whether or not they
purchase a textbook.
While I thought the first edition of this text was a great
addition to a graduate level class, the additional book chapters, and
especially the addition of the discussion sections and the companion website,
really bolsters the ability of this book to be used as a potential textbook in
any English studies classroom. A recent discussion in our Pedagogical
Instruction course was the need for more cohesiveness between undergraduate and
graduate level coursework. I believe a text such as Lippi-Green’s in an upper
level undergraduate English course would be just as effective as it would be in
the TA/instructor workshop I would like to move forward with planning.
Resources:
Lippi-Green, Rosina. English
with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination
in the United States. 2nd Ed. New
York: Routledge, 2012. Print.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. “Companion Website: English With an
Accent.” Routledge.
2012. Web. 20 Feb 2013.
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