Week 14: Language as Access: Fiction?

My blog post this week is focused on the issue of language as access and power. 

It was clear throughout Way with Words that students, parents, as well as teachers believed that helping students acquire the standard dialect required for most school settings would amount to power, to the potential for higher paying jobs, and to a general moving up in life that many of them wanted for themselves, their children, or their students.  In talking about the parents’ hope for their children’s education, Heath writes,

“Intuitively, they [Roadville and Trackton children] and their parents feel language is power, and though they may not articulate precisely their reasons for needing to learn to read, write, and speak in the ways the school teaches, they believe that such learning has something to do with moving them up and out of Trackton and Roadville” (265).  

In other words, citizens believed that using “town language” would give students access to “town things”—better jobs, better education, easier lives.  While this belief doesn’t encourage the residents to help their children with their homework, and they see language as primarily a thing that school should teach their children, there might still be some value in this interest.  Certainly this feeling makes those in the Roadville households read books to their children to prep them for school.  Health herself seems to at least implicitly agree with their understanding of the importance of proficiency in the standard for the students’ futures—after all, to a degree, this has spurred her research, though her understanding of the issues associated with language and language change are of course much more complex.    

However, some of the more recent studies that we have read (I’m thinking specifically Pennycook here) seem to indicate that the need for acquiring a “standard dialect” in order to prosper in the future is a fallacy.  That really, if it most important to concern ourselves with the languages that our students do have, that they are already proficient in.  These scholars bring up the ethical implications of teaching students that their “home dialects” are for home (and therefore not good enough for “outside” the home).  They ask questions about what it means for students and their identity formations when they are told that the languages that they are most comfortable with are best left to creative assignments and rough drafts—not to final academic work. 

I guess I am left wondering if it is still worthwhile to speak of language as access—langauge as a mode of gaining power? If not, what motivates students to learn a standard dialect? This question remains important because most institutions and programs that we might teach in in the future are going to insist that we teach the standard and that we ask our students to use a standard dialect in their academic writing.  So how do we convince students to do this? I wonder if any of the teachers in Heath’s study, or their ethnographic methods, might be of some use here?