Practical language

"Myth 1: English must obey the rules of grammar" Zuidema - Linguistic Prejudice

If we're going to teach our students that their vernacular of English is "correct English," we should also teach them the importance of establishing an academic language. I agree with Zuidema's debunked myths, including one of them which evokes the question: What even is "Standard English?" Rather than trying to teach students what the district's board of education or a teacher thinks "Standard English" is, for my own class experience I would like to teach them "Academic English." Their own personal vernaculars should be shown value, though not at the expense of their academic literacy.

I would like to see my students do a project on comparing media-portrayed vernaculars and regional dialects to people they know in real life who speak that way. I'd like the results of their projects to be an understanding that the media often portrays accents to be associated with certain values or qualities in a person, but that's not necessarily true all the time. People also don't always speak the same way in every situation, and that should be something they discover in their research as well. I'd also be interested in their opinions about why certain accents were chosen for certain characters in films and critique that choice.



Even though we want our students to become aware of linguistic prejudice, I think we also need to continue teaching them an academic literacy for practical purposes. However, I wonder to what extent we can realistically teach them that their vernacular is "okay" while enforcing an academic language in essays that can erase their individual voices.