Dialects in the Classroom
People who come from different places or have different backgrounds might pronounce their words in different ways. They might also use different words for the same thing, and they may structure their sentences differently. All of these differences in speech are linked to their dialect. Everyone speaks a dialect – even those who speak in a way most people would identify as standard. Like your fingerprint, your dialect is personal. It reflects the combination of influences on your personal identity over the course of your life. Things like your hometown, nationality, gender identity, ethnicity, education, and neighborhood may affect the way you speak. In short, your dialect tells your story. For this reason, it is essential to value all forms of speech as representations of individual identity. Moreover, studies have shown that students respond more positively to instruction when both the language of the classroom and the language of the home and/or wider community are valued and treated with dignity. Understanding differences will also help you to teach students the sound-grapheme correspondences necessary to become successful readers and to recognize where students may be misunderstanding academic writing (and why they produce the forms they do when they write their own words down).
Nonstandard dialects are often misunderstood to be failed attempts at speaking the standard. They are consequently often characterized as wrong or bad. As well briefly outline in module 2, linguists have shown that this is not the case. Dialects develop independently but in tandem, and the features selected as standard are not chosen for some objective superiority – indeed, features seen as nonstandard (and therefore wrong) in one language may be perfectly standard (and therefore correct) in another. For example, in English we consider the use of multiple negatives in a sentence like I ain’t never done that to be incorrect, but in French, the same construction (je n’ai jamais fait ça) is considered correct.