PEDAGOGICAL DISCUSSION: ANTI-DISCRIMINATORY EDUCATION IN MULTILINGUAL SCHOOLS Responding to Accent Discrimination and Linguistic Privilege
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P116-C6
2025-10-01
307
PEDAGOGICAL DISCUSSION: ANTI-DISCRIMINATORY EDUCATION IN MULTILINGUAL SCHOOLS
Responding to Accent Discrimination and Linguistic Privilege
As discussed in the Commentary, there are several ways accent discrimination can disadvantage ESOL students making classroom presentations in multilingual schools. First, ESOL students who speak with accents that are different from the Standard English accent most valued at school lack credibility and an affirming audience of believing listeners. As revealed in Timothy Chiu's play, this lack of credibility is sometimes communicated to ESOL presenters through gestures. Such gestures increase the presenters' nervousness, which in turn, diminishes their performance and the mark they get for their performance. Second, teachers who assess ESOL students' presentations make their own subjective evaluations about the way their students speak. These evaluations may be positive, neutral, or negative. A negative social evaluation of a particular accent can lead to a rejection of the communicative burden on the part of the teacher, which in turn will lead to the teacher not understanding what the student is trying to say and a lower presentation mark.
There are a number of ways that teachers can challenge the impact of accent discrimination in their classrooms. English teacher Greg Dunn has given his ESOL students the opportunity to give their presentations in front of a smaller, self-selected group of students, rather than the whole class. This smaller audience provided the ESOL presenters with a group of believing listeners and avoided the possibility of them having to speak in the face of distracting and disturbing gestures. English teacher Leonard Robertson has given his students the opportunity to submit a videotape of their oral presentation in addition to giving their presentation in front of the class. In the event that a student becomes extremely nervous and gives a disappointing performance in front of other students, the videotape of a more polished performance raises the student's presentation mark.
In my own teacher education classroom, my students and I negotiate classroom rules for talking about issues of discrimination in schooling. One of the rules is Disagreement is a part of life. We understand that there are times when we will disagree, but we will not intentionally humiliate, intimidate, or embarrass each other. If we unintentionally do so, we will apologize. Nonverbal gestures also communicate messages that can humiliate, intimidate, or embarrass people.
This commitment to monitoring the way we respond (both verbally and nonverbally) to what others are saying helps my students and me to productively dialogue across differences of political and educational opinion. Perhaps the inclusion of a similar rule, with reference to audience participation during student presentations, might help teachers and students challenge accent discrimination in their own classrooms. Such a rule is probably most effective when students are also asked to think about the kinds of subjective evaluations they make about different accents. The first activity to follow entitled "Thinking about accent and race," is intended to promote such thinking. This activity may also be useful to teachers who want to think about their own subjective evaluations regarding the way their students speak. As was discussed in Activity 1, "Unearthing and Deconstructing Stereotypes Around Varieties of English," we have all learned to discriminate against other people on the basis of the way they speak. Educating ourselves to be able to discern between real communicative difficulties and those stemming not from language, but from stereotype and bias, is essential for teachers who want to challenge linguistic inequities in their classrooms.
As mentioned earlier, many of the students at Northside who were linguistically privileged because they spoke with a Standard Canadian-English accent were also advantaged because they had already accumulated the cultural capital needed to give an effective school presentation in English. Providing ESOL students with some explicit instruction around the norms associated with giving a classroom presentation is another way of responding to the issue of linguistic privilege in multilingual schools. To illustrate with an example from our own work at Northside, in the first year of the project, assistant Judith Ngan gave a "demonstration speech" in one of the ESOL Drama classes at Northside. The purposes or learning outcomes of the activity were to (1) help students become aware of the components of a good speech; (2) help students become more knowledgeable about how to give an oral presentation; and (3) reinforce the need for organization. Judith's demonstration speech was about how to use one sheet of paper to make an eight-page booklet. As Judith spoke, she followed her own directions and turned a sheet of paper into an eight-page booklet. After the demonstration speech, Judith gave students a brief lecture on how to prepare and give an oral presentation. Modeling some of what she was suggesting to the students, she prepared an outline of her lecture and put it on a transparency so that students could easily follow her presentation. Judith's demonstration speech, the outline, and the lecture notes themselves are all included in Appendix C. As can be seen from Judith's work, the cultural, linguistic, and paralinguistic knowledge needed to give an effective presentation is quite complex. Providing ESOL students with access to this capital takes time. One ESOL teacher who Judith spoke to told her that it took her an entire semester to have the students complete the process of practicing how to make a presentation, that is to say, from choosing a topic, to handing in the speech, to composing an outline, to presenting the speech. Clearly, Judith's demonstration and lecture was only the first of many other activities that needed to take place to provide students with the kind of instruction and practice they needed to access the linguistic and cultural capital associated with giving an oral presentation.
Of all the advice contained in Judith's lecture, perhaps the most valuable pieces were "Watch how other people do it," and "Practice as much as you can" (see Appendix C). Sociolinguist James Gee writes that students develop school discourses, such as the discourse of making classroom presentations, through "apprenticeship."1 He believes that discourses are acquired in natural settings rather than learned through overt teaching. Knowing "about" the language (of classroom presentations) does not mean knowing how to "do" the language. If mastery of a discourse comes through acquisition, not learning, as Gee believes, teachers wanting to assist their students in accessing the capital associated with giving classroom presentations need to create the conditions for such acquisition as well as provide explicit instruction. Returning to Judith Ngan's lecture and Timothy Chiu's play, No Pain, No Gain, for an illustration, we can see it is possible to teach students to begin a presentation with "Good morning," or "Good afternoon," as Judith did in her lecture (see Appendix C). However, Timothy's knowledge that the greeting should be said brightly and with much enthusiasm ("Good afternoon, fellow students!"), comes from having heard other students greet their audiences in such a way. In fact, when the play was presented to participants in the playwriting workshop, the phrase, "Good afternoon," received a big laugh because it sounded just like the "Good morning" greeting Northside's student council president uttered every day before making her announcements over the intercom.
Given the complexity of the discourse of classroom presentations that needs to be acquired by students, teachers who want to respond to the inequities of linguistic privilege in their classrooms might want to reconsider the role classroom presentations play in their curriculum or the way they assess their students' performances. Teachers can replace or supplement classroom presentations with other kinds of oral activities that are more familiar to their ESOL students. They can also lower the stakes associated with the performance of any one presentation by assessing the entire process of making a presentation: the choice of a topic, the preparation of a speech, the composition of an outline, the creation of visual aids, and the rehearsal of the speech as well as the final presentation of the speech.
1 In talking about developing school "discourse" rather than school "language," or discourse acquisition rather than language acquisition, Gee (1996) is putting forth the idea that our knowledge of how to use language at school is more than a knowledge of words and how to combine them to form grammatical sentences. It is knowledge of ways of being in the world of school. This knowledge includes "words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions and clothes" (p. 127).
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