Linguistic discrimination on campus: Ratings of and attitudes toward student writing with African-American English

Ho'Omana Nathan Andrew Horton

doi:10.3765/plsa.v2i0.4041

Abstract

Based on empirical evidence, this study identifies a contradiction between attitudes towards the use of African-American English in student writing vs. how such writing is actually rated by university English instructors. Even when instructors expressed highly positive views of the use of stigmatized varieties of English in student essays, a statistically significant difference (p=0.027) was found between their ratings of essays with and without features of African-American English. These findings indicate that university instructors, even those who are consciously aware that linguistic discrimination is problematic, are not immune to the effects of linguistic discrimination. These results highlight the importance of dialect education and awareness programs for university English instructors as well as the need for further research into the prevalence of standard language ideology and linguistic discrimination at the university level.

Highlights

When it comes to language variation, university English instructors can find themselves in a tight ideological and pedagogical spot
Johnson and VanBrackle (2012) investigated instructor treatment of linguistic variation in writing and found that anonymous raters of a state-mandated university admissions essay showed substantial linguistic discrimination against features of African-American English (AAE), rating essays with these features even more negatively than essays with Standard English errors. These findings clearly demonstrate that standard language ideology persists in academia and affects student writing
This study aims to investigate whether the presence of morphosyntactic features of African-American English in student writing affects the rating of student essays by instructors in the English department at a large public research university in the Upper South

Summary

Introduction

When it comes to language variation, university English instructors can find themselves in a tight ideological and pedagogical spot. Linguists and other social scientists have shown how this standard language ideology affects speakers of less prestigious varieties in many areas of life, from customer service positions (Eustace 2012) to speech pathology (Kroll, Mok, Keegan, Papakyritsis, & Damico 2014). Despite these consistent findings, the prevalence and effects of standard language ideology in higher education has largely been unaddressed empirically and is only recently beginning to garner attention

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