Non-Standard English, Composition, and the Academic Establishment

Abstract

THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGE in the schools has traditionally been an attempt, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, at social engineering: getting a group of people to adopt an arbitrarily prescribed elite dialect. There are three basic approaches to the problem of non-standard speech: eradication, bi-dialectalism, and non-directivism. Those who would eradicate non-standard speech and writing operate under the delusion of a white man's burden of absolute cultural supremacy. Proper usage is seen as the outward sign of deep-structural grace, while nonstandard usage is regarded as evidence of physical and moral decay. As Ben Jonson put it, language must be freed from the opinion of Rudeness, and Barbarisme, wherewith it is mistaken to be diseas'd.1 The eradication approach to Black English and other non-elite dialects has so far proven to be an obvious linguistic, not to mention social, failure. The bi-dialectal, or white-man-speak-with-forked-tongue, approach has problems too. While it ostensibly encourages pride in non-standard dialects, it also generates antagonism and linguistic insecurity. It stresses the socially limited role that non-elite dialect can play in white middle class society, and implies that the use of non-standard English anywhere but in the home or on the street is utterly without redeeming social value. The non-directive approach is based on the premise that language systems always tend to be maximally efficient over their range of contexts; they respond to, rather than dictate, what needs to be said within a particular speech community. People within the speech community are inherently multidialectal.2 They can style switch, accommodating their language to the speech situations within the realm of their social experience. The only way to master a dialect (and to learn a language) is total immersion in the natural social milieu where that dialect is spoken (i.e., not in school), where social intercourse between the learner and the natives is unimpeded and relatively without stress. For example, the only