Prescriptive language attitudes in a dual language elementary school

Mary Hudgens Henderson

doi:10.3765/plsa.v1i0.3699

Abstract

Language misconceptions are still very prevalent among the public, partially due to lack of linguistic education in schools. Language misconceptions can influence language attitudes, including the language attitudes of language-minority children towards their native language. In this study, 5th graders enrolled in a dual language program participated in an 18-lesson language awareness curriculum and completed Likert-type pre/posttest surveys and pretest/posttest interviews. Students’ prescriptive language attitude results are compared to those of an English-instruction control group that did not receive language awareness lessons. Both bilingual and monolingual students believed formal, school-based language to be superior to informal language. Despite having received language awareness instruction, students in the treatment group continued to hold prescriptivist language attitudes. Implications for future language awareness curricula are discussed.

Highlights

Since William Labov (1963) published his research on a sociallymotivated sound change on Martha’s Vineyard, linguists have come to accept language variation as a natural and positive fact of human language
Misconceptions about language remain so extensive that an entire sub-field of sociolinguistics, Perceptual Dialectology, has developed around the study of what nonlinguists think about languages and dialects (e.g., Niedzielski & Preston 1999)
The scientific study of language variation is absent in most K-12 curricula, and only a small fraction of teachers complete an introduction to linguistics course before they graduate

Summary

Introduction

Since William Labov (1963) published his research on a sociallymotivated sound change on Martha’s Vineyard, linguists have come to accept language variation as a natural and positive fact of human language. Many people view language variation, and nonstandardized language varieties in particular, negatively. Misconceptions about language remain so extensive that an entire sub-field of sociolinguistics, Perceptual Dialectology, has developed around the study of what nonlinguists think about languages and dialects (e.g., Niedzielski & Preston 1999). The scientific study of language variation is absent in most K-12 curricula, and only a small fraction of teachers complete an introduction to linguistics course before they graduate. There is a long tradition of excluding language variation from formal studies; nonstandardized varieties are either studied as examples to avoid, or used as ways to represent literary characters (Wolfram 1998: 169)

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