Teachers’ development of a socially-stigmatized dialect

Abstract

This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by speakers of a socially-valued dialect, the language of the classroom. Second, it considers the knowledge of individual AAE features by outgroup speakers, about which little, if anything, was previously known. This research highlights the linguistic situation in one urban high school over the course of an academic year, focusing on four teachers’ proficiency in their students’ dialect as demonstrated by teacher performance on a translation task administered four times over the course of an academic year. Results indicate that features cluster into three levels of proficiency, with the highest level attained by the teacher who was most deliberate and explicit in her second dialect (D2) development. This work contributes to the small but growing canon of research on D2 development.

Keywords:

• African American English
• second dialect development
• teacher proficiency
• translation task
• implicit learning
• explicit learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following Larsen-Freeman’s (2015) argumentation, I primarily use the term ‘development’ to refer to the overall process of the teachers’ addition of a second dialect (or not) to their linguistic repertoires in an attempt to avoid the terminological and conceptual controversies and pitfalls associated with using the term ‘acquisition’ to describe what teachers are and are not doing with a language variety that is not one with which they were raised. Following other researchers’ conventions, I also employ terms such as ‘learning’, ‘knowledge’, ‘proficiency’, ‘understanding’, ‘familiarity’ and ‘ability’ in this paper.

2 This study is situated in a state in which teacher training programs for general education (i.e. not bilingual, ELL or foreign language) teachers do not require coursework in linguistics. As the teachers in this study work in a non-public institution, they need not be certified by the state anyway; in fact, only one of these teachers is state certified.

3 The distinction between ‘second dialect acquisition’ and ‘second dialect proficiency’ may be understood as the process of learning a dialect (SDA) as opposed to a demonstration of dialect proficiency at a given moment in time under specific conditions (SDP). Siegel focuses on SDA, while this study considers SDP. Of course, no study can truly measure linguistic competence, so performance in a variety of contexts may be the best way to gauge proficiency.

4 See also Van Geert and Fischer (2009) for a discussion of ‘development’.

5 While Hulstijn (2003) makes a distinction between ‘implicit’ (the term preferred by many SLA scholars) and ‘incidental’ learning, for the purpose of this paper they will both be used to describe unintentional development of language in opposition to ‘explicit’ or ‘deliberate’ development.

6 ‘St. Nicholas of Myra’ is a pseudonym for the school.

7 See Green (2010) for more extensive discussion.