Michelle Lefebvre
Have you ever thought about how you explain new grammar points to your ESL class? How about the way you give corrective feedback? I noticed something about the materials I use in my own teaching practice, and once I noticed it I started seeing it everywhere.
I want to talk about the word “we”.
This past summer I took on part-time a job as a content editor for an e-learning platform. My job was to read through all of the introductions to new grammar points and try out all of the exercises to make sure there were no errors. I noticed that every time the platform introduced something or offered feedback it used the word “we”. Things like: “We never say fastly”, or “We use the present progressive tense to talk about actions that are happening now”. It started to bother me a little. The thing is, once I noticed it, I realized I was saying the same kind of things to my own students too! That made me even more upset. Here’s why.
Who am I referring to when I say “we”? The more I thought about it, I realized that this “we” is probably referring to speakers of “standard” English. You may be thinking, “Okay, so what? Shouldn’t English teachers teach “standard” English?” The problem is that “standard” English has less to do with the language itself, but rather with who is speaking the language (Lee & Handsfiled, 2018).
Language education cannot be separated from social and political factors (Wiley & Lukes, 1996). That’s because language is a social construct and dominant groups position their language variety as the model in order to promote the idea that their language and culture are superior (Wiley & Lukes, 1996). “Standard” English is an excellent (maybe the best) example of this in our society.
Most linguists agree that what is considered “standard” English is based on the communicative norms of upper and middle class white people (Young, 2009). What’s really annoying about this is that “standard” English was completely made up in order to marginalize and oppress people. What’s more, the majority of English speakers don’t even speak this manufactured “standard” English (Lee, 2014).
So, what do you think? Could using the word “we” be reinforcing dominant or standard language ideologies? Does it imply that language learners need to learn “standard” English in order to gain access to this mythical club?
For more information on inclusive language visit: https://consciousstyleguide.com/articles/
References
Lee, A. Y., & Handsfield, L. J. (2018). Code‐meshing and writing instruction in multilingual classrooms. The Reading Teacher, 72 (2), 159-168.
Lee, M. E. (2014). Shifting to the world Englishes paradigm by way of the translingual approach: Code‐meshing as a necessary means of transforming composition pedagogy. TESOL Journal, 5 (2), 312-329.
Wiley, T. G., & Lukes, M. (1996). English‐only and standard English ideologies in the US. Tesol Quarterly, 30 (3), 511-535.
Young, V. A. (2009). “Nah, we straight”: An argument against code switching. JAC 29 (1-2), 49-76.
