In 1975 the committee on the Conference on College Composition and Communication published a statement entitled Students Right To Their Own Language. The statement acknowledges that speech patterns and vernacular can be diverse since students themselves are diverse because they can come from all all sorts different backgrounds. Differing backgrounds can result in students having different dialects that are not Standard English, thus this statement claims that they have the right to utilize their own vernacular when writing.
While Standard English has its purpose I do think that writing courses should be more open to different dialects. I think when students are allowed to write in their natural dialect it can lead to their writing being more fluent and honest since it would no longer be restricted to remain within the rule set of Standard English. Allowing students to write in their own vernacular can improve their creative output, engagement with their own work, and can help them express their authentic selves.
I believe that other dialects have not only been underrepresented in school writing courses but also have been over represented as being beneath educational standards. A lot of these dialects that have been misrepresented as such tend to originate from lower class and P.O.C. groups. There’s there’s a common misconception that AAVE– or African American Vernacular English– is an “incorrect” or “sloppy” version of Standard English. This this misconception has often led non-users to characterize those who do use it as uneducated. Normalizing their use in educational settings would help de-stigmatize these dialects and the groups that utilized them.
Leave a Reply