This National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Minority Post-Doctoral Fellowship Starter Grant funds the launch of a project designed to examine effective methods of communicating issues about language variation to K-12 educators and provides infrastructural support for Anne Harper Charity Hudley in her position of Assistant Professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. The PI?s postdoctoral fellowship # 512005 assessed how listeners judged the voices of young speakers of African-American English and Southeastern American English along a range of academic and social characteristics. Listeners often judged African-American English-speaking youth as having lesser academic abilities, and their responses indicated that many educators knew very little about variation within English. These results provided the impetus for this follow-up project, which explores methods for orienting educators to the reality of language differences and linguistic intolerance. The project has three cumulative objectives. First, the PI will conduct collaborative workshops with 100 educators in four K-12 schools in Baltimore and Richmond to disseminate accurate and foundational linguistic knowledge to educators of dialectally diverse students. Second, a set of 40 educator-consultants will work jointly with the PI to develop pedagogically sound and linguistically informed strategies for addressing variation in the speech and writing of their students using methods that have been developed by linguists but that are largely not known among most educators. Strategies include best practices for promoting awareness about language variation, for teaching about the systematic nature of language variation, and for using knowledge about the systematic nature of language variation to help students acquire Standardized English. Third, the PI will collect from the 40 educator-consultants a range of quantitative and qualitative data (from pre- and post-test surveys, participant-observations, short reflection responses, and in-depth interviews) to reveal what knowledge they gained from the workshop and how it might inform their language-related teaching strategies.
Broader Impacts
The joint empirical and applied nature of this project contributes to sociolinguistic and educational theory and practice. Findings will add to a small but critical body of literature that addresses not only what educators know about language variation but also how educators process this information and envision its use in their classrooms. The series of workshop trainings will aid educators in more fully integrating knowledge of language, literacy, and culture into their classrooms, thereby helping their students meet the linguistic requirements of academic and social success. NSF funding will allow for educator-consultants to travel to four school sites in Richmond and Baltimore to ensure that educator-consultants develop targeted solutions that are specific to their school environments. This funding will ensure that educators will be able to attend and fully participate in the workshops, regardless of their financial status. The grant will also provide materials to support all workshop participants and will support the development of a workshop-specific website to ensure broader educator access to the findings of the project. Results from this project will help linguists refine and implement future workshops to similarly connect with educators on the topic of language variation. The study lays the groundwork for sociolinguists and educators to work together in a more collaborative fashion to promote the educational attainment of nonstandardized English-speaking students. As the PI teaches in an undergraduate department, the award will also support the participation of undergraduate students in every aspect of the research.
