Dichotomies, Dialects, and Deficits

Abstract

This study bridges the dichotomies between the study of multilingualism and multidialecticism to explore the mythologies surrounding what is often called Standard English (*SE). While literacy and teacher education have made progress toward preparing teachers to work with linguistically diverse populations, such preparation is usually geared exclusively toward multilingual learners. Through this study, I argue that the field must also prepare teachers for the dialectal diversity that characterizes U.S. classrooms but is often framed through racialized deficit ideologies. To fulfill this goal, this study outlines a module on multidialecticism embedded into a course on teaching multilingual learners. Drawing on survey data, participant reflections, and classroom observations, I explore the affordances and limitations of this module, asking how teachers’ conceptualizations of linguistic diversity developed over the course of the semester. Initial findings highlight participants’ reliance on surface-level structural features, commonality arguments, and cosmetic word exchanges in conceptualizing *SE. While varying degrees of complexity and sociolinguistic analysis emerged through participants’ engagement in the module, changes were generally minor cosmetic shifts through which underlying deficit ideologies were maintained. This study brings into question the extent to which the field has made progress in problematizing the *SE myth and concludes with suggestions for disrupting these *SE mythologies in literacy and teacher education.

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