Variationist Approaches to Language and Education
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VA R I AT I O N I S T A P P R O A C H E S
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VARIATIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
For over four decades, variationists have investigated the social dilemmas of language and education. This effort is based on the study of language variation, with language variation being a cover term for both synchronic and diachronic variation (variation in space and over time). Since language variation is a daily presence in the classroom, many proactive efforts of variationists have focused on how educational policies and practitioners handle language variation. Variationist sociolinguistics can be seen as both a subtype of sociolinguistics and linguistics: This work is exemplified by The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (Chambers, Trudgill, and SchillingEstes, 2002). As linguists, variationists work from the findings of cognitive science to construct explanations for language variation both in the speech community and in the mind. The extraordinary trait of variationists-cum-linguists is the inclusion of social factors as well as linguistic factors in their explanations. From their scholarship, variationists argue against two “common sense” beliefs about language: the concept of the homogenous correct form and the reification of language (e.g., English). Over recent decades, educational professionals1 have begun to transition from an assumption of language having only one correct/incorrect form to an assumption of language having multiple, linguistically legitimate forms. Second, treating a “Standard English” as a single, coherent entity is an empirical mistake (Bex and Watts, 1999; Milroy and Milroy, 1999). Standard English is defined synchronically and diachronically by shifting social standards. There are standard Englishes throughout the world, but there is no one “Standard English.” This article covers some early developments of language variation and education, some major contributions, prescriptivist views and
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Educational professionals signifies anybody employed by a school system who influences children’s education, including teachers, teachers’ aides, librarians, principals, or system-wide administrators. K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 85–98. #2008 Springer ScienceþBusiness Media LLC.
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KIRK HAZEN
variationist approaches, and a conclusion of the challenges for researching this topic. P R E L I M I N A RY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The pervasive question across both public and scholarly debate concerns what role nonstandard language should play in institutional education: Should vernacular language be encouraged, allowed, or discouraged in the classroom? Through 1960s and 1970s, sociolinguists sided with two different approaches to language variation and education. The first is the dialect rights position (see Wolfram, Adger, and Christian, 1999, p. 115), which maintains that students have a right to their own language. The second approach involves the so-called add
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