Enduring Patterns: Standard Language and Privileged Identities in the Writing Classroom

Enduring Patterns: Standard Language and Privileged Identities in the Writing Classroom by Bethany Townsend Davila A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English & Education) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Anne Ruggles Gere, Co-Chair Associate Professor Anne Curzan, Co-Chair Associate Professor Carla O’Connor Associate Professor Christine Tardy, DePaul University © Bethany Townsend Davila 2011 To Frank, Julius, and Kai ii Acknowledgements I want to thank my committee for their support and careful attention to my project. My dissertation is the result of collaboration—of conversations and written feedback, of hard questions and generous encouragement. Each committee member has left a mark on this project—and me—in her own way. I especially want to thank my co-chairs, Anne Curzan and Anne Ruggles Gere. Both have been generous with their time and attention, engaged me as a peer, and given me the confidence to keep pushing this project forward. Thank you to my peers. I am humbled by the generous, even selfless, support I receive from other E&E students on a regular basis. Hannah Dickinson deserves a special thank you for always having time for all of us and for the wisdom in her advice. Thank you to the rest of my cohort (Brett, Laura, Melinda, and Randy), to Staci and Mike who went through it first, to my writing group partners over the years, and to all of the other wonderful friends and colleagues I have been blessed with during my time at Michigan. I would like to thank Bonnie and Lisa for making the EDWP office a welcoming space and for their unconditional confidence. I also want to show great appreciation for my family, especially my parents, Steve and Peggy and my sisters, Becca and Emily. Your constant reminders that anything is possible has nurtured my insistence on always focusing on solutions instead of problems, which—as it turns out—is really useful when writing a dissertation. iii Of course, thank you to my husband, Frank, who has offered endless support and encouragement over the years—support and encouragement that have allowed me to follow my passion for which I will always be grateful. Finally, I want to thank my children, Julius and Kai, who are my daily dose of perspective, filling me with love and laughter and always reminding me of what’s really important. iv Table of Contents Dedication........................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................iii List of Figures.................................................................................................................... vi List of Appendices ............................................................................................................ vii Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 “Standard” Edited American English: Composition’s Neutral Dialect ............. 5 Chapter 2 Research Design and Methods ......................................................................... 38 Chapter 3 Indexicality and “Standard” Edited American English: Examining the Link Between Conceptions of Standardness and Perceived Authorial Identity.................. 61 Chapter 4 Standard Language Discourse: The Rhetorical Construction of Linguistic Neutrality .................................................................................................................. 112 Chapter 5 Breaking Patterns and Opening Gates........................................................... 138 Appendices...................................................................................................................... 152 References....................................................................................................................... 158 v List of Figures Figure 3.1 Indexicals for Class……………………………………………………………79 3.2 Indexicals for Race…………………………………………………………….86 3.3 Indexicals for Gender………………………………………………………….92 vi List of Appendices Appendix A. Instructor Demographics………………………………………………………..152 B. Instructions for Instructors on Responding to the Anonymous Student Papers………………………………………………...153 C. Interview Protocol for Composition Instructors……………………....……......154 D. Student Author Demographics………………………………………...……….156 E. Distribution of Student Papers………………………………………...……….157 vii Introduction During my Master’s Program I worked as an intern teaching first-year composition at a community college. After the first assignment, a personal narrative, the supervising instructor asked me to join him in meeting with Jason, a male, African American student in order to discuss the grammar “issues” in his paper. I also had noted Jason’s essay as problematic when I read it. In fact, given my commitment to allowing marginalized dialects into composition courses, I had been surprised by how quickly I decided Jason’s narrative wasn’t working—largely because of grammatical difference. After class, the instructor and I met with Jason to discuss his paper. While the instructor focused on correcting Jason’s grammar, I talked to Jason about his voice 1 and identity in the paper. I told him that many of his readers could interpret evidence of his dialect (African American English) as error. I asked him to consider maintaining his voice through vocabulary and the dialogue, but to adhere to “standard” English at other times, for example when indicating the tense of verbs. Following the meeting, I reminded Jason that I was available to meet with him if he wanted more feedback or direction in revising his paper. Jason never came to meet with me. I wrote in a reflective journal I was keeping at the time that I had “no idea how to help Jason navigate instructors’ expectations and his own goals,” especially given my initial instinct to “ask him to erase much of the culture from his paper.” Looking back at this experience and the words I used to describe it, I was enacting and perpetuating many of the ideologies I critique in this dissertation: I located “standard” edited American English (SEAE) only at the level of the sentence, did not acknowledge its connection to meaning, and often conflated it with grammar; I reacted to “difference” as inappropriate for college writing; and I assumed that other language varieties, but not SEAE, work to signal identity. 1 At that time, I understood voice to be a written identity largely related to style that is controlled by the author and expressed through the text. In Chapter 1, I draw on recent work by Matsuda and Tardy to expand and complicate the concept of voice. 1 My difficulty responding to both Jason and his writing illustrates the complexity of considering SEAE’s role in writing classes. As a field, composition studies recognizes SEAE as a gatekeeper that often excludes nontraditional students from academia (Bizzell, Fox). However, instructors who want to resist SEAE and its gatekeeping function often feel conflicted because of the strong possibility that other classes and other contexts will expect mastery of this dialect. Indeed, many instructors feel compelled to demand SEAE for that very reason (Smith, Delpit). In large part, this dilemma explains why there has not yet been a strong challenge to the privilege afforded SEAE by composition studies: despite the field’s recognition that this dialect functions as a gatekeeper, instructors are convinced by the argument that students need SEAE in order to access mainstream power and success. Scholars who address the role of SEAE in composition studies have not, as yet, considered the indexicality—the ideological process that links language and identity—of this privileged dialect. As a result, the stakes of mandated SEAE in composition courses have been undertheorized. As is evident in my reaction to Jason and his writing, though, the relationship between writing and identity matters greatly when considering the tensions surrounding SEAE in composition. When I equated Jason’s written identity (what I called “voice” at the time) with African American English and noted that asking Jason to remove some features of the nonstandard dialect from his paper amounted to “eras[ing] the culture” from his writing (emphasis added), I revealed an expectation that SEAE would not have “culture” of its own and would be identity-less. This project argues that the portrayal of SEAE as nonindexical—as not connected to identity—prevents composition studies from fully understanding the relationship between writing and identity and has, thus far, precluded an interrogation of the role of identity in SEAE’s gatekeeping function. This dissertation, then, examines instructors’ responses to non/standardness in anonymous student writing, exploring both the indexicality of SEAE and the rhetorical construction of SEAE as linguistically neutral. Throughout the dissertation, I consider the presence, perpetuation, and production of ideologies related to language, standardness, and privilege—specifically standard language ideology and whiteness—in instructors’ talk about student writing. I begin, in Chapter 1, by providing the reader with an extended description of composition studies’ 2 scholarship on SEAE, the connection between writing and identity, and linguistic neutrality. In this chapter, I challenge existing scholarship

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