46 English as a Second Dialect & Indigenous Educational Attainment in Canada: A Call to Action Jonathan J. Life Some students in Canada, most relevantly some Indigenous students, speak English as their first language, yet have grown up using a non-standard variation of it. As a result, these individuals have more in common with students attempting to learn English as a second language than with students who have grown up speaking English with a standard dialect. Current educational practice uses first-language education methods for these students, which can be inefficient for their learning. In particular, many English second-dialect speaking children can be misdiagnosed with learning disabilities and placed in special education programs in an effort to help address their language difficulties. When confronted with a student struggling to acquire an unfamiliar dialect, many educators may see special education as the only tool available. In addition to wasting money, misdiagnoses of learning disabilities can negatively affect both the learning and the self-image of the student misdiagnosed. Since many English second dialect speakers in Canada are Indigenous, this problem may disproportionately affect Indigenous children, thus widening Canada’s educational attainment inequity. This paper suggests an alternative educational policy direction. It advocates the use of second-language education methods in the teaching of second-dialect speaking students. This policy would offer a more psychologically accurate approach and thus would likely decrease economic wastefulness and increase educational effectiveness. In the context of the significant inequities in Indigenous educational attainment in Canada, this paper proposes a clear, practical policy direction that could be implemented across Canadian provinces (where applicable) and could effect an immediate tangible improvement for Indigenous students’ learning. Method This paper draws heavily on the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics and speech-language pathology. Where concepts 47 may be vague or unfamiliar to the general public I clarify them in plain terms. Since relatively little has been written on the connections between linguistics and public policy, I have found it necessary to include some older sources. As a rule, most of the older sources relate to historical precedent for the connection between non-standard dialect and public education policy, especially to Black English in U.S. education in particular. For all Canadian- and Indigenous-specific arguments I have provided the most up-to-date sources available. Largely everything that has been written on the connection of non-standard dialect to education has been written by linguists, sociolinguists and speech-language pathologists1. The primary ambition of this paper is thus to translate the findings of these language scientists and practitioners to a simplified and concise form accessible to government and policy professionals. In addition, I aim to elucidate the unique challenges of Indigenous second-dialect education in Canada, and to create a blueprint for a policy implementation process for moving forward. While I believe this paper offers a positive way forward for Canadian education policy, I also must be clear about the limits of its scope. While Indigenous self-governance is a crucial concept for long-term Indigenous education policy, I do not directly apply this concept in the methodology of this paper2. The paper, rather, works purely in a provincial-government-based policy framework. The reason for this scope restriction is absolutely not to downplay the importance of Indigenous self-governance. The choice to work in a short-term provincial framework comes simply from an analysis of my own competencies, together with a belief that the ideas here proposed offer a chance for real, positive changes that could be implemented practically immediately. Planning a trip to the grocery store tomorrow needn’t rule out a trip to Tokyo next year. 1 The one exception to this is the statistical work of Battisti et al 2011 on second- dialect education in British Columbia, which is also highly technical. 2 For related work discussing community-researcher-practitioner partnerships please see Ball and Bernhardt 2008, and Hart-Blundon 2016. Carleton Perspectives on Public Policy 48 Indigenous Education Statistics As last recorded in 2011, the number of Canadians with an Indigenous identity is 1,400,685. This is approximately 4% of the overall population. This percentage is likely to grow, as Indigenous people continue to be younger, on average, than the general population. Forty-six percent of Indigenous people in Canada are under twenty-five years old (National Household Survey 2011). The problematic history of colonialism together with these growth- rate demographics give us strong reason to be concerned about Indigenous educational attainment in Canada. Without policy action, the issue will only grow. In Canadian government-determined standards, there is significant inequity in educational attainment between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada3. Twenty-nine percent of working- age Indigenous Canadians has not completed high school, compared to only 12% of working-age non-Indigenous Canadians. Less than half (48%) of working-age Indigenous Canadians has post-secondary qualification of some kind, while this is the case for almost one third (65%) of non-Indigenous Canadians. Lastly, 10% of Indigenous Canadians has a university degree, compared to 26% of the non-Indigenous population (National Household Survey 2011). There are many factors that likely contribute to this inequity. These factors include colonialism and poverty (Ball 2007), negative effects of residential school (Schissel and Wotherspoon 2003) including trauma (Bombay, Matheson and Anisman 2009), and a failure to promote literacy in a culturally appropriate context (Ball 2007). The situation with Indigenous educational attainment in Canada is complex. To present the relevance of one causal factor at issue is not to dismiss the relevance of any other. In what follows, I present the case that one relevant causal factor in Indigenous educational attainment is a failure of recognition that many Indigenous children are second-dialect users of the variant of English used for classroom instruction. Emphasizing this factor has the prospect for a practical implementation process that could 3 A potential weakness in government educational statistics is that they do not take account of the transfer of traditional Indigenous Knowledge. A longer-term policy direction might involve finding ways to remedy this. Volume 5 – Fall 2018 49 bring real, tangible progress. What is a Nonstandard Dialect, and Why Might it Matter? To understand the concept of a nonstandard dialect, first one must understand the distinction between linguistic prescription and description. A prescriptive conception of a language is about how one ‘should’ use a language. Following a prescriptive grammar and vocabulary is thus ‘correct’ language use. Prescriptive conceptions of language are determined by society at large, particularly by groups in prestige positions, such as teachers, professors and other educated professionals. In all likelihood, no individual person perfectly speaks a prescriptive language. A descriptive conception of a language, conversely, is about how a person uses a language as a matter of fact. Following a descriptive grammar is merely systematic language use: repeatedly applying a given set of rules in one’s speech. To use an analogy, a descriptive conception of language is more like physics than it is like ethics; it is not about how language should be, but simply about how it is. For a speaker4 of a standard dialect, one’s own descriptive language and one’s society’s prescriptive language5 largely overlap. A standard-dialect speaker, that is, someone who uses descriptive psycholinguistic rules that are largely equivalent to the prescriptive linguistic rules her society considers ‘correct6.’ Speakers of a standard dialect will thus generally speak in accordance with dictionaries and grammar books (Trudgill 1999), as well as with the linguistic norms followed by those of perceived status (Wolfram and Christian 1989). For a speaker of a non-standard dialect, however, one’s own descriptive language and one’s society’s prescriptive language are significantly divergent. This means the speaker’s descriptive psycholinguistic rules are importantly different from the prescriptive linguistic rules her society considers ‘correct.’ 4 I emphasize linguistic speech and speakers in this paper, but for the most part all relevant considerations also apply to linguistic writing and writers. 5 For simplicity I use the singular ‘language’ here, though of course both an individual and a society may be multi-lingual. 6 “Correctness’ is put in quotes to indicate that it is determined by power, not by logic. Carleton Perspectives on Public Policy 50 Nonstandard dialects break from the standard for various reasons. Sometimes influence on the standard language from an ancestral language causes a dialect break (Leap 1993). Other times parents learn a second language without formal instruction and pass that language to their children. The children in turn fill in the holes in grammatical structure (Ball et al. 2007). Such linguistic changes can become cemented as unique community dialects in any cases where the community is in some way isolated, either geographically (Ball et al. 2007), economically