“I don’t want my accent to hurt my self-esteem anymore,” says a native
speaker of Spanish. “I know I can get my point across in English, but I
don’t want to feel uncomfortable every time I say something” (Hernandez
1993: 1).
In a series of studies using matched-guise testing, Carranza and Ryan
(1975) showed that African American, Anglo and Hispanic students all
found Spanish-accented English to be lacking in prestige and inappropriate
for a classroom setting. According to Ryan, Carranza and Moffie (1977)
“Small increments in accentedness were found to be associated with
gradually less favorable ratings of status, solidarity, and speech
characteristics” (as summarized in Eisenstein 1983: 173).
In the teaching of language, there is a very striking division between
educational psychologists and theorists, on the one side, and boards of
education and classroom teachers, on the other. The NCTE circulates a
publication list to its 90,000 members which includes titles such as Kids
Come in All Languages (Spangenberg-Urbschat and Pritchard 1994) and
(more than 20 years ago) Affirming Students’ Right to Their Own
Language (McCrum et al. 1986). For the most part, these are well-
balanced reports on those factual issues which should be clear to every
teacher involved in language instruction.
In spite of the availability of such resources, however, the language arts
classroom is one of the best places to watch the way that language
communities and individuals who do not use *SAE are subordinated by
means of misinformation, trivialization, and a carefully constructed set of
threats and promises.
Good enough English
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. government was hard
pressed to find some kind of lasting resolution for the on-going conflicts
with the continent’s indigenous peoples. Disease, warfare and systematic
routing had reduced the great variety of native cultures to a handful.
Tribes that were not wiped out entirely were decimated often to less than