teach a child a new language by scorning and ridiculing and forcibly
erasing his first language.”
Appropriacy arguments
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), together with the
International Reading Association (IRA) regularly reviews, revises and
publishes Standards for the English Language Arts, a 12-point list which
emphasizes reading and reading comprehension skills. The spoken
language is mentioned only three times. A survey of language arts
textbooks provides a similar picture, in which the focus is primarily the
written language. In this view of education, children are potentially
productive members of literacy communities rather than language
communities (National Council of Teachers of English 1996: 3).
One variety of English can be targeted for culling with a ready-made but
shallow set of appropriacy rationalizations.
Tightly bound to the concept of linguistic appropriacy is that of
communicative competence, a term first coined by anthropological
linguists, but appropriated by educational theorists. Taken in its loosest
form, to become communicatively competent, a child learns how to adapt
speech and writing on the basis of context, audience, and intention. Add to
this the subjective nature of social appropriacy which is rarely challenged
and the stage is set. If communicative competence is taken as a speaker’s
ability to use language appropriately in social context, and we do not
challenge the construction of “appropriacy,” then we have opened a back
door to exclusion on the basis of another kind of “correctness” logic.^8
Appropriacy judgments that cloak subjective, culturally bound
judgments of “correctness” might be made clearer by the contrast between
two statements:
1. It is inappropriate for a law student to pose a question in
Hawai’ian Creole English in the classroom.
2. It is inappropriate for a wife to contradict her husband.While the second statement was once unremarkable, it would now evoke
resounding criticism in most quarters. The first statement might still pass
without comment, although the underlying issue; silencing of voices