Curricular approaches to linguistic diversity: Code-switching, register-shifting and academic language.

For several decades, some sociolinguists have argued that students---particularly those students who speak nonstandard varieties of English---would benefit from educational approaches grounded in linguistic principles. While studies have supported the claims that linguistically informed curricula can be educationally beneficial, such curricula have not yet been routinely adopted by educators, with a few exceptions. For a linguistically informed curriculum to be more generally implementable, it must articulate a coherent approach to dialect and academic language issues. Such articulation requires attention to existing educational processes and goals, which includes attention to the register features of academic writing. Additionally, a curriculum's design must mitigate teachers' lack of experience with linguistic content and a common ambivalence toward grammar. A linguistically informed curriculum must be accessible to teachers and students, relevant to their learning objectives and integrable into an existing classroom ecology. This study addresses these issues, first, by designing a secondary-level curriculum that combines techniques of contrastive analysis, which compare the grammatical features of one language variety to another, and systemic functional linguistics, which explicate the syntactic and rhetorical structures of specific linguistic practices---in this case, of academic registers. The study also addresses some of the barriers to adoption and scalability by designing a curriculum that provides teachers with the necessary information and resources to be managed by non-experts. The qualitative analysis of the curricular implementation at a high school in Washington, D.C. demonstrates how the participating teacher and her students are able to negotiate content that introduces new ways of understanding and making meaning with language. The study evidences important changes in the metalinguistic awareness of the teacher and her students---development that can promote students' academic achievement. In addition, the study debunks the oft-repeated claim that grammar is boring. The high levels of student participation during the lessons illustrate the curiosity that many students have about language. Furthermore, the participating teacher sees the linguistic content as relevant to established goals and presents it to students that way. The study, therefore, demonstrates both the challenges and the possibilities of fashioning linguistic content into usable, accessible and relevant curricula. View Less