Description
After reviewing “Your Research Question,” consider potential research questions. Post your topic and research question idea(s) here.
Some reminders:
You can list multiple possibilities here, but your research should ultimately be focused on one guiding question. Aim for each idea you list to be a possibility for guiding your entire paper focus.
Your research question should be one for which you can formulate a position through your research. It should not be a question with a single answer that you will locate through your research. For example, “What are the different types of phishing?” is not a good research question because it is one that has a defined answer that you can locate. “What types of phishing will become more common in the next five years and how should businesses be prepared?” is a good research question because you can formulate a position, based on your research, in response to the question.
The Myth of Standard American English
Throughout school you surely have been taught what was presented to you as the “proper” way to use the English language. Rule-oriented and unduly formal, you’ve likely been told that this form of writing is what you need to learn to be successful in school, at work, and in life. This kind of writing is often called Standard English (SE), Standard American English (SAE), or Standard Written English (SWE). There is only one problem: The English language does not have one standard form.
Ask Yourself
Think about the different ways in which you use language in conversation. Do you speak with your boss the same way you talk with your friends or with your children? Do you use the same words, pronunciations, and sentence structures that everyone else in the country uses?
I bet not!
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Conversation is filled with different words and grammar constructions, clearly revealing our different regional and cultural dialects. How would you react if someone said to you, “Hey! Where ya at?” To folks who live in New Orleans, this is a friendly greeting meaning something like “Hi, how are you?” Someone in another part of the country might ask “Sup?” and mean approximately the same thing. If you order a milkshake in Boston, you might have to ask for a “frappe” to be understood. When you order something to drink with lunch, do you ask for a “soda,” “pop,” or “soft drink”? On a summer night, do you like to watch “fireflies” or “lightning bugs”? Have you ever said, “We be happy” or “We might could” or “Come on, yous guys”? If any of these examples sound familiar, you know what a dialect is.
English is not one set language. It is instead many different dialects. It is as diverse as the people who live here. Folks in Louisiana speak and use language differently from those of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, who use it differently from those who live in Chicago’s southside, who use it differently from inner city youth in Los Angeles. Everyone speaks a dialect – a particular variety of language with different vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This kind of linguistic diversity also includes the versions of English non-native speakers use.
The idea of a standard American English is a myth, yet in school and in textbooks, we are taught to use the language in one particular way and that to use it any other way would be incorrect. No one uses standard American English in their day-to-day lives, yet we’re led to believe that is how we should use it when we write. Why?
In “Writing Toward Racial Literacy” Mara Lee Grayson (2022) says that “when someone tells you to use ‘standard English,’ what they’re really telling you is to stop using your own English” (p. 168). Delpit (1988) attributes this tendency to what she calls “the culture of power” in that the dominant culture that holds power establishes the “standard” and makes the rules that others need to follow.
In a 1974 resolution on language, which was reaffirmed in 2003, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2023), the major professional organization for researching and teaching composition, put forth the following:
We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. (para. 3)
Despite the condemnation of a “standard American English,” the controversy continues in large part because as Kretzschmar and Meyer (2012) argue
we continue to be dominated by a false dichotomy between ‘standard English’, that proper English that we get in school from the earliest grades, and, on the other hand, ‘non-standard English’ – dialect, or speech with an accent, or writing with words or grammar somewhat different from the standard. ‘Standard English’ is not the language that any of us habitually speak or write in the language interactions of our daily lives. ‘Standard English’ – standard American English – continues to be a creation of people who write school grammars and reference books, and apply their own impressions of what is standard to their works. (p. 142)
American literary critic Stanley Fish (2009) does not agree (and he is not alone) with what he sees as politicizing the teaching of composition. He takes issue with the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s position on linguistic diversity in the classroom and argues that while standard American English may be reflective of the dominant culture, educators do students a disservice by not preparing them to participate in that world. Fish contends, “You’re not going to be able to change the world if you are not equipped with the tools that speak to its present condition. You don’t strike a blow against a power structure by making yourself vulnerable to its prejudices” (para. 8-9).
In response to Fish, Vershawn Ashanti Young (2010), a professor in the departments of Communication Arts and English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, writes,
But don’t nobody’s language, dialect, or style make them “vulnerable to prejudice.” It’s ATTITUDES. It be the way folks with some power perceive other people’s language. Like the way some view, say, black English when used in school or at work. Black English dont make it own-self oppressed. It be negative views about other people usin they own language . . . that make it so. (p. 110)
Over the past decade, awareness has begun to grow with respect to longstanding, inherent biases in, among other institutions, our educational system. Standardized testing, for example, long a way to exclude minorities from equitable educational access, is starting to be eliminated with more and more colleges and universities no longer requiring the SATs. Standard American English is not going away, but perhaps it can be part of a more inclusive curriculum that recognizes linguistic diversity.
