The Same Conversational Page?

Abstract

Through surveys and focus group conversations, we studied students' experiences with instruction in writing-intensive (WI) courses at our urban R1 university and their awareness of and attitudes about linguistic and rhetorical diversity. Specifically, we explore discrepancies between students' experiences with languaging, language judgment, and our university’s diversity and our goals as teacher-scholars who seek a university context more ready for writing instruction that embraces linguistic diversity. Echoing Baker-Bell’s (2020) discussion of students’ “linguistic double-consciousness,” our analysis demonstrates the misalignment between the valuing of linguistic diversity emphasized in contemporary scholarship and the perspectives on languaging held by our direct instructional audience: the students at our university. Importantly, while most survey participants agreed that “bringing linguistic diversity into the classroom enhances their writing,” most focus group participants generally implied a much different experience, describing writing “formally” or “in Standard American English,” for classes, with no suggestion that their writing was positively affected by linguistic diversity. This study points us to strategies that will help us get on the same conversational page with students about linguistic diversity.

Keywords

• linguistic diversity
• writing-intensive
• languaging
• focus groups