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Language, conflict and community: linguistic accommodation in the urban US

Schools have linguistic agendas. Seldom do schools promote ‘the accretion and growth of every dialect’. At best, schools offer students access to standard language—a culture’s prestige codes, control over which is an important factor in social mobility (see Delpit, 1995). Seldom do we accomplish this as fully as the public expects, for even in the most idyllic circumstances, teachers do not control classroom discourse to the extent people imagine. Students arrive in schools with a variety of dialects, determined by region, neighbourhood and social class. When we offer access to prestige codes, we model a series of verbal dance steps, which students may imitate and replicate. But what happens if the ‘dance’ in which we seek to engage students is felt to be unfriendly or even inimical to the students’ home culture? And what if more than one ethno-linguistic variety is represented in a classroom—groups which alternately bond and collide? Between 1991 and 2002, it was my privilege to work as an English teacher and reading specialist in a rustbelt city in the United States. The school system which employed me served a range of races and socioeconomic levels; however, the racially isolated schools to which I was assigned—middle schools, and in one case a K-8 school for delinquent and ‘pre-delinquent’ youth—served overwhelmingly lowincome and African American youngsters. There was a sprinkling of white youngsters in these schools. Most of them were what sociologists describe as ‘Urban Appalachians’, young people whose families had migrated to our city from the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and New York to find employment. Annual tests of literacy and achievement characterised the racially isolated schools as ‘low-performing’. One such school was New Vista Middle School. It occupied a half-block of real estate in the city’s Lower Basin section, a run-down, high-crime neighbourhood, with broken-windowed and abandoned buildings, a place where police distrusted the (mostly African American) community, and the community feared the police.