Educators’ Stancetaking on Standardized English: From Prescriptivist to Critically Conscious and Somewhere In-Between

Building on connections between language, identity, and sociolinguistic power relations, we explore orientations to the concept of “Standardized English” in linguistic autobiographies written by 111 educators taking an online master’s course in sociolinguistics. Through an interpretive, discursive analysis we identified three types of stancetaking toward Standardized English, which we name “Prescriptivist,” “Middle Ground,” and “Critically Conscious.” We discuss how each of these types of educator stancetaking ideologically positions learners as types of speakers and educators as listeners. Prescriptivist stancetaking positioned linguistic difference as a problem, with teachers required to listen for such differences and redirect students’ adherence to SE. TMG positioned educators as complacent, non-judgmental, humanist listeners of student speakers and even as advocates. However, these positions remain agnostic to power structures and fail to name or question them. Critically conscious stancetaking constructed difference as normal, questioning the systems that perpetuate insidious beliefs of variation as problematic, thus positioning speakers as experts in their own language use and teachers and students as critical sense makers of unjust institutional and social systems. Findings illuminate routes toward disrupting deficit perspectives surrounding culturally and linguistically diverse students’ sociolinguistic positioning across educational contexts.