A strong lan-guage education policy in the United States thatwould support bilingualism as a resource muststart by acknowledging the language practices ofU.S. bilingual communities, and not simply relyon the constructed understandings of nationallanguages that have informed much language ed-ucation policy in the past

language policy in formal education hastraditionally served the interest of nation-states,including the United States. Language educationprograms have been made to fitestablished pat-terns and pedagogical traditions, sometimes tocurb bilingualism, at other times to promote it

a translan-guaging policy would encourage students' use ofall their language resources in learning new ones,rather than banishing their home language prac-tices from the classroom.

any child who hashad regular exposure to American television or film has already internalized the standard forms of language, since most mediacommunication on television and in film is done in some version of standard English.

There are many versions of "standard English."President Clinton speaks one such version, but it differs in many ways from other versions. The differences are mostly in the soundsystem, not in the vocabulary or syntax.

The first important fact about dialects that teachers should know is they do not indicate anything significant about a child's intelligenceor cultural status. The second important fact is that anyone, especially children, can modify or add to a dialect easily and withoutspecial effort, given appropriate motivation

The child who comes into a classroom speaking anything other than the "standard" dialect of American English will probably belabeled and, therefore, disadvantaged from the start.

Throughoutour schooling, we learn to carry the assumption that we need to writefor an “academic” audience that is far removed from our upbringing andcommunity ways of knowing. But rarely are our families, friends, or othercommunity members understood as part of our audience, although theyare very the people, including ourselves, that academics learn from, and inturn, are supposed to serve.What if we think of our audience beyond academics and actively writefor people who we share our lived experiences with?

For instance, while Princess Charlotte of Cambridge, UK,is praised for engaging her Spanish and English bilingualism, multilingualstudents, who are viewed through a racializing lens, are often told thattheir bilingual practice is inadequate in academic spaces.

standard written English is not an objectiveset of criteria. Instead, it is an ideal that centers a “norm” often conceivedas white, upper-middle class, “accentless,” and male, built from a myththat our society needs only one language (without any form of variation)for unity (“Talk American”).

Doing this work, essentially try-ing to silence your voice, can be exhausting. And honestly, this reductionof your voice can make writing feel difficult, irrelevant, and monotone(aka boring).

language architects carefully considerhow to work with their own languages and voice for the most successfulcommunication in a specific situation (25).

That behegemony. Internalized oppression. Linguistic self-hate. But we should be mo flex-ible, mo acceptin of language diversity, language expansion, and creative languageusage from ourselves and from others both in formal and informal settings. Why?Cuz nobody can or gone really master all the rules of any language or dialect.So, what happen when peeps dont meet the dominant language rules? Well,some folks can get away with not meeting those rules while others get punished,sometimes severely, for not doing so. Let me go a lil mo way with this: Even uni-versity presidents and highly regarded English professors dont always speak andwrite in the dominant standard, even when they believe they do.

Instead of prescribing how folks should write or speak, I say we teach languagedescriptively. This mean we should, for instance, teach how language functionswithin and from various cultural perspectives. And we should teach what it taketo understand, listen, and write in multiple dialects simultaneously.

Everybody mix the dialect they learn athome with whateva other dialect or language they learn afterwards. That’s howwe understand accents; that’s how we can hear that some people are from a Pol-ish, Spanish, or French language background when they speak English. It’s howwe can tell somebody is from the South, from Appalachia, from Chicago or anyother regional background. We hear that background in they speech, and it’s oftenexpressed in they writin too. It’s natural

Besides encouraging teachers to be snide and patronizing, Fish flat out confusin(I would say he lyin, but Momma say be nice). You cant start off sayin, “disabuseyo’self of the notion that students have a right to they dialect” and then say to tellstudents: “Y’all do have a right.” That be hypocritical. It further disingenuous ofFish to ask: “Who could object to learning a second language?” What he reallymean by this rhetorical question is that the “multiculturals” should be thrilled toleave they own dialect and learn another one,

He prolly unware that he be supportin languagediscrimination, cuz he appeal to its acceptable form–standard language ideology alsocalled “dominant language ideology” (Lippi-Green). Standard language ideologyis the belief that there is one set of dominant language rules that stem from a singledominant discourse (like standard English) that all writers and speakers of Englishmust conform to in order to communicate effectively. Dominant language ideologyalso say peeps can speak whateva the heck way they want to—BUT AT HOME

there only one way to speak and write toget ahead in the world, that writin teachers should “clear [they] mind of the ortho-doxies that have taken hold in the composition world” (“Part 3”). He say dont nostudent have a rite to they own language if that language make them “vulnerableto prejudice”; that “it may be true that the standard language is [...] a device forprotecting the status quo, but that very truth is a reason for teaching it to students”

Nor will students — once they leave our cushy campuses and enter the professional world — be able to talk and write any way they choose, any more than they will be able to dress or behave any way they want. Preparing them adequately for life beyond college is arguably our greatest responsibility

It seems to me the height of arrogance and hypocrisy, if not outright discrimination, to deny students access to those same opportunities, whether we do so intentionally or simply through neglect. Our objective as educators ought to be to help them attain what we have attained, if not more — and language proficiency is a necessary prerequisite.

The responsibility for helping students learn to use standard American English effectively, and insisting that they do so, cannot fall solely on the English department.

Students, then, have a vested interest in mastering SAE: It literally pays off for them, as those who are more proficient tend to be more easily hired and more successful on the job.

The word “standard” here is not prescriptive. It does not refer to a flag we must all salute. Rather, it simply describes accepted norms — in this case, accepted in the workplace by college-educated professionals.

bilingual educationprograms in the United States that aimed to pro-mote bilingualism and biliteracy were mostly rela-beled as 'dual language' by federal and state edu-cational authorities (notice how previously we re-ferred to this enterprise as dual language bilingualeducation-DLBE- to remind readers that they areindeed bilingual programs) . Many educators andscholars supported the naming change to duallanguage since they argued that itrecasted bilin-gualism in a positive light, as an enrichment activ-ityfor all American children, and not simply as atransitional program for language minority chil-dren.

reflecting on U.S. history is that thecountry has always been linguistically diverse.From colonial times through the 19th century, forexample, there was general tolerance toward mostEuropean languages. Enslaved Africans, however,were not allowed to speak or transmit their nativelanguages even as they were restricted from be-coming literate in English. Colonial era 'compul-sory ignorance laws' were incorporated into slavecodes that were maintained in southern statesuntil the end of the Civil War (1861-1865). Na-tive language literacy was promoted in some Na-tive American tribes until repressive policies wereput in place along with the English-only boardingschool movement that was instituted in the 1880s(Weinberg, 1995)

Corpus planning "deals with normselection and codification, as in the writing ofgrammars and the standardization of spelling;[whereas] status planning deals with initial choiceof language, including attitudes toward alterna-tive languages and the political implications ofvarious choices" (Bright, 1992, p. 311).

language planning has as itsovert purpose the goal of social control, in-cluding the use of policies for discriminatorypurposes. Both the notions of 'social control'and 'influence' suggest that language planninghas a political dimension of ideological con-trol (cf. Fairclough, 2013; Tollefson, 1991; Wiley,1996, 2005).

Explicitlanguage planning and policy making in the United States-when itdoes occur- tends to be done at thestate, local, or institutional levels, or within rather limited domains of federal priorities, such as thoserelated to defense or national security

If students are thrust into high-stakes writing at ev-ery turn, they will not have the freedom to developtheir translanguaging skills.

Multilingualstudents may doubt the translanguaging skills theybring with them because the school imposes itsmonolingualist ideologies on them

"Justlike our identities and backgroundsare diverse, so should our writing. They shouldreflect who we are- but would that work all ofthe time?"

Scholarslike Khubchandani (1997) have argued thatmultilingual interactions are aided by gestures,tone, setting, objects, and interpersonal strategiesfor interpretive clues, not words alone. In writing,one has to tap into alternate resources.

Some would argue that grammar cannotbe separated from discourse, and meaning fromrhetoric.

we have not developed pedagogical strategiesfor developing such practices in the classroom.