As educators, we willgreatly advance our students if we provide intense instructionin Standard English. Alternatively, those well intentionedteachers who choose to withhold such instruction forwhatever reason will likely disadvantage their students andvisit real-world harm to satisfy an impulse that very well mayinvolve egocentric virtue signaling.

On a more practical level, such qualitiescan improve human lives wholesale through the exchange ofideas, advancement of thought, and facilitation of trade.

Standardized communication will likely benefit allpractitioners; however, all groups struggle to attaincompetencies in SAEA because it is a dialect separate fromall others.

Very recently, though, some scholars have resurrectedarguments rooted in the 1970‟s. These arguments questionthe established practice of supporting Standard LanguageIdeologies, and perhaps the most direct and visibleopposition to embracing Standard English of late hasemerged from Dr. Asao B. Inoue, the past President of theConference on College Communication and Composition(CCCC) and keynote speaker at the 2019 CCCC

That Subject A examoperated until the early twenty-first century when thenomenclature changed to the Analytical Writing PlacementExam (AWPE)

The traditionalresponse is remarkably pragmatic: Students with such skillsare far more likely to excel in courses that use Standard5 One need look no further than Ferdinand de Saussure‟s famous textCourse in General Linguistics and the poignant concept of sign and signifier.The greater the linguistic difference between sign and signifier leads to thegreater the possibility of slippage between sign and signifier.English textbooks, rely on lectures in English, and routinelyassign papers to be submitted in English.

In the“Report of The National Commission on Writing forAmerica‟s Families, Schools, and Colleges” generated byCollege Board in September of 2004, writing was recognizedas a “‟threshold skill‟ for both employment and promotion,particularly salaried employees.” (3) [14]. The surveyconsidered 120 major American corporations thatrepresented almost eight million workers.

Smith is one of the more recentscholars to forward such a particularly lucid example of theantagonism towards Standard English, but Smith‟s argumentis notable and potent because the authors suggest changes tothe mechanism of testing.4

Melinda J. McBee Orzulak, for example,supports the idea that Deficit Language Ideologies – the ideathat Englishes that diverge from Standard English –“marginalize nondominant groups and promote dominantgroups‟ interests” (180), presumably both within the confinesof education and in society at large [12]. Embracing apedagogical approach that places Standard English in aseminal position in the composition classroom, according toOrzulak, wouldFurther advocate for linguistic separatism by ignoringthe realities of code-meshing. One aspect of deficitlanguage ideology is the belief that if something is not“standard” English, it is not grammatical or that sloppypeople use sloppy grammar. (180)

Displacinginstructional time to accommodate code-meshing andcode-switching has the unfortunate byproduct of limitinginstruction in Standard English and introducing linguisticconcepts that actually interfere with Standard Englishacquisition. As a result, students may be placed at adisadvantage in acquiring the linguistic skills necessary tojoin in the Burkean parlor.

Ultimately, composition classes are limited in scope, soinstructors must make practical decisions about what will beemphasized and what will be ignored.

“it seems useful to ask them [students] to not onlymesh codes, but to consider the politically-charged origins ofthe „codes‟ they employ, and to think about ways in whichthey might interrogate – and even construct – these codes interms of their specific personal, cultural, and rhetoricalsituations” (283).

In other words,Standard English provides a platform for inclusivity that isarguably absent in multiple Englishes.

The potential pitfall of code-meshing and the subtledisplacement of Standard English rests in a slippery slope asit can apply to instruction in the composition classroom;

Even champions ofcode-meshing, like John Vance,

If Cochran-Smith et al. are correct,then instructors might be inclined to traverse the slipperyslope of validating code-meshing, an approach thatinvalidates the concept of Standard English, and, arguably,generates confusion about the role of Standard English andexpectations around Standard English.

“In point of fact, it was argued that Black English is justas linguistically and functionally systematic as white English

Is Standard English racist? Oppressive?

current criticism in Composition/Rhetoricthat addresses the linguistic construct of multiple Englishesand their relationship to Standard English, most especially asthe relationship is conceived in American higher education

admonishment

ubiquitous

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower thatthe men had built. Then the Lord said: ”If now, whilethey are one people, all speaking the same language,they have started to do this, nothing will later stop themfrom doing whatever they presume to do. Let us then godown and there confuse their language, so that one willManuscript received September 9, 2019; revised January 21, 2020.Paul A. J. Beehler is with the University of California Riverside, UnitedStates (e-mail: paulb@ucr.edu).not understand what another says.”

In this archetypal story, people are remarkably productiveand industrious specifically because of their reliance on acommon language.

This response considers an excerpt of Dr.Inoue’s speech and then ultimately refutes the argument thatStandard English should be abandoned

Rodolfo Jacobson, PatriciaCunningham, and James Sledd

bstract—Scholarly debates about Standard English in the1970’s were, in part, instigated by the 1969 Task Force onRacism and Bias in the Teaching of English.