weekly discussion post

Jessica Love-Nichols
“There’s No Such Thing as Bad Language”

5
“THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS
BAD LANGUAGE, BUT . . .”

Colorblindness and Teachers’ Ideologies of
Linguistic Appropriateness

Jessica Love-Nichols

Introduction

In June 2008 I moved to New York City to teach in a “hard-to-staff ” public
school, where for several years I taught emergent bilingual students (i.e., “English
language learners”; see García & Kleifgen 2010) and African American English-
speaking students. To imbue new teachers with a sense of urgency, my training
program focused heavily on the statistically poor educational outcomes for low-
income students of color and the drastic consequences these outcomes could
cause—connecting kindergarten achievement with graduation rates and third-
grade reading scores with prison populations. Underlying the program’s sugges-
tions was the conviction that competency in “standard” English was critical to
preventing these negative outcomes. If we just worked hard to give our students
large vocabularies and highly evaluated oral expression abilities, we were prom-
ised, they would experience great success in school and, most likely, in life. Even as
a teacher with enough background in linguistics to suspect that access to “stand-
ard” English was probably not enough to prevent racialized students from expe-
riencing “profound institutional exclusion” (Flores & Rosa 2015: 165), I still felt
a great sense of urgency to “help” my students gain access to “standard” English
as quickly as possible.

Thus, educators are put in an almost untenable position. Academic research on
teachers’ language ideologies, however, does not always acknowledge the insti-
tutional context in which teachers are socialized and trained and in which they
practice (cf. Malsbary 2014). Such research can also overlook the material and
affective investment that most teachers make in their students, missing much of
the complexity of the teacher–student relationship. In this chapter, I therefore seek
to emphasize the relationship between teachers’ positive actions, intentions, and

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92 Jessica Love-Nichols

impact and the negative language ideologies that many teachers—and particularly
but not only white teachers—still participate in. I endeavor to avoid the dominant
ideology of white racism examined by Jane Hill (2009), which holds that the roots
of racism lie only with immoral individuals, instead attempting to focus on nega-
tive language ideologies not as individual attitudes but rather as dispersed, shared
systems of beliefs that, in many cases, are rooted in positive intentions.

Researchers of language ideologies have extensively demonstrated that teach-
ers’ implicit and explicit biases toward speakers of minoritized linguistic varieties
have real and lasting effects on their students, including their academic achieve-
ment (Lei 2003), their educational experience (Skiba et al. 2011), and their sense
of self (Alim 2004). To a certain extent, current educational institutional language
ideologies have moved away from a defi cit-oriented perspective on linguistic
diversity in which any divergence from “standard” English is seen as a defi ciency
(Wolfram 1999), although defi cit-oriented ideologies are still widely circulated
(Avineri et al. 2015; see also Carruba-Rogel, this volume; Lateef-Jan, this volume).

However, recent changes in institutional language policy represent only a
superfi cial reframing of earlier negative language ideologies. Institutional materi-
als about linguistic variation now often avoid explicitly defi cit-oriented language,
focusing instead on issues of appropriateness and context (Fairclough 2010; Flo-
res & Rosa 2015). Where once marginalized languages were considered “ungram-
matical” and “incorrect,” they are now said to be “informal” and therefore not
suitable for “written, formal, and public” communication (quoted in Fairclough
2010: 236). Instead of replacing supposedly defi cient or broken languages in stu-
dents’ linguistic repertoires, educational materials now advocate teachers’ “add-
ing” hegemonic varieties that students may use when “appropriate” while still
“respecting” students’ home languages. As Norman Fairclough describes this ide-
ology, “different varieties of English, and different languages, are appropriate for
different contexts and purposes, and all varieties have the legitimacy of being
appropriate for some contexts and purposes” (2010 : 36; original emphasis).

Such discussions assert the equality of all ways of speaking while simultane-
ously maintaining that some may be “inappropriate for the educational setting”
or “unprofessional.” The British government’s 1989 Cox Report on the teaching
of English in schools, for instance, states,

Pupils need to be able to discuss the contexts in which Standard English
is obligatory and those where its use is preferable for social reasons. . . . Non-
standard forms may be much more widely tolerated —and in some cases,
preferred —when the language is spoken, informal, and private.

(quoted in Fairclough 2010: 37; original emphasis)

More recently, but in a similar vein, the U.S. Common Core Standard for Lan-
guage Arts in grades nine and ten states that students need to be able to “adapt
speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating a command of formal

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“There’s No Such Thing as Bad Language” 93

English when indicated or appropriate” (California Department of Education
2013: 26).

Similarly to other strategies of colorblindness employed in neoliberal discourses
of race (Bonilla-Silva 2018; Corella, this volume; see also Rys, this volume), in
which racial evaluations are displaced onto cultural frames, ideologies of linguistic
appropriateness mask discriminatory practices by reframing the discussion away
from race. Colorblind discourses of language, for instance, focus on the supposed
insuffi cient vocabulary (Avineri et al. 2015) and lack of formality of racialized
varieties to explain their “inappropriateness.”

In this chapter, I examine the language ideologies of three white teachers who
participated in the SKILLS outreach program, focusing on two main ideologies of
appropriateness that emerged from the teachers’ refl ections on student language.
In the fi rst ideology, which I term the ideology of formality , linguistic varieties other
than “standard” academic English are considered inappropriate for school or other
institutional contexts due to their perceived informality. Minoritized varieties in
this ideology are seen as inherently less “formal” or “professional.” (For the fl ip
side of this ideology among Latinx youth in a nonacademic setting, see Bax &
Ferrada, this volume.)

In the second ideology, which I refer to as the ideology of worth , a division
is created between linguistic content and linguistic form such that minoritized
varieties are seen as inappropriate for school because they do not convey the
“content” of the students’ message in a way that will be perceived as intelligent
and important by others. Whether because interlocutors may not be profi cient
in the students’ linguistic variety or because of some inherent defi ciency in the
form of the language, such speech styles are seen as unable to express the students’
thoughts in a format that allows listeners to hear them as “worthwhile.” Teachers
drawing on this ideology often recognize that hierarchically positioning linguistic
varieties in relation to one another is problematic, yet they nevertheless hold that
minoritized ways of speaking are inappropriate for the classroom because they put
the students at risk of being judged negatively by a supposedly generic—that is,
white—listener. Through this ideology, teachers’ positive impulses to prevent their
students from being perceived as unintelligent ultimately reinforce racializing dis-
courses about marginalized varieties.

Crucially, both the ideology of formality and the ideology of worth attribute
power to linguistic form rather than to the speakers who use particular ways
of speaking, thereby obscuring the social relations underlying these ideologies.
By espousing the ideology of appropriateness, educational institutions nominally
move beyond explicitly positioning minoritized varieties as “bad” and “broken,”
replacing those ideologies with new discourses that assert that all forms of lan-
guage are “equal” while simultaneously insisting that the language of racialized
students is only suited for certain nonpublic contexts. This change, however, only
serves to camoufl age the continuing discriminatory nature of such ideologies. By
locating the power to be seen as “professional,” “formal,” and “intelligent” within

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94 Jessica Love-Nichols

the realm of language, the ideology of appropriateness contributes to colorblind
discourses by suggesting that if students simply used academic English, they would
no longer suffer discrimination.

In this chapter, I therefore argue that it is not enough to recognize student
language as systematic and legitimate outside of the classroom; the educational
institution must instead recognize the ideology of appropriateness as a reifi cation
of “standard” English and as a form of colorblind discourse that provides legiti-
macy to modern-day defi cit-oriented ideologies.

Language Ideologies in Educational Contexts

Research on the language ideologies of preservice and practicing teachers shows
that most teachers possess negative attitudes toward minoritized varieties, under-
estimating the cognitive abilities of students who speak such varieties and judging
their work more harshly (Baugh 1999; Byrnes, Kiger, & Manning 1997; Cross,
Kiger, & Manning 2001; Godley et al. 2006). Importantly, several studies demon-
strate that teachers’ attitudes are not merely individual beliefs but are shaped by
institutional policies (Helmer 2011; Razfar 2012), and have a negative impact on
students both personally and academically (Lei 2003; Menard-Warwick 2008).
Conversely, researchers have found that teachers who view students’ linguistic
knowledge as a resource have a positive effect on their students both personally
and academically (Paris & Alim 2017; Siegel 2006).

A growing number of researchers seek to change language ideologies in the
educational context through preservice classes, classroom interventions, and pro-
fessional development programs. Unlike most programs of this kind, at the time
of the research the SKILLS program generally focused on increasing students’
critical language awareness and for the most part did not include any formal train-
ing or professional development for partner teachers. This situation thus created a
unique opportunity to investigate the effect on teachers of exposure to a critical
language awareness approach that largely did not include teacher training and
development. As my analysis demonstrates, without such explicit training, teach-
ers in the SKILLS program drew heavily on colorblind discourses of linguistic
appropriateness that reproduced negative language ideologies.

Linguistic Appropriateness as a Colorblind Discourse

Colorblind discourses are bivalent in nature (McIntyre 1997): They can be used
both as a strategy to avoid talking about race and thus to “insulate white people
from examining their/our individual and collective roles in the perpetuation of
racism” (1997: 46) and as a well-intentioned attempt to avoid a focus on racial dif-
ference as defi ciency. One of the most frequent colorblind discourses of language
is the ideology of appropriateness (Fairclough 2010; Flores & Rosa 2015), in
which all linguistic varieties are nominally viewed as equal, but racialized varieties

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“There’s No Such Thing as Bad Language” 95

and languages are constructed as “inappropriate” and invalid in many public and
institutional spaces.

Ideological links between language and appropriateness have been well doc-
umented. Bonnie Urciuoli (1996), for example, argues that speech that is ide-
ologically perceived as publicly appropriate is linked to a middle-class, white,
English-speaking population, while the use of the Spanish language by Latinxs in
the United States is often seen as disorderly and inappropriate (see also Zentella
2007).

Observing applications of these ideologies in the school setting, Nelson Flo-
res and Jonathan Rosa (2015) note that the U.S. educational context has used
both subtractive and additive approaches to language. In the subtractive approach,
educators attempt to replace students’ home varieties with “standard” English,
while in additive approaches, the goal is for students to acquire a hegemonic vari-
ety of English alongside their home variety. Flores and Rosa argue that both of
these approaches are problematic in positioning “standard” English as an objective
linguistic category that gives its speakers access to societal advantages and thus
concealing the fact that racialized speakers can conform to hegemonic linguistic
norms while still facing institutional exclusion:

Failing to acknowledge language-minoritized students’ common racial
positioning and the ways that such positioning suggests defi ciency, which
has been typical in appropriateness-based approaches to language edu-
cation, normalizes these racial hierarchies and provides them legitimacy
through the perpetuation of a meritocratic myth: the idea that access to
codes of power and the ability to use these codes when appropriate will
somehow enable racialized populations to overcome the white supremacy
that permeates U.S. society.

(2015 : 166)

Thus, the ideology of appropriateness is closely connected to the discourse of
colorblindness. In this chapter, I build on previous critiques of linguistic appropri-
ateness to show in detail how ideologies of appropriateness are constructed as a
form of colorblind discourse in white teachers’ talk about their students’ language,
even in a program with an explicit focus on sociolinguistic justice.

Talking With Teachers

Before the beginning of SKILLS instruction in 2014, I conducted interviews
with SKILLS partner teachers at three different schools—Nancy, Julie, and Steve
(all pseudonyms). Both Nancy and Steve had participated in the program before,
Nancy for one year and Steve for several. My interview with Julie took place
before her fi rst year of participation. Nancy and Julie were white women in
their thirties or forties, and Steve was a white man in his fi fties. All of the school

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96 Jessica Love-Nichols

populations in this study were roughly evenly divided between Latinx and white
students, with smaller numbers of students from other backgrounds.

Although teacher professional development was not a primary goal of the
SKILLS program, the partner teachers were generally present for the majority
of instruction and could participate in curriculum development and teaching to
a greater or lesser extent. None of the teachers had previously met me, but they
knew of my involvement with the SKILLS program, and during the interviews
I highlighted my own background as a former primary school teacher in hopes of
creating a friendly conversational context and shared basis for the semistructured
interviews. All of the teachers were aware of my research interest in language ide-
ologies in a general way, as I told them that I was interested in how their participa-
tion in the SKILLS program affected the way they “think about student language.”
Because of my position as a linguist and their awareness of my research interests,
the teachers appeared careful in their discussion of student language, although all
of them approached the interview in an open and amicable way. Despite their care
with the topic, however, at times the teachers drew on language ideologies that
I considered deeply problematic.

The emergence of these ideologies even in careful discourse highlights the
effectiveness of colorblind discourses, but also presented a deep confl ict for me as
a researcher. Because of my strong identifi cation with the teachers and the fact
that many of these ideologies sprang from a genuine desire to serve their students,
I was unsure of how to handle the situation. During the interview, I hesitated to
engage the teachers about these problematic ideologies, and I ultimately let the
opportunity pass, only providing relatively neutral answers to maintain a cordial
atmosphere. Moreover, in analyzing the data I struggled with the task of represent-
ing both the teachers’ positive intentions and deep commitment to their students
and the problematic nature of the language ideologies in which they participated.

The data analyzed in this chapter are drawn from the audio recordings of these
interviews. Two of the teachers were interviewed in their classrooms, one during the
school day and the other after the end of class. The third partner teacher was inter-
viewed on the University of California, Santa Barbara campus. The interviews lasted
between thirty and forty-fi ve minutes and were based on written questions covering
topics such as the teachers’ experience with linguistics, their attitudes toward student
language, and their perceptions of the effects of language in their students’ lives.
I transcribed the interviews and coded them according to themes that emerged as
salient across interviewees; portions of the interviews that were especially pertinent
to the analysis were then transcribed to a higher level of detail, including the length of
pauses, overlapped speech, and stress (Du Bois et al. 1993), and analyzed using a close
discourse analysis approach. Linguistic appropriateness emerged as a salient theme in
all three interviews, manifesting itself as the most relevant ideology through which
these teachers perceived student language. The interviewees constructed, reinforced,
and, in one case, challenged the ideology of appropriateness through two main sub-
ideologies, the ideology of formality and the ideology of worth.

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The Ideology of Formality

As part of the ideology of appropriateness, the ideology of formality states that
racialized varieties of English are not “appropriate” for the classroom because they
are “informal,” “unprofessional,” or low-register. This ideology is reminiscent of
Jane Hill’s (2005) discussion of the positioning of Spanish as out of place or inap-
propriate in white public space, while the Mock Spanish used by white speakers is
perceived as well suited for socially taboo topics such as bodily excretions. Accord-
ing to the ideology of formality, the educational context, which is constructed as a
formal space, is an inappropriate context in which to speak minoritized varieties,
because their use is perceived as lacking the appropriate professionalism.

The fi rst excerpt illustrating the ideology of formality comes from my inter-
view with Nancy. At the time of the interview, the high school where Nancy
taught, whose mascot was the eagle, was undertaking a schoolwide initiative to
promote professionalism, with the slogan “Eagles Are Professional.” This initiative
attempted to encourage desired student behavior by linking such behaviors to
those needed in the middle-class corporate workplace. Nancy had participated in
SKILLS during the previous year and was about to begin her second year with the
program. After asking her some general questions about teaching, I asked Nancy
about the language ideologies she had held before participating in the SKILLS
program.

(1)

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JESSI;

NANCY;

JESSI;
NANCY;

JESSI;
NANCY;

So how did you think of students’ language use,
before,
participating last year in SKILLS?
..
Um,
..
Gosh I don’t even know.
Um.
..
I think one thing,
it’s really made me think a lot about is?,
kind of this idea of professional or formal language?,
[Mm]
[and] how a lot of students,
they may have never been exposed?,
M[hm.]
[to] it,
And so I’ve kind of really—
kind of rethought—

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98 Jessica Love-Nichols

20
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JESSI;
NANCY;

JESSI;
NANCY;

been thinking about how um,
..
just looking at stu- each student’s background,
and trying to fi gure out and understand,
not only with their writing,
but also with their language?.
[Mm].
[As to where] maybe that gap is.
And like my expectation as a teacher?,
M[hm].
[How] much training or help might they need.
With their language,
and what they’re expected,
because they honestly.. might not know?,
what’s expected in a professional setting?,
if they’ve only..
I mean if their main contact,
you know,
maybe at home it’s always informal language.

Throughout her response, Nancy draws on ideologies that are characteris-
tic of a defi cit orientation to linguistic variation (e.g., they may never have been
exposed , line 15; where that gap is , line 27). Yet she also uses colorblind strategies
to delink her students’ supposed language defi cit from their racialized linguis-
tic variety, an approach she characterizes as a positive change from her previ-
ously held ideologies before her participation in the SKILLS program. Instead
of presenting her students’ home language as “bad” or “broken,” or portraying
her students as inherently incapable of using “appropriate” language, she says
that they may simply not have seen “professional” or “formal” language (line
12) and hence “they honestly might not know what’s expected in a profes-
sional setting” (line 34). By framing her evaluation of students’ home language
with respect to setting, Nancy also draws on colorblind discourses that con-
ceal the problematic underlying nature of her focus on context. Although her
affective investment in her students’ success is clear, by constructing students’
home language as “always informal” (line 38) and therefore inappropriate for
the classroom, Nancy elides the racialized nature of what can be seen as appro-
priate for the classroom and reinforces harmful ideologies about marginalized
varieties.

In the next example, Nancy continues to refl ect on the link between students’
home language and how they speak in school, revealing further the defi cit ori-
entation underlying the ideology of formality. Before the example begins, I have
asked Nancy how participating in SKILLS changed her view of student language,

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“There’s No Such Thing as Bad Language” 99

and she becomes slightly more direct, although she still draws on colorblind terms
to code her evaluations.

(2)

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NANCY;

JESSI;
NANCY;

I mean they honestly might not know,
that a certain way to speak,
or using slang is maybe inappropriate in that setting.
Right.
But for some of these kids,
maybe they don’t have good examples at home,
because
..
um,
you know parents’ language is not—
maybe the same at home,
as they’re using in those other environments,
or um,
it’s not as formalized because of lack of education.

In this response Nancy focuses further on students’ home language or variety
as the root cause of their “inappropriate” speech in school (line 3), saying they
might not “have good examples at home” (line 6) and attributing this linguistic
lack in turn to a “lack of education” (line 14). Importantly, Nancy refers to dif-
ferent home languages as well as different varieties of English: She notes that
“parents’ language is not—maybe the same at home” (lines 10–11) (she later
refers explicitly to Spanish as the language of the parents of many of her students),
and she also mentions that parents’ language is “not as formalized because of lack
of education” (line 14), implying that they may use a “nonstandard” variety of
English. While these statements are fairly direct examples of a defi cit orientation,
Nancy also draws on ideologies of appropriateness, mentioning the importance
of “setting” (line 3) and “environment” (line 12). Here Nancy’s clarifi cation of
her earlier response in Example 1 makes explicit the link between underlying
defi cit-oriented thinking and the ideology of formality, as well as showing the
importance of formality as an ideological building block in larger discourses of
appropriateness.

The next example illustrates a different teacher’s similar, if more masked, ver-
sion of the ideology of formality. At the time of my interview with Julie, the
SKILLS program had not yet started and Julie had only received a brief orienta-
tion to the program. During the interview, she constructed herself as knowledge-
able about linguistics, however, mentioning that she had taken three linguistics
courses as an undergraduate as part of her teacher training and using technical

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100 Jessica Love-Nichols

linguistic terms such as code . In Example 3 I ask Julie about her views on student
language use (the same question to which Nancy responds in Example 1). Unlike
the other teachers, Julie interpreted this question as asking about her philosophy
of teaching language use.

(3)

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JESSI;

JULIE;

JESSI;
JULIE;

JESSI;
JULIE;
JESSI;
JULIE;
JESSI;
JULIE;

JESSI;

JESSI;
JULIE;

Um, okay so,
how do you think about students’ language us:e.
Um, the way that I always approach it in my classroom,
is um,
students need to not only be fl exible thinkers?,
they need to be fl exible speakers,
Which means they always have to know their audience and purpose,
[Mkay].
[So we] talk a great deal about that,
and we do—
already had some initial discussions of,
you know,
you don’t talk the same way to your friends,
that you talk inside a classroom,
Mhm.
You know the same way you don’t talk to your grandmother,
[Right].
[Um] that there is a switching that occurs.
[
2
Uh huh].

[
2
So there’s] no such thing as um.. bad language,

we talked about that cause kids [will slip],
[Mkay].

and use inappropriate words in the classroom,
Mhm.
but it’s.. the idea of context.

Julie produces an extremely fl uent explanation of her approach to students’
language use. She speaks rapidly, and her relative lack of pauses and hesitation
gives her response a rehearsed feel; it is possible, for example, that discussions of
student language were addressed in institutional professional development work-
shops she previously participated in. Julie begins by mirroring language found
in the Common Core standards for language arts, which state that students in
ninth and tenth grades should be able to “present information, fi ndings, and sup-
porting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow
the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are

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“There’s No Such Thing as Bad Language” 101

appropriate to purpose, audience, and task ” (California Department of Education
2013: 69; added emphasis). Julie uses exact wording from the standard—“they
always have to know their audience and purpose” (line 7)—and the concept of
context to invoke ideologies of appropriateness, stressing the need for students to
be “fl exible speakers” (line 6) and to know what might be “inappropriate . . . for
the classroom” (line 22).

At the same time, Julie frames the language ideologies she invokes as part of a
larger, …