Enduring Patterns: Standard Language and Privileged Identities in the Writing Classroom.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the indexicality (the ideological process that links language and identity) of “standard” edited American English (SEAE), revealing common patterns that associate privileged, white students with standardness and disassociate marginalized—especially African American—students from SEAE. Importantly, this project argues that SEAE both signals identity and is rhetorically constructed as linguistically neutral. Throughout this project, I examine the presence, perpetuation, and production of ideologies related to language, standardness, and privilege—specifically standard language ideology (SLI) and whiteness—in instructors’ talk about student writing. These ideologies simultaneously justify the indexicality of SEAE and work to position SEAE as linguistically neutral, a positioning that masks the troubling indexical patterns described in this dissertation. Drawing on interviews with composition instructors about their readings of anonymous student texts, this project suggests that indexicality and standardness are mutually informative: the non/standard features of student texts operate as indexicals for student-author identities just as perceived student-author identities influence the reading of a text as non/standard. Additionally, this dissertation analyzes standard language discourse, the discursive production and manifestation of SLI, in order to better understand the rhetorical construction of linguistic neutrality. I argue that identifying and interrogating SLD allow for a critique of not only the perceived neutrality of SEAE but also SLI. Ultimately, this dissertation offer inroads to challenging SEAE’s indexicality and perceived neutrality, both of which offer unearned privilege to some students at the expense of others and, in the process, perpetuate race- and class-based privilege.