Preparing Teachers for Dialectally Diverse Classrooms

Scholarship on dialect diversity in classrooms has yielded two seemingly incompatible lines of research. Although numerous pedagogical approaches have been shown to provide productive alternatives to traditional responses to stigmatized dialects, research on public perceptions and teachers’ attitudes suggests that negative beliefs about stigmatized dialects and the students who speak them are deeply entrenched in U.S. society. The authors argue that teacher preparation grounded in socio-linguistic understandings of dialect diversity can help teachers develop productive pedagogical responses to students’ language choices. Drawing on previous research and their own work with teachers, the authors present a framework for preparing teachers for dialectally diverse classrooms. Recommendations include anticipating resistance, addressing issues of identity and power, and emphasizing pedagogical applications of sociolinguistic research.