Dialect awareness is an instructional approach that teaches basic sociolinguistic concepts to students with the purpose of increasing awareness of language variation and improving language attitudes. An example of this approach is the Voices of North Carolina (VoNC) curriculum developed by Jeffrey Reaser and
Walt Wolfram
Walt Wolfram ( ; born February 15, 1941) is an American sociolinguist specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in ...
. The VoNC curriculum consists of a video and week-long social studies unit for 8th graders in North Carolina. A pilot study found improved language attitudes among participants.
Dialect awareness teaching is composed of three general components:
# Building respect for different
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
s and
language varieties
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also known as a lect or an isolect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety.Meech ...
# Understanding basic
sociolinguistic concepts
# Practice
style-shifting from one language variety to another (typically from informal language to formal language)
Dialect awareness instruction may use the
contrastive analysis
Contrastive analysis is the systematic study of a couple of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies.
Second language acquisition
Contras ...
method to compare and contrast language features.
Dialect awareness instruction has been shown to increase instances of Standard English in academic writing.
The dialect awareness approach has been criticized for lack of attention to language and power issues; some researchers advocate for a critical language pedagogy
that explicitly deals with issues of linguistic prejudice, use of vernacular language varieties in education, and linguistic identity.
References
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Dialects of English