Linguistic Diversity February 2016

Language Rights “The vast majority of the world's nations are at least bilingual, and most are multilingual, even if one ignores the impact of modern migrations.“ Prepared by the Committee on Social and Political Concerns Approved by the Executive Committee of the LSA Ratified by the membership of the LSA June stmt-language-rights.pdf

Linguistic Diversity Because it is seen and heard, it can effect the evaluation of candidates and faculty, even those who are “native” speakers of English.

Screening for Fluency  Language ‘proficiency’ screening is used to  Protect instructors from negative evaluations  Protect student learning “…the Arizona Department of Education and State Board of Education recently (in May 2010) directed Arizona schools to remove teachers who speak English with "heavy accents" from English Language Learner (ELL) classrooms…” arizona-teachers-english-fluency-initiative

Resolution on the Arizona Teachers' English Fluency Initiative Furthermore, exposure to different ways of speaking has been shown to help, and not hurt, students acquire language. It is therefore helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign- accented speech as a part of their education. arizona-teachers-english-fluency-initiative

English with an Accent “…a Ph.D. cannot render anyone accentless.” “…undergraduates are not very good at making such assessments (fair assessments of English proficiency)” “Depending on the slide projected, the students evaluated the same native speaker of U.S. English as having more or less of a foreign accent.” Lippi-Green, R. (2012)

Perception of Language “The distinction between "languages" and "dialects" is usually made more on social and political grounds than on purely linguistic ones.“ oakland-ebonics-issue