How Linguistic Racism Impacts ESL and ELL Classrooms

For years, I delivered English pronunciation training programs in Brazil. Seeing as many English language learners feel they need "perfect pronunciation", I designed pronunciation programs that would help learners understand a little about phonetics so they could feel confident about their pronunciation and consequently feel better about their English speaking.

I used to start the training with minimal pairs and vowel sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Later, learners would go through intonation training, which would include how native English speakers create "liaisons" and "clusters". In fact, pronunciation was hard for students and did impact on their overall confidence to speak. The programs were effective in achieving the goal of helping students learn phonetics and incorporate native-like pronunciation patterns.

Later in life, I'd realize that most well-known language programs, including the one I had created, consciously or unconsciously standardize certain accents. This is problematic due to the fact that English has become a world language. Yet US-centric and UK-centric approaches still perpetuate the fallacy of right/wrong accents. Perhaps the term US-centric should not even be used, since the United States is, in fact, a nation of immigrants. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say the notion of "right" or "neutral" accent stems from the idea that sounding white is correct--and that any other variety of accent is wrong and needs to be corrected. That is cruel.

There was no better place for me to dive into studies about linguistic racism than Harvard. Yes, it is true that having a white-sounding accent may give one privilege, especially when it comes to getting a position in the US marketplace. However, at what cost? Probably at the cost of excluding Black and non-native English speakers with their original accents in interviews. My mind shifted completely, and this has been one of the best learnings over the past few years.

At the end of the day, English learners will feel confident when they can communicate well and when they can authentically engage in English-speaking environments. Ideally, they will feel confident when they can speak with native English speakers on equal footing.

To conclude, I have two main questions that have been guiding me as I strive to design language learning that respects and celebrates differences.

1. How might we help English language learners speak "on equal footing" with native English speakers?

2. How might we use listening training strategies to foster inclusion and confidence instead of focusing on any sort of accent training?

While I do not have perfect answers to any of these questions, I will trust the cyclical nature of design processes to keep informing and improving my language learning design decisions.