Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Communicology, clip 7 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: Last semester my other course was a verbal communications course, so the focus was basically... how do we use language. Place via culture and language became actually quite relevant in that class because we were talking a lot about how does language define our identities, and how do we use language strategically... to be different kinds of people in different kinds of situations? And how does language link to identity? And so we had a number of interesting conversations about language here on the islands, about using Pidgin, about code switching with Pidgin and using Pidgin strategically. They had a reading on that... people talking about their experiences in the workplace... When would they use it? When wouldn't they use it? And what does it mean to use it? We spent awhile talking about language attitudes... How are different languages perceived and evaluated? What are kinds of attitudes towards pidgin? What does it mean to speak different languages, and what are the social consequences of speaking in different ways? That came back to place. That course had exams, and then it had a group project, and so they did a group project where they went out and collected data about some topic related to verbal communication... and one paper actually looked at language attitudes related to Pidgin... They recorded somebody doing a job interview, talking about...'Here's why I would be a good candidate for this job' in a very generic kind of way, not a specific job... and they had one in kind of Standard English... and one in... a local dialect, essentially. And then their project was that they played those for different people and asked them, you know, would you hire this person as a teacher, as a maintenance worker, as a CEO, as an etc... and compared the results.They were striking and depressing and highly statistically significant. Huge differences in terms of basically, what you would expect... which is when you have a local dialect, people say, yeah, you're fine to be a maintenance worker, and you're fine to be a janitor. We would definitely not hire you to be any kind of high status profession.