In a previous blog entry, Teaching Vocabulary Is ”Racist,” Says British Professor Who Trains Future Teachers, I linked to a Daily Mail article about Dr. Ian Cushing [Email him], a British professor who trains teachers.
The Daily Mail article was entitled Schools branded ’racist’ for trying to improve pupils’ vocabulary because tackling the ’word gap’ between middle and working class children ’has colonial roots.’
Dr. Cushing swiftly responded to the Daily Mail article, tweeting that
This new Daily Mail article wins the prize for the worst take on my word gap research. Only they could do such a good job of misrepresenting the work and perpetuating deficit ideologies. I’m proud to join a long line of anti-racist voices who rile up the right-wing press.
They asked me for a comment, which they ignored. This was: “There is nothing wrong with the teaching of vocabulary. It is problematic when the teaching of vocabulary is framed as a single solution to broader structural inequalities, which mainstream word gap narratives do”.
OK, but I don’t know of anybody who claims that just teaching vocabulary is going to solve all our society’s social problems. Nevertheless, schools should teach vocabulary.
A Dr. Cushing article from last summer goes into a lot more detail on his worldview. It’s entitled Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy, by Ian Cushing, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, July 25, 2022.
What, you might ask, is ”raciolinguistics”?
The Wikipedia definition is ”Raciolinguistics examines how language is used to construct race and how ideas of race influence language and language use.”
Dr. Cushing’s explanation from his article:
Raciolinguistic ideologies represent beliefs about language tethered to European colonialism and its ongoing legacies, within which low-income and racialized speakers’ language practices are perceived as deficient, incomplete, and indeed, full of gaps when compared against the language practices of the idealized white middle-classes. Schools are a key space where raciolinguistic ideologies get turned into practices – such as through word gap interventions which position teachers as linguistic remediators whose role is to fix linguistic deficiencies by filling holes where there are ”absences.”
You get the drift. Dr. Cushing says the Daily Mail distorts his teaching, and that he really doesn’t say that it’s bad to teach vocabulary. But when you read his stuff, it sure sounds like he thinks teaching low-income and minority students vocabulary is bad because it implies there is a standard way to speak English which they need to learn, and that’s bad.
Here’s how Cushing begins his article’s abstract:
Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England’s education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called ”word gap.” This article conceptualizes the word gap as a realization of raciolinguistic ideologies in which the language practices of racialized, low-income and disabled speakers are characterized as deficient, limited, and indeed, full of gaps because they fail to meet benchmarks designed by powerful white listeners.
The final paragraph in Cushing’s article leaves us no doubt where he stands:
A raciolinguistic perspective pushes us to seek a radical transformation of institutions to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism, in the rejection of ideologies which maintain the power of the white listening subject and the onus it places on minoritised speakers to modify the way they talk. Emerging frameworks such as Crip Linguistics (Henner & Robinson, 2021) and critical disability studies more broadly also push us to think about how the word gap is rooted in ableist conceptualizations of language which frame disabled people’s communication as ”less than” because they are deemed to not conform to normative modes of language practiced by able-bodied communities. In education systems such as England, which are characterized by an increasing level of state power and surveillance, it becomes urgently important to challenge word gap ideologies which exacerbate social inequality under seemingly benevolent guises of empowerment and social justice.
