Download PDFHow I Advocate for Linguistic Justice
I would like to preface this by saying I am still a GSI with some experience under my belt and a lot of progress to make going forward. As a white woman, I recognize that my perspective is shaped by privilege and positionality. My goal through this research and going forward has been to listen, learn, and do my part to amplify student voices, challenge linguistic biases, and foster a space where all forms of expression are valued. I do not view myself as an authority on linguist justice. Rather, I see my role as one of allyship and accountability. I don’t claim to have nailed it on the head just yet, but I do have enough experience to confidently share what I’ve done so far, or plan to do in my next semester teaching. I’ll offer a few moves that have worked for me, but first, I want to explain the main factors that impacted my decision and implementation.
The context of where I have been teaching has played a huge role in my decision, with 60+ % of students speaking a second language as of Fall 2024. Another deciding factor for me was how much I wanted to change the course content and assignments from the content given to me when I started teaching. As a GSI with limited time and experience, I ultimately decided to sprinkle a bit of linguistic diversity throughout the semester rather than hitting it hard and changing the overall course. Similarly, I haven’t entirely picked one method or another, but blend bits and pieces of each, usually leaning toward translingualism based on our student body.
The first thing I have done to set the tone for the class is explain my research interests and my “get-to-know-me” presentation on the first day. I spend a little time talking about other things, but highlight linguistic diversity, explaining that this is one topic I will advocate for in this class. Because so many students speak other languages at my university, their ears are usually perked.
A few days after that introduction, the class dives into the first major project, a personal narrative. In this assignment, I ask students to write in the first person about a story that taught them a life lesson. I emphasize that I want to hear their voices and see dialogue that matches the setting and people involved. They can choose to code-mesh or, blend languages, or even stick to SAE if that’s the honest representation. This assignment not only helps me get to know them and hear their voices, but also proves to them that using authentic language can be really powerful in conveying stories and making their messages stand out in a crowd. The students in my class start the semester by learning how to represent themselves and their ideas as true to reality as they would like.
I am often shocked to see the difficulty students go through when trying to leave the boundaries of the Standard Academic English (SAE) that has dominated their education up to this point. It showed me that education, as it is now, has been preparing them for standardization rather than individualization. More than once, students have commented that this is the first time they have ever been allowed to write the way they sound. This personal narrative assignment has been a class favorite every semester for numerous reasons, including the linguistic freedom it affords to students.
As the semester progresses, the department requires research-style papers and advocacy papers. While language often comes secondary to teaching information literacy, I use these opportunities to show my students how to write for real audiences, using their identity as ethos builders, and using their language to their advantage, no matter the genre. It’s all about teaching them the tools and giving them the power and safety to play and experiment, reflecting along the way. Despite talking about language as a tool, I have yet to have a student break the bounds of SAE for the research paper, although they will experiment more with the follow-up advocacy paper. The roots of this could be that they are overwhelmed with the research genre itself and are more concerned with completion rather than style (which is my guess) or that they don’t feel confident applying linguistic diversity for any number of reasons. While I can’t do much to negate the first concern, the second concern suggests that I may need to work harder to demonstrate how language variety can successfully appear in academic genres.
The third application is one I recently learned about at CCCC 2025, and I can’t wait to apply in the future: how AI uses SAE. By showing students how AI takes away individualized style and replaces it with the most straightforward synonym, teachers can also exemplify how voice and diversity disappear. Even when AI is asked to take on the voice of a certain linguistic variety, it usually creates some stereotypical response rather than an authentic replication of that language style. Because teaching ethical AI use is a cornerstone of my class, this will be a natural way for me to implement linguistic diversity into something I already use.