WHAT IS STUDENTS' RIGHT TO THEIR OWN LANGUAGE (SRTOL)?
The Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) resolution appeared in a special issue of College Composition and Communication in Fall 1974. The resolution, adopted by members of the leading organization in the field, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in April 1974 then reaffirmed in 2003 and 2014, responded to concerns over the stigmatization of multilingualism in the composition classroom.
Following the brief SRTOL resolution, the authors offer up a nearly thirty page rationale advocating for a diversity of dialects in the composition classroom, specifically for those students on the linguistic margins. Fifty years later, though SRTOL remains the official policy position of our largest professional organization, Standard Written English (SWE), also known as “academic writing,” still dictates college writing program outcomes nationwide and scholars and practitioners of writing continue to teach “this mythical monolith” (McIntyre, 2021) despite its contributions to the ongoing oppression of students of color. "Differences in dialects derive from events in the history of the communities using the language, not from supposed differences in intelligence or physiology. Although they vary in phonology, in vocabulary, and in surface grammatical patterns, the differences between neighboring dialects are not sufficiently wide to prevent full mutual comprehension among speakers of those dialects. That is to say, when speakers of a dialect of American English claim not to understand speakers of another dialect of the same language, the impediments are likely to be attitudinal. What is really the hearer's resistance to any unfamiliar form may be interpreted as the speaker's fault." |
"Since dialect is not separate from culture, but an intrinsic part of it, accepting a new dialect means accepting a new culture; rejecting one's native dialect is to some extent a rejection of one's culture. Therefore, the question of whether or not students will change their dialect involves their acceptance of a new–and possibly strange or hostile–set of cultural values." (SRTOL, 1974, p. 26) According to Prendergast (2003), “the Students’ Right statement did not emerge from a cultural void but was preceded and followed by many efforts by many literacy scholars to marry the causes of literacy research and teaching with racial justice” (p. 96). Smitherman (1999), a leading scholar of sociolinguistics and one of the authors of the resolution, suggests that the SRTOL statement was developed to redress educational policies that exclude historically marginalized people, particularly Black students, amid growing concern of the near obsession with correcting Black English in student writing (Prendergast, 2003; Smitherman, 1999).
Linguists and historians alike trace the roots of the CCCC’s 1974 SRTOL resolution to the socio-cultural and political circumstances following the Emancipation Proclamation through the Civil Rights Movement (Kynard, 2013; Smitherman, 1999; Parks, 2000). Since SRTOL’s adoption over five decades ago, the National Council of English Teachers has perennially adopted new statements to keep up with the evolving landscape of language studies in times of xenophobia and racial tension. The next section will discuss four of those communications: the CCCC’s “Guideline on the National Language Policy” (2108), “Statement on White Language Supremacy” (2021), “Statement on Ebonics” (2021), and its “Statement Black Linguistic Justice” (2021). |