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Through the analysis and discussion of statements from students' assignments in a required language and literacy development course, this article explores white settler preservice educators' views of Indigenous English, a variety of English spoken by First Nations and Métis in Saskatchewan. In these reflective assignments, students report childhood and school experiences that that they understand as having informed their negative views of Indigenous English. As a result of course information that critically influenced their views of this English language variety, they also report feeling concerned with how ethically and democratically to negotiate language variation in their own future classrooms.
Language as Social Invention
Before beginning this class I used the term "proper English" all the time. It was the term my teachers used when referring to grammar and word usage in Language Arts. I did not realize that the English used when writing a paper or when wanting to sound professional was influenced by anyone; I just assumed it was the way I was expected to speak. (Student 1, 2008)
Viewing English through a postcolonial lens means understanding English language varieties such as Indigenous English not as a rejection of "correctness," but rather as a reconstitution of languages "in more inclusive, ethical, and democratic" ways (Canagarajah, 1999, p. 2). From this perspective, indigenized varieties of colonial languages function as counter-hegemonic discourses to "standard" varieties of English, Spanish, or French, to name but a few. A postcolonial view of English "provides for the possibility that, in everyday life, the powerless in post-colonial communities may find ways to negotiate, alter, and oppose political structures, and reconstruct their languages, cultures, and identities to their advantage" (p. 2). I offer this postcolonial view of English as an alternative to normative views of standard language and the linguistic othering they make possible. The view of language variation presented in this article derives from the understanding that "languages are social inventions that have emerged in the discursive spaces of colonial and postcolonial times' (Clemente & Higgins, 2008, p. 22).
Ideology is a term used in academic writing in a number of possible ways. Canagarajah's (1999) definition, which I use in this article, sees ideologies as our socially constructed views of the world, which in turn produce discourses that "are...