February 2011 - AAAL Resolution against Discrimination on the Basis
of Accented Speech
The American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) is a professional
organization of scholars and educators whose mission includes facilitating the
advancement and dissemination of knowledge and understanding regarding
language-related issues in order to improve the lives of individuals and conditions
in society.
The AAAL Executive Committee, at the recommendation of the Ad hoc
Committee on Advocacy, resolves to make it known that:
1. AAAL opposes the discrimination of teachers and students on the
basis of accent.
2. Established facts from applied linguistics or educational research,
rather than opinions or folk theories about language learning, should be
considered in the formulation of all education and language policies,
especially those policies affecting large populations of English language
learners (ELLs) and English teachers.
Research-Supported Positions
Knowledge grounded in sound and rigorous scientific research should be
considered in making language and education policies, especially those with farreaching consequences. With regard to policies that discriminate against ELLs
and/or English teachers on the basis of accented speech, AAAL presents the
following research-based facts for consideration:
1. All speech is accented. Any policy presupposing the underlying idea
that speech can be “unaccented” is misguided. Every single speaker,
regardless of language(s), has an accent. This is an unavoidable fact.
Further, from a linguistic standpoint, no one accent is inherently better
or worse than any other. Judgments about which accents are deemed
socially acceptable or unacceptable are rooted in and supported by
divisions within historical, social, and political contexts. The designation
of one accent as linguistically superior to another is not a practice that is
supported by research.
2. A particular accent is not an indicator of knowledge of a language.
Empirical studies of language acquisition yield similar results with
regard to predicting accent in a language—the older the learner when
acquisition of another language begins, the more likely it is that the
(s)he learner will have an accent that differs (to varying degrees) from
that of language-majority speakers.
3. Accent is not an indicator of the ability to teach a language. In fact,
those who have gone through the process of learning a second
language, English or otherwise, are often good teachers of the language
because they have undergone the complex process of discerning and
comparing the rules and patterns of the languages they use/know. This
fact can be readily observed when such teachers successfully teach
English grammar to monolingual English speakers.
4. Exposure to varieties of accented speech helps children learn.
Studies of language acquisition show that increasing a child’s exposure
to a larger variety of pronunciation facilitates the child’s acquisition of
language-specific linguistic patterns. In other words, exposure to
different forms of accented speech can help children internalize more
about the patterns of the language overall. In a classroom context,
children learning language benefit from exposure to a range of oral
accents.
5. Policies that nevertheless propose accent as an aspect of teacher
competence, such as those recently considered in Arizona, must at
minimum present criteria for assessing accent. In any case, such criteria
for measuring accent should be presented to the public and academic
communities to evaluate their scholarly soundness and appropriateness
for judging teacher competence.
Members of the AAAL AdHoc Committee on Advocacy who contributed to this
document include Fabiola Ehlers-Zavala, Jeff MacSwan, and Karyn Mallett. This
statement was drafted, in part, based on statements put forth by the Department
of Linguistics at the University of Arizona (May 26, 2010) and the Linguistic
Society of America (July 28, 2010).