"As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!"

The belief that educated people talk in complete, standard, syntactically integrated sentences is just wrong and ill informed. The concept of "sentence" as well as of "word" is a written language one. The "sound" system taught through phonics instruction never matches anyone's spoken language. The difference is that people with social and political capital get away with their "deviations," learn to adjust their language to the oral or written context, and are never made to believe that the way they talk is responsible for any failure to learn to read and write.

The issue of spoken language deviating from written language is one that came up last semester in Dr. George's Theories of Language course. It is something that has stuck with me since, and I thought about it again the other day when Dr. Jones asked us if West Virginians should be made to change the way that we speak. Language is such an important factor in the preservation of a culture. If we all begin speaking the same, we will lose something so vital to retaining diversity. As a student in English classrooms, throughout my education there has been little if any attention to the separation between written and spoken language by instructors. If a student asked why we had to learn grammar when that's not even how people talk, we would simply be told that that was how we were supposed to talk. Just as Purcell-Gates writes however, no one speaks in the same way that they write. This article made me think about why certain students would be considered less capable of learning english because of their spoken language even though everyone in the classroom speaks differently than they write. It seems that if a student speaks differently than the majority of the classroom, he is marginalized because the others do not realize that their language is deviant as well.