Everyday Language of Oppression

Everyday language of oppression is discrimination and inequalities based on differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, and sexuality. The authors of this piece, Mandy Suhr-Sytsma and Shan-Estelle Brown go into great detail about addressing everyday language of oppression in writing centers. The approach they seem to mainly focus on is how writing centers address oppression from tutor’s firsthand experiences in the writing center and their reflections about those experiences. The authors also seem to favor working with tutors to pay close attention to actual words used by individuals in the writing center to categorize whether they can be considered language of oppression. The authors then went on to set up focus groups to determine the cause of everyday language of oppression because all the tutors came from different backgrounds, race, and beliefs so they shared times when they became aware of a time of language oppression and how they handled it. From their results they came up with two lists to break it down one called “How Language can Perpetrate Oppression” and the second called “How Tutors and Writers can Challenge Oppression through Attention to Language.” One of the tutors claimed there needs to be a system or way to figure out how to conduct productive discussions of differences because the student may feel a different way than the tutor based on their language oppression, which are normal. Many of the reasons listed under the first list are very similar they all touch upon how the writers voice can create oppression without even being aware of it. The second list, “How Tutors and Writers can Challenge Oppression through Attention to Language” focuses mainly on how to combat the challenges we face as writes through our voice that can create oppression. In other words the second list is kind of a solution to the problems presented in the first list. Overall, the authors believe that the most effective way to suppress language oppression is to have tutors draw on their experiences and learn from them as the tutors did in these focus groups that created these heuristic groups.

Similar to the concepts discussed by Suhr-Sytsma and Brown the article “Students’ Right to their Own Language” emphasizes how each students writing style varies and that is due to their unique individuals and a tutor or another teacher figure can’t take that away individual. The article claims that being a nation that is proud of its diverse backgrounds we must be knowledgeable enough to attain and respect different dialects and writing styles. The article also hits on the fact that society expects English teachers to respect these different dialects however, jobs and occupations demand one particular dialect. “The real world” doesn’t respect these dialects. The article then goes on and claims that English teachers with the employability as well as the linguistic ability of their students. They say this because today employers think a person who is qualified to be an employee should be able to speak some form if not be fluent in the English language. They also believe spoken performance makes a difference in job performance. However the key to getting their students ready for employment starts with teachers understanding that spoken language is always primary and written language is secondary. In other words, a person can fluently speak a language but struggle in the written field and still be a valuable employee.