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It’s been called academe’s last acceptable prejudice: that against rural, Southern students. And a new study supports that claim, suggesting that college students from Appalachia who speak a dialect feel made fun of or that they’re frequently corrected. Lead author Stephany Dunstan, the assistant director of the Office of Assessment at North Carolina State University, interviewed 26 students from rural, Southern Appalachia who attended an unnamed large research institution in the urban South. She asked about their experiences in college and their dialects, and performed vocalic analysis of several features typical to the Appalachian dialect. Many participants said they felt they had to work harder to prove to others on campus that they are intelligent and capable, “despite” their dialects, Dunstan said via email. “For some students this means that they code-switch (or change their speech) frequently or in some cases, categorically.”
Dunstan said a major implication of the study for faculty is to be “mindful in their courses that students of all dialect/language backgrounds are treated respectfully and feel comfortable using their own voices (for example, not feeling they must code-switch to a ‘standard’ variety to be taken seriously or respected).” It’s similarly important that faculty members who speak diverse dialects feel comfortable using them in class, so students hear them, she added.
The paper, called “Dialect and Influences on the Academic Experiences of College Students,” was recently published in The Journal of Higher Education.
