Published In
Education Sciences
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Subjects
Higher education -- Student success, Multilingualism, Applied linguistics -- Social justice
Abstract
In the context of changing demographics at regional universities (including our own), we highlight an ongoing project at our university that addresses the last area of acceptable bias in English-medium higher education: bias against speakers of other languages and non-standard dialects of English. We discuss the hegemonic aspect of the Standard Academic English used by default at most US institutions of higher education and its role in potential discrimination against users of languages other than English and dialects other than the Standard. Data from over 2000 surveys, 55 follow up interviews, and three focus groups from faculty, staff and students in the university community are being analyzed. Preliminary findings show pervasive ignorance of the nature of language variation and how that plays a role in continuing discrimination against those who use other languages and diverse varieties of English even in our very multilingual setting. We conclude by outlining next steps, including the development of onboarding materials for new faculty, staff, and students.
Rights
Copyright: © 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).
DOI
10.3390/educsci15010029
Citation Details
Hellermann, J., Santelmann, L., Mittelstaedt, J., Cowal, J., & Thorne, S. L. (2025). Welcoming Historically Under-Represented Groups in Higher Education Through Awareness of Standard English Ideology. Education Sciences, 15(1), 29. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15010029
Description
This article belongs to the Special Issue Promoting Linguistic Diversity in Higher Education.