In her essay “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar,” Anne Curzan argues that the way schools teach English to students is fundamentally flawed, in that it insists invariably on a set of arbitrarily selected and enforced rules. According to Curzan, this type of language, which she refers to as Standard English, discorages interpretative and pedagogical thought in the field of language, and that teachers have a responsibility to foster questions about grammatical rules.
Curzan also questions why many people, including those who aren’t English professors, are resistant to variations from Standard English, even if they still understand the meaning of the sentence. As an example, she writes how several of her colleagues asked her to instruct her students to avoid using “they” in cases where the subject of a sentence is a singular person. After doing research, Curzan found that not only were there examples where “they” is a more suitable word to use than “he” or “her,” but the basis for such a rule was posited in a grammar book written in the eighteenth century. Curzan expresses her frustration that English grammar, unlike every other field of study, is locked to conventions that predate every living speaker of the language.
Additionally, there is a discriminatory aspect of Standard English. Nonstandard dialects and their speakers are immediately dismissed as incorrect, even if they are still comprehensible. Therefore, a single arbitrarily decided, form of English is inherently dismissive towards diversity and inclusion. To solve these problems, Curzan posits that teachers should allow their students greater freedom to choose the manner in which they speak and write, so that English can become a language that evolves with its people rather than being stuck in the past.
Source:
Curzan, Anne. “Says Who? Teaching and Questioning the Rules of Grammar.” PMLA, vol,124, no. 3, 2009, pp. 870–879. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25614330. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.
