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Critical language awareness offers one approach to communal justicing, an iterative and collective process that can address inequities in the disciplinary infrastructure of Writing Studies. We demonstrate justicing in the field's pasts, policies, and publications; offer a model of communal revision; and invite readers to become agents of communal justicing.
Introduction
In this essay, we take up John Duffy's challenge to Writing Studies scholars that despite the goals articulated in field-orienting documents such as the Frameworkfor Success in Postsecondary Writing and the Council of Writing Program Administrators' (WPA) Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, "we have yet to offer a common vision, a shared rationale for our work" (10). We1 argue that critical language awareness should shape our common vision. At the heart of every composition course is the production and assessment of language-based texts, and critical language awareness offers a proactive response to standard language ideologies and the negative consequences these ideologies have long authorized: ranking and sorting students in discriminatory ways. Contributing to ongoing efforts to disrupt the inertia of the discipline's discriminatory pasts, we advance a common vision for critical language awareness in writing assessment by revising the "Developing Knowledge of Conventions" section of the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. By sharing our thinking as well as its product, we aim to invite others to participate in similar projects of communal revision. We imagine these efforts as participating in communal justicing. the ongoing, iterative, and collective project of working toward justice.
Standard language ideologies have embedded injustice in many of the policies and publications that guide writing instruction and assessment. These ideologies privilege certain forms of language as "correct," "better," or "commonsensical." Privileged forms are codified and enforced as "standard," while the language varieties and discursive patterns of less privileged groups receive discrimination and ridicule. Critical language awareness enables instructors and their students to investigate and understand both how discourse operates and, in the words of Keith Gilyard, "how the dominant or most powerful discourse serves to regulate and reproduce patterns of privilege" (True, 142). This includes exploration of language change, historical processes of standardization, distinctions between descriptive and prescriptive grammars, and an awareness that terms like "conventions" are grounded in standard language ideologies.
Challenging standard language ideologies requires what we...