Week 8, Post 2B: My 2 Cents on "Balancing" Classroom Dialects

The Immersion Question
As sensitive an issue as this is, and as personally confused/divided as I am about it, my first reaction is to seek employment where this is not such a hot political topic.  My misgivings arise because, having taught ESL for a number of years, I've taught in classes that had both many languages and many dialects as well, and, while I made a conscious effort to validate the language and culture of each individual in my class, the focus of the course was on English immersion.  In fact, on a number of occasions, my more impatient pupils simply protested any discussion or acknowledgement of any language in the classroom beside (SE) English.  All this furor about Students' Rights to their home dialect appears to run counter to all the substantial research and pedagogy supporting language immersion in the L2.

The Justice Question
Beyond this, the issue of classroom justice comes up.  If I have five students who use AAVE at home, another five who speak Hmong, another five who speak Spanish, another five whose family are Cajun, etc., all of this takes the spotlight off of the subject at hand, and seems to turn it onto home dialects.  How are we to find the time to address all of these dialects?  I understand how ethnographic activities, or even private journals, could be a step toward satisfying the Students' Rights issue, but, to spend a lot of time on this seems foolhardy, since our schools are falling behind the task of education already.  To read prominent linguists suggesting anything like a "balance" smacks of the "equal time clause" of the FCC.  Anyone who's familiar with the many pressures already facing classroom teachers would likely find such "balance" of dialects impractical, if not ludicrous.

The Efficacy Question
Which brings up a most critical point.  While Signithia Fordham and friends decry the over-valuing of SE as anything beyond just another dialect, and while there's research to support the notion that badgering students about every grammar/pronunciation offense is counter-productive, still, I've yet to see the research that proves that, minority students who've been freed from the yoke of persnickity classroom SE transform into stellar students.  If this were the case, I feel the majority of educators would jump on that bandwagon today.  Bottom line: are we doing all of this to improve public relations or is this a proven way to improve SE acquisition?