Department Feedback Policy for Dialect Variation vs. Standard Written Norm
Lincoln High's Portuguese department serves 180 students, most of Portuguese, Brazilian, or Cape Verdean heritage. Before a district-wide writing assessment scored by outside raters on a standard-written-Portuguese rubric, the team meets to standardize feedback. Three sentences from student journals are on the table:
- "A gente vamos sair cedo amanhã."
- "Tu vai gostar da festa."
- "Eu vi ela na festa da igreja."
One teacher wants all three marked as errors in every context, including journals. A second argues that marking them tells students their families' Portuguese is wrong, and that (1) and (2) are simply how people speak in the neighborhood. A third proposes marking only in formal essays but has no plan for what students should be told about the external assessment. The chair wants a written policy with a rationale and three concrete classroom practices, to be adopted before the assessment window opens in five weeks.
1. Classify each of the three sentences linguistically. Which are dialect/register features, which are nonstandard agreement, and which are prescriptive prohibitions? Explain what each classification implies for marking.
Read the worked answer
The three sentences are not the same kind of object, and treating them identically is the policy error.
(1) "A gente vamos" - a gente is standard and takes a third-person singular verb (a gente vai). "Vamos" arises by analogy with nós, and it is nonstandard in every written norm, including Brazilian. The correct target is the agreement, not the expression: a gente itself must never be marked wrong. This is a genuine written-norm error and belongs in formal-writing feedback.
(2) "Tu vai" - tu with a third-person singular verb is a well-attested variable pattern in Brazilian speech, and Portuguese usage has tu vais. It is a dialectal/register variant, not a cognitive error and not a grammatical impossibility. In formal writing the student must pick one coherent paradigm: tu vais (or você vai). Mixing tu with você agreement inside one text is the thing to correct.
(3) "Eu vi ela" - Brazilian speech overwhelmingly uses the subject pronoun in object position; the standard written norm requires the clitic vi-a, which is normal in European Portuguese speech as well. This is a register/prescriptive matter: mark it in formal writing, explain why, and do not describe it as broken Portuguese.
So: (1) mark always in writing; (2) mark only as paradigm consistency; (3) mark only in the formal register, with explicit contrastive instruction.
2. Draft the policy. What is marked where, and what rationale do you give students and parents?
Read the worked answer
A three-tier policy, stated in one page and posted in every classroom:
Tier 1 - Journals and quick writes: no grammar marking. Teacher responds to meaning and occasionally recasts a form in the margin without a grade. Rationale: journals exist to build fluency and willingness to write; marking them for norm compliance teaches avoidance.
Tier 2 - Formal essays and the district assessment: standard written Portuguese. Students are told exactly which norm is being scored and why: the outside raters use a published standard-written-Portuguese rubric, and students deserve to know the rules of the game rather than discover them in a score report. Target forms are taught explicitly, not just circled: a gente vai, tu vais / você vai, vi-a / vi ela.
Tier 3 - Oral work: no correction of dialect features. Correct only what blocks intelligibility or what the task targets (e.g., a formal presentation register).
The rationale to families must name the norm as a register, not as correctness: "We are teaching your child to add formal written Portuguese to the Portuguese they already speak, the same way English class adds academic English." That framing is accurate - every one of the three sentences is comprehensible and rule-governed - and it removes the objection that the school is calling family speech defective. It also protects teachers: the policy specifies context, not personal preference.
3. The second teacher's concern is real: students who are corrected harshly disengage. What three classroom practices would you build into the policy to address it while still preparing students for the external rubric?
Read the worked answer
Register-contrast lessons, not error hunts. Take one sentence and rewrite it across three registers: a text to a cousin, a letter to the principal, a news lede. Students see that Eu vi ela is not wrong, it is informal, and that the formal version is a tool they control. Contrast beats correction because it gives students a choice rather than a verdict.
Name the norm out loud, every time. Say "in standard written Portuguese" rather than "correctly." When the class knows the label refers to one register among several, a red mark on an essay no longer reads as a judgment on the family.
Teach the formal forms as content, with the same rigor as vocabulary. If vi-a and tu vais will be scored by outside raters, they need direct instruction, modeling, and low-stakes practice - not just a circled error on a graded draft. A student who has never been taught the clitic paradigm and is penalized for missing it has been treated unfairly, and that unfairness, not the correction itself, is what drives disengagement.
Add a monitoring habit: once per quarter, check whether the same students are receiving the same marks repeatedly. Persistence of a feature is information about instruction, not about the student's Portuguese.