“Wogs, westies and writing in Western Sydney" : the reappropriating of labels and the teaching of academic English

Students and educators at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) have long had to confront issues of social isolation-division: geography, migration, class, welfare-capital inequities, wide variations in English-language competence and accent, and lower than national-average educational backgrounds. Various offensive labels have been invented, or re-applied, by the wider community to refer to the people who live in the suburban areas serviced by this university. These labels are symbolic of much deeper social divisions, but they can also be seen as derogatory referents to people with low social –including linguistic - capital. A new, linguistics-based approach to the teaching of Academic English at UWS seeks to reverse the stigma of offensive labelling as an impediment in the pursuit of literacy, motivation and, ultimately, social empowerment. Indeed, it may very well be true that, for many of these students, the perceived deficiencies in capital are actually linguistic and cognitive advantages which directly assist in their apprehension of the academic register of English.