Children seamlessly shift their ways of speaking, adopting and adapting language they hear spoken by adults around them, as well as constructing their own variants. These speaking styles play an important role as children experiment with who they want to be, and how they want to be perceived. They also allow children growing up in situations where different dialects or languages are in contact to mark their affiliation to dominant and minority ethnic, racial, and gender identities.

Young people who move between marginalized and mainstream communities often report code-switching as a way to maintain affiliation with their home community, while also making their way in a world where the standard dialect is associated with various kinds of success. However, moving back and forth may lead to what Ogbu (2008) has called “oppositional culture” to describe how school systems may inadvertently set up a situation where the student feels the need to define her identity contra the expectations of the school, and for that reason to refuse the dialect that the school insists on.

 Unfortunately, language technologies, including and very persistently, educational technologies, may inadvertently carry negative stereotypes about ethnicity and how it is carried in language, leading to stress and lack of a sense of agency as children try to navigate a path that allows them to benefit both from the support of their community and the opportunities offered by mainstream education. 

My students and I have examined this issue by building “culturally-aware” educational language technologies, and specifically  “virtual peers” that either speak only the child’s own dialect, or that model a code-switching strategy between what linguists call low-prestige and high-prestige dialects. Results using a variety of methodological approaches, in both one-shot and longitudinal studies, demonstrate the positive impact of technology such as these that take issues of culture, and of power, into account on children’s school performance. On the other hand, careful assessments of the children’s reactions to the technologies shows that they will need further development  to improve the children’s own internalized biases against low-prestige dialect speakers.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is an important agenda across every field throughout the world. Language as a major part of communication should be inclusive and treat everyone with equality. Today’s large internet community uses language technology (LT) and has a direct impact on people across the globe. EDI is crucial to ensure everyone is valued and included, so it is necessary to build LT that serves this purpose. Recent results have shown that big data and deep learning are entrenching existing biases and that some algorithms are even naturally biased due to problems such as ‘regression to the mode’. Our focus is on creating LT that will be more inclusive of gender, racial, sexual orientation, persons with disability. Over the past few years, systems have been developed to control online content and eliminate abusive, offensive or hate speech content. However, people in power sometimes misuse this form of censorship to obstruct the democratic right of freedom of speech. Therefore, it is imperative that research should take a positive reinforcement approach towards online content that is encouraging, positive and supportive. Until now, most studies have focused on solving this problem of negativity in the English language, though the problem is much more than just harmful content. Furthermore, it is multilingual as well.