Understanding Language
Dean
I notice that my friend Ben Kepple (along with some other bloggers) is bringing up the subject of Ebonics, and subjecting it to a sound thrashing. As I have mentioned here in the past, I find this attitude rather unfortunate.
Perhaps it's just the catchy phrase "Ebonics" that puts people off, but I think it may be more than that. In any case, somehow this concept caught political fire almost a decade ago, and nothing seems more likely to get most people's ire up faster than bringing this subject up. The objections are always the same: it's poor English, it's ungrammatical, it's illiterate, it's stupid.
The funny thing is, it's hard to find anyone who dissents from this view. Whenever I bring it up I am almost inevitably in the minority. Because I say, "No it is not stupid, it is not ungrammatical, it is not backwards. It is perfectly valid language, and by refusing to acknowledge that, you're holding kids back from learning better Standard English."
I say I'm almost always in the minority when I say this, but there is one group among which I am not in the minority--and it's not black people by the way. Black people are often the most vociferous critics. No, the group that sides with me is that group of scientists known as Linguists. Linguists have nearly universally recognized what they call "Black Vernacular English" (or "African American Vernacular English) for generations. Indeed, Black Vernacular English is as uncontroversial among Linguists as it is uncontroversial among physicians that there is such a thing as "Type AB- blood." If you get very deep into the subject you'll find there are subtleties there, and debates around the edges--some will quibble over whether it should be sub-categorized as a patois or a vernacular for example--but in any case it's just not controversial at the core. Nor is it a political statement.
Simply put, so-called "Ebonics," which is also called "Black Vernacular English" (sometimes abbreviated BVE, or AAVE for "African-American Vernacular English), or sometimes called "Soul Talking" or "talking black" is a regularized language with its own quite consistent rules, grammatical constructions, and traditions. It is no less a language than the Cajun Creole of Louisiana, the Afrikaans language of South Africa, or the Tok Pisin language of New Guinea. It has its roots primarily in English, but has developed in parallel, with its own unique roots and influences.
The most important thing that marks BVE as a language (rather than just "illiterate English") is the fact that it is regularized. It shares consistent structures among its speakers, and can be both taught and understood by practically anyone who wants to take the time to learn it--and it is, by the way, no easier to learn than any other language. If you already speak standard English you'll have a strong head start on it--but no moreso than you will have a strong head start on Spanish if you already speak Italian.
Almost no one likes hearing this. They always get mad at me whenever I bring it up. I find this most remarkable because, once again, it's a subject that is entirely uncontroversial among scientists who actually study language for a living. I also find it remarkable because it seems independent of political persuasion or even race--indeed, some of the angriest people to deny that there is any such language as Black Vernacular English are black.
Mind you, black linguists find it unremarkable. But outside the field, people often practically turn purple when you bring it up.
There is a reason why this disturbs me. It's because refusal to deal with this rationally does a lot to keep young black kids from becoming proficient in Standard English.
That's right: I said refusal to recognize Ebonics retards black children's ability to learn Standard English. At least, it hurts the kids in inner-city areas like Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago... or Oakland. Some kid who grew up in the suburbs in areas dominated by the predominant tongue (i.e. "grow up talking white") have no trouble of course. But for the kids in the inner cities, this refusal to deal rationally with language by the adults hampers their reading and writing skills in Standard English.
Let me really, really emphasize this, so I'm making myself very clear: it is refusal to acknowledge this language that lowers reading and writing ability in Standard English. You with me? You get what I'm saying? This isn't touchy-feely "help their self-esteem" crap. It's about how the human brain works, and the best way to teach a child how to read and write.
The world is full of non-standard languages. French, German, English, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and every other major language has related variants which are looked down upon by the dominant culture as "stupid" or "ungrammatical" or "illiterate." But if they are carefully studied it usually comes to be found that they are not stupid or ungrammatical, they simply follow a set of rules different from the dominant tongue.
Here's the greater frustration: study after study has shown that children who grow up hearing and speaking these non-standard tongues often suffer lifelong problems because they have trouble in school. They can usually understand their teachers well enough, but have a great deal of trouble understanding what their teachers are telling them about reading and writing and speaking, because it doesn't match anything they encounter in real life (except maybe TV shows). Sometimes it just confuses them and they think they're stupid. Other times it gets them mad and resentful as Hell at teachers and others who speak the "straight" language of the dominant culture.
Note that this what you get almost any time you have a non-standard variant of a language butting up against a more dominant variation of that language. We see it across cultures, across continents, and across races, in language after language after language.
In America some blacks call the dominant tongue "talking white" and they often resent it or are just plain frustrated by it. Meanwhile, those who are trying to "help" them seem to think that by mere force of repetition they can make the kids "speak properly."
It's not unlike the tourist who goes to a foreign country who think she can make herself understood better by TAL-KING VER-Y LOUD-LY AND SLOWWWW-LY!!!!
The tragedy of this is that study after study, in language after language, has shown that this problem is fairly easily overcome in the classroom. What you do to teach kids who grow up with a non-standard language is:
1) You teach the teachers how to understand the non-standard dialect and to be comfortable with it,
2) You train the teachers so that they teach the children how to differentiate the dialect they speak at home from the standard language used for business and interaction with the wider society. In short, the kids are taught the "formal tongue" in a compare and contrast way, so they can easily switch between the two whenever they need to, and
3) You reinforce this learning by allowing the children to give answers to questions in their own mother tongue, but then consistently challenge them to also rephrase the answer in the standard tongue, so they become comfortable with it.
Once again: study after study, across language after language, culture after culture, has shown that this helps kids improve their flency and literacy in the mainstream tongue, and that they do much better than kids in classrooms where teachers refuse to recognize their mother tongue and constantly "correct" them by telling them that the way they speak at home and with their friends is "wrong" or "ungrammatical" or "improper" (or "stupid").
For a good paper on the subject, see sociolinguist John Rickford's Using The Vernacular To Teach The Standard. Read it carefully and note just how much kids' reading and verbal skill scores go up on programs using this compare-and-contrast method. Note also that, once again, it's not just about American black kids, but kids of all races and cultures who grow up learning a different, non-standard tongue at home. You might also want to spend some time at the Center for Applied Linguistics reviewing their materials.
There is an urban legend that is pervasive in American society. This urban legend goes like this:
In the 1990s a school district in California announced that they would begin teaching "Ebonics" in the classroom. The kids would be taught this non-standard language, given lessons in it, and taught to regard it as equal to English.
Still to this day most people believe that there was such a program to "teach Ebonics to children." But it never existed. It is an urban legend, one of the most widely sprad urban legends in America.
Instead, what actually happened is that the Oakland, CA school district decided that, based on reams of research on non-standard languages, and with the full support of the Linguistics community, they would put in place a program that had been successful in improving children's reading and writing scores in Standard English. They would:
1) Teach the teachers how to understand the non-standard dialect of the children, so they would be comfortable with it,
2) Train the teachers so that they would teach the children how to differentiate the dialect they spoke at home from the standard language used for business and interaction with the wider society. In short, the kids were to be taught the "formal tongue" in a compare and contrast way, so they could easily switch between the two whenever they needed to, and
3) Teachers would reinforce this learning by allowing the children to give answers to questions in their own mother tongue, but then constantly challenge them to also rephrase the answer in the standard tongue, so the kids would get comfortable with it.
The school district was pilloried nationwide by blacks and whites and hispanics and political commentators from all over the spectrum.
So of course they dropped the program. Apparently, most people preferred it if, when the kids spoke improperly, the teachers would correct them and tell them they were being ungrammatical and improper. And perhaps they thought the teachers should SPEAK VE-RY LOUD-LY AND SLOW-LY SO THE KIDS WILL UN-DER-STAND BET-TER.
So tell me. Do you really think think we're all better off with this "Black Vernacular English is just stupid and illiterate" mentality?
Related Posts (on one page):
- More On Language
- A Christmas Tale
- More Linguistics Thoughts
- Understanding Language
Good post, though.
I had assumed something along the lines of the "urban legend" you mentioned, even though all my information came from Newsweek. I'm not sure Newsweek said anything wrong, but they have that annoying MSM tendency to avoid giving details that allow the reader to actually understand the issue at hand, because what would the reader know anyway? And there's the Washington mentality that says that what's really important is what various people in Washington think about the issue.
My neighborhood is mixed, and I am used to hearing it a lot. Many that speak Ebonics can when they want to also speak proper english. I do have a problem with some, especially of the younger generation that don't care to learn, or in a few cases just don't "want to sound white". It could hold them back later in life in some areas of employment such as dealing with the public, or publilc speaking.
I have a close friend who uses both, and she understands, and agrees with my feelings on it. It is rather comical when I talk to her on the phone and she doesn't know it is me at first. She uses perfect english at first, but as soon as she knows that it is me she falls back into her more comfortable Ebonic way of speaking. She has also insured that her children can speak proper english. Mostly I suppose because she doesn't want a possiblility of it holding them back later in their life.
Well, part of that is caused by the attitudes I describe. The teachers the kids encounter, rather than simply recognizing that this is a different way of speaking, constantly "correct" them and tell them what they're saying is "wrong" instead of comparing and contrasting how they speak at home from Standard English. Rather than teaching them that it's different they insist that one is "wrong" and the other is "right" and the kids immediately see that as jive--no one they know talks like that. So they resent the teachers instead of learning from them, and it becomes very much an "us vs. them" mentality.
Get past that and the kids generally learn better. At least that's the findings of the studies.
By the way, people with southern regional drawls are equally viewed as stupid and illiterate. "White trash" or "redneck" is the phrase. It's the same classist, elitist instinct that defines black vernacular as stupid and ungrammatical (only people are less shy about expressing such sentiments).
As you explain it, and I have no doubt that it's accurate, Ebonics doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. But I think that as implemented in real-life public schools it would have quickly turned into just what the critics claimed it was, and done more harm than good.
Which is a damned shame. These programs have been used quite successfully with many other languages and in many regions around the world. Just look at the materials I linked, and do some more digging.
And seriously: can you be doing any WORSE than we're already doing in most of our inner city schools? They're doing such a splendid job now that there's no reason for any of them to even experiment with alternatives?
That's right. Over here in England our equivalent of the Southern drawl is the Birmingham accent. While there aren't many actual dialectic (is that a real word?) differences from, let's say, Queen's English, a 'Brummy' is commonly thought of as slow and stupid due to the lazy, flattened vowel sounds. I can't think of many Brummy celebrities to refer to (though, as a point of interest Enoch Powell, JRR Tolkien and William Shakespeare himself are all natives of the Midlands region), Ozzy Osbourne is a good example of the Brum accent. It's amusing to imagine that Shakespeare's works were originally played by actors who spoke like Osbourne. Ridiculous that may seem, but it tests the theory that 'A rouse boy any uther nyme wud smell as swoit'.
The dialect of my region, Manchester in the north west, is a particularly common (vulgar) one, and fortunately I suffer from only a mild case of 'Manc'. Manchester natives, especially our teens, are often referred to as 'scallys', 'townies' and 'chavs'. The Gallaghers from Oasis are typical Mancs.
Interestingly, the majority of the UK's telesales call centres are based in my region. Studies have shown that people are more likely to trust a Manchester accent than, say, a Scottish or southern (read: Hugh Grant) accent.
Interestingly enough there does seem to be just such a standard accent for newsreaders (what we call newscasters) here in the states. I've lived in several parts of the country and regardless of the regionalisms, the news readers almost always speak in the same accent, with a few local color exceptions here and there. I'm not sure most people are conscious of it but it's really fairly distinct and can be mimicked if you've got a good ear.
1) TV - there isn't one person in the U.S. not exposed to standard English. And poor children of any ethnicity watch more TV than others.
2) The age children are watching the most televison is the age when language is learned almost by default.
3) Kids are genuises when it comes to "working the system". I sub in some pretty tough schools, and believe me, the kids have trouble understanding: "Turn to page 24 and start doing the problems" but no problem at all understanding complex information about early dismissal, convocations, etc.
4) My German great-grandparents got on the boat and said, "From now on you will speak English." It was hard, but by the time they saw the Statue of Liberty they were pretty good at it. Most immigrant children have NO PROBLEMS with English because their parents won't stand for it. In the schools I visit, ALL the 2nd generation kids speak English. It's only the home growns that have trouble.
The speaker of RP would refer to all the rest as "having accents", as if he or she pronounced the language in some paradigm-pure, non-specific way.
All discussions of English accents have to get past Shaw's Pygmalion -- past Henry Higgins's line that "the moment an Englishman opens his mouth, another Englishman despises him".
BBC English is a soft, rather upper-class accent that evokes a sense of authority and respect with the average Brit, hence it's popularity in news broadcasting. It's a pleasant sound that plays well from John O'Groats to Land's End - essentially it bypasses Shaw's claim. The same applies in the US - From Oregon to Florida you'll hear the same accent on the newscasts.
Some children may game the system and pretend. Others are being short-changed if you don't challenge them appropriately.
The programs should be expanded I'd say. They really ought to be specialized by region.
Actually Dean, BVE is not a language, per se, but a dialect. That is, it is one of a class of 'Black English' languages. Blacks from NYC, for example, speak a BVE far closer to Brooklynese, or Lawn Guylandese, than they do to Los Angeleno BVE, or Alabaman BVE, or Chicago BVE. Minnesotan blacks also sound far more 'Minnesotan' than BVE, as do native black Texans sound more Texan. Creole, Gullan, Caribbean, Canadian, New England, Jamaica, and Guyanese, are more 'BVE' dialects, as well. Get a Guyanese BVE speaker in a room with a Canadian BVE'er and you'll see they're as related as Cantonese and Mandarin, or Welsh and Brittanese. DAN
What parts of the Adirondacks Dean? That's news to me growing up just south of them. I've heard people say there's an accent but no real dialect - unless excessive conversation about snowmobiles is considered a different dialect :).
Cosmo: Right, well, as I said, linguists will agree that there are all sorts of variations and arguments for interpretations. But I believe most of them are fairly universal in saying BVE is linguistically valid and not simply "illiterate" or "stupid" and that most variants of BVE have more in common with each other than they do standard English as taught in American public schools.
Saying that, why is it necessary for schools to teach in this language? Surely like anyone else Black students can learn Ebonics at home and learn proper English at school? That is how it works for most non-English speakers. My Cuban friends in Miami and their parents did it this way. (Sometimes this was a problem as older relatives did not or were not able to learn English and they were never really exposted to it.) My mother spoke French at home, but was schooled in English.
You need to be able to speak the mainstream language in any society you are living in. Children are perfectly capable of learning two languages at the same time.
On the point of the BBC: I know many English contemporaries who are rather sick of the BBC's regionalisation. Now it seems virtually everyone on the Beeb now speaks with a dialect. Some have such thick version is a wee bit hard to understand them, even for native Britons.
Again the studies show the kids learn the mainstream tongue better this way, and their reading and writing scores go up. And it's not just English, it's any tongue which has a very strong regional or ethnic variant. This has worked in many countries with many languages.
But there's another related problem that needs to be confronted as well. There is no country anywhere in the world in which multiple languages are spoken in which the speakers of one language don't dominate the other (or others) economically and socially. Since my ideal America is a pretty egalitarian one a single people speaking a single language is a component of that.
Increasingly there are societies in which people can get a fair shake regardless of race (note that I am not saying that things are perfect in that regard—I am saying that they are better). But the same kind of progress is not being seen in the area of language. So while that ideal America I'm talking about can easily be multi-racial I don't see it being multi-lingual.
Insofar as BVE is becoming a language (it's a dialect right now) that's not a trend in the direction of that ideal America I'm talking about. And, while I didn't have any problems with the BVE to SAE programs you're writing about, I do have a problem with any attempt to create a parallel BVE society-within-a-society just as I have a problem with educational programs that maintain a Spanish language society-within-a-society. And that some people do have agenda of this sort is clear. Listen for the occasionally-heard codewords “cultural genocide”. They're a dead giveaway.
Any such linguistically distinct communities will be separate and they will not be equal. I'm not saying it's what I want. I'm just saying it's the way things are.
A couple of years back I spent a summer in Melbourne, a few miles from the street on which the soap opera Neighbours (not sure if you have it in the US) is filmed. I've grown up with Neighbours, so it was almost a pilgramage for me. One night I met one of the stars, a guy in his late 50's/early 60s called Ian Smith, who plays Harold Bishop. Harold is one of the logest serving cast members, and has been on the daily show for almost 20 years (with a hiatus of several years when he almost drowned, washed up in Tasmania and suffered from amnesia before turning up again in the mid 90's - God, I love that show).
Anyway.. on the show Harold has quite an odd accent. It's almost BBC British with a very soft Aussie twang. You would assume that he was a fairly recent immigrant from the UK if you'd never met him before. So, when I met him it came as a surprise to hear that in real life he speaks with one of the strongest Victoria accents I've ever heard. I asked him which Aussie Rules Football team he follows, and he replied with 'Aussie Rules? Bunch a' puftas! Oi folla Ragby.' It's strange how a man's accent can shape your opinion of him.
The difference for me, of course, was that I was never told that my native language was "wrong". It was simply a different language, that was all. Now, as an adult, I speak fluent English with an American accent, and French with a French accent.
My experience doesn't entirely translate, since English isn't a varient of French (although I'm sure some 12th-century Normans and Saxons might have disagreed with me on that one). But it's a common experience for kids growing up overseas from their home country, or children of immigrants; and my understanding is that they do best if, like me, there's a clear separation between the languages. "We speak Spanish at home, and English at school." Plenty of immigrant kids have no trouble separating the two languages. If "Ebonics" (or whatever the correct term is) would get treated as a separate language, then it makes sense to me that it would work out the same way.
"The argument against Ebonics is similar to the argument for some against Yiddish. I read a complaint from a Rabbi that Jews in Miami were not learning proper Hebrew, but just using Yiddish instead."
Yiddish is related to German, COMPLETELY different than Hebrew, so this is a different issue (How many languages can you teach a kid?).
If I understand Dean, nobody is TEACHING kids BVE, because that's what they already speak. People want to teach IN BVE.
Now, the fear is that if you teach BVE as a legitmate dialect, or even if you teach, say, southern drawl (personal pronouns: me, you, he/she/it, we, y'all, they/them) as a legitimate dialect, that you will legitimize it and teach the kids that it's OK to use all the time, when it's clearly not. Would you prefer your doctor to say "pass me the scalpel" or "gimme da shank, homey G!"?
Can you imagine, Martin Luther King Jr, among the most respected African Americans of all time, using ebonics? No, his "I have a dream" speech was all standard English. Yes, it was given in the style of a black southern preacher, but it was standard English, recognizeable and powerful to someone outside of black culture.
It doesn't matter that the linguists say Ebonics OK or even that Ebonics is self-consistent. It's not socially acceptable among the elite of our society (and I mean elite in the good sense). Our society doesn't respect Ebonics, and so it's going to be very difficult to convince teachers to treat it as an acceptable dialect.
As for whether you understand me properly: no, you don't. You don't teach the kids in BVE. Did you not read my description? I thought I was very precise and descriptive. You DO NOT "teach the kids in BVE." That is the exact OPPOSITE of what you do. Read what I described again. Carefully.
Dave &Blog Jones: The problem with what you're saying is that BVE has been studied for well over a century. It is not "becoming" another language, it already exists whether it's recognized or not, and has existed for generations. You can't fake it either--either you know it or you don't. (Which is another reason it's wrong to say that it's just "illiterate." Bullshit. Those who speak it can spot a faker a mile away--because it's real, not just stupid or illiterate). This way of speaking is centuries old, and has evolved over time.
The real debate isn't whether BVE is real. It is. It's not about how to stamp it out either; the schools have been unsuccessfully trying to stamp it out by labelling it "ungrammatical" and "improper" for generations, and it isn't working.
Instead we usually have taught with a method that some kids can master but most can't. Because of that ineffective method they tend to reject standard English.
I can only repeat that if you look at the data I've linked--and I can give you more--if you want to teach kids more effective standard English, if you want them to read and write and speak Standard English better, you use the compare-and-contrast method. Which you can only do if you at least recognize the patois and have the ability to challenge the kids and make smart comparisons.
I would say that the bifurcation or fragmentation you're talking about is already in place. It's in the music, it's in the everyday culture on the street. Now do you want the young kids to learn better Standard English, or do you want them to keep thinking you're an ass for telling them that the way they and their families and friends all talk is just stupid and ignorant? That's how I see it anyway.
It's here. The question is how to get kids speaking and reading and writing Standard English better.
May I suggest that you post a transcript of a lesson using compare-and-contrast? I kinda think I know what it means, but I'm not sure. And I suspect that, if it means what I think, a lot of the debate here will fade away. We're arguing terminology and end goals here; but I'll bet that an actual lesson using compare-and-contrast will kinda look like plain old teaching, and won't be controversial at all. The labels and the marketing are confusing the debate.
And not freaking out because somewhere, somebody is teaching something to kids that you don't happen to agree with.
Iceland has taken the idea of preserving the sanctity of their language to the extreme. They won't let new words into the lexicon there. What do you call a telephone under those conditions? Officially, they use several words along the lines of "box with wires that you talk into". It's little wonder that english is increasingly the language of business there. When a language stops changing to meet the time, it's dead.
I personally would call ebonics a dialect, but I've heard of islands on the Atlantic coast where there are genuine languages spoken unique to very small portions of the population.
We all speak in different registers chosen by context. I use a completely different manner of speaking when I'm home in rural Alabama than I do when I'm making a sales pitch in front of Chicago executives. The Korean language is tough to learn because their registers are formalized as I understand it and like learning another language in each. Imagine having a different language for speaking to your kid and a respected elder.
You have to teach the standard language in the school for the future success of the kids because so much perception is tied to the manner of speech. Not having an "upper" register is like not owning a suit. But we should abandon the elitist concept that one is "speaking wrong" because he's using the best method of communicating in the peer group he's in. You look stupid wearing that suit in a swimming pool.
Your prescription is right on, Dean.
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Superintendent in conjunction with her staff shall immediately devise and implement the best possible academic program for imparting instruction to African-American students in their primary language for the combined purposes of maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language whether it is known as "Ebonics," "African Language Systems," "Pan-African Communication Behaviors" or other description, and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.
That is what caused the uproar. Maya Angelou, Jesse Jackson, educators and President Clinton including the US Senate all weighed in on the subject; not to mention the parents of non-black students in the school district.
In May of 1997 that part of the resolution was dropped and for good cause.
John Baugh, a professor of education and linguistics at Stanford University, called the changes an improvement. "There is a big difference between teaching black English and teaching about black English," Baugh said. "The latter is extremely important so that educators, parents and students can be aware of the differences between African-American English and standard English. But to suggest that you would teach in black English is a retrograde step."
Dave Schuler: you were trained as a lingust: what's the differentiation there?
Um, disagree about what? That BVE is a dialect and not a language? I think that something referred to as "vernacular English" should be considered a dialect of the English language, although the difference between dialect and seperate language is pretty arbitrary. I mean, what difference would it make? Is a dialect somehow less "respectable" than a language?
BTW, when I said "teaching in BVE", I was thinking of "allowing the children to give answers to questions in their own mother tongue". Whereas "teaching BVE" meant teaching BVE to kids who don't already speak it, which as you said is what many people mistakenly feared was going to happen.
I really wasn't clear. My bad.
So teachers are not already smart enough to treat the ebonics-speaking children as though they are merely speaking a foreign language?
The neighborhoods where ebonics is taught are not smart enough to know this is stupid?
The children are not smart enough to learn another language?
As far as I can tell ebonics was developed relatively recently, for the specific purpose of separating blacks from whites, as also advocated by white Liberals now, represented by the symbol, "African American".
[I recall, for example, in about 1964 and subsequently, collecting guys from the inner city to play basketball and socialize, etc., etc.. Jive was in strong evidence, but everyone seemed perfectly capable of speaking regular English. What happened?]
Ebonics is political - a football.
Chomsky is a linguist. Color me unimpressed. As for Ebonics, I've never been able to see a reason why it is anything more than pidgin English, on the order of what you might hear among Hawaiian natives, or Cajuns, or any other foreign-language speakers that only ever half-learned English. Certainly not worth study, and really not worth arguing about.
Yours,
Wince
So basically you're going to write off a whole branch of science because you disagree with Chomsky's politics? That'd be like me writing off biology because some biologists happen to believe in God.
Catch 22: You need only read that resolution carefully, and note the position of linguists on this subject long before they acted, to understand what they were really trying to do, and it is exactly consistent with what I'm saying. Your quoting of various Democratic politicians only underscores my point, however; people on all parts of the political spectrum turn completely irrational on the subject.
UML Guy: May I suggest that you follow the links I provided? There's plenty there in what I provided. But if you want a simplified transcript:
In a class on civics:
"Jacob, can you tell me the name of the President of the United States?"
"He name George Bush."
"Right! Now can you answer me in standard English?"
"His name is George Bush."
Note that the teacher did not "teach in Ebonics." The teacher did not urge the child to answer in Ebonics. The class isn't even ABOUT language, it's about civics. But what the teacher did NOT do is upbraid the child for being "ungrammatical" and did not mock his use of language.
Follow the links I provided. There's plenty more to read on the subject--for those who don't think they already know everything anyway!
Casey: Linguists don't make the iron distinctions between "language" and "dialect" that you do. In most cases, it's a distinction without a difference.
Maor: Linguists have for generations referred to BVE as a language. If it's important to you to make this distinction, fine. But the fact is that it is regularized, can be described as well as any other language/dialect, and is learned and transmitted to children like any other language. The point is that it is not "stupid," and it most certainly is not a "political" creation in the sense that lefty political groups created it. Indeed, you'll find people on the political left are every bit as likely to condemn the very mention of BVE as the right.
That's part of what's so funny about this: right-wingers insist that this is an insideous left-wing plot, part of the "cult of victimology" or whatever. In the meantime, lefty politicians insist that this is a RIGHT-WING plot to pat blacks on the heads and make them look stupid. Both are being equally irrational. What we're talking about here is the most effective way to teach fleuncy in reading, writing, and speaking Standard English.
Monomer: Correct, many teachers in the past have often not been "smart enough" to teach as you describe. As for the kids being "smart enough" -- study after study has confirmed that kids who are not taught by the compare-and-contrast method have a harder time picking up the mainstream lingo than the children who are taught by it.
There is nothing "recent" about BVE, by the way. It has been described and studied by linguists as far back as the 1700s. Furthermore, as Catch 22 so ably demonstrated for us above, our political "liberals" are as likely or even MORE likely to react negatively when confronted with the reality of BVE.
As for your experience in 1964, there are any number of possibile answers, but I'm not going to try to discuss it with someone who flatly refuses to educate himself on the matter.
Dan: Hmm. Let's try that logic out on other fields. Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for Biochemistry for his invention of the Polymerase Chain Reaction. Kary Mullis believes in Astrology. Therefore, Biochemistry is pseudoscience!
Would that make any sense?
Most linguists view Chomsky as a brilliant linguist who made major advances in the field of linguistics. The problem is that he seems to think that his expertise in linguistics makes him qualified to bloviate on unrelated subject areas like history and political science.
Regarding BVE being a pidgen--you really should learn more about linguistics! Just so you know, a pidgen is a combination of two or more languages usually spoken by adults who are forced to deal on an everyday basis with other adults who speak a radically different language. American soldiers and Japanese living near them during the Japanese occupation invented just such a pidgen, a mix of English and Japanese words. Pidgens generally only have a few hundred words, those required for basic commerce and emergencies. They usually lack complex adverbs, adjectives, or conjunctions. Most such pidgens disappear, although sometimes they develop into a creole language.
I think you would find that linguistics is a far more interesting (and rigorous) science than you think. It tells us a lot about how the human brain works, actually....
Excuse me, the point the liberals reacted to negatively to, was not the reality of BVE, but that the Oakland School Board announced they were requesting local, state and federal funds to teach, "Ebonics" to the students.
Most of the black parents in the Oakland School District, the hispanic parents, the asian parents and the caucasian parents were vociferous
in opposing their sons and daughter being taught
Ebonics as a prelude to learning plain common
american english.
Parents of students could care less what linguists like Chomsky say. Parents want their sons and daughters learning reading, writing and arithmetic
at a functional level with a standard acceptable on a national scale not in the BVE comunity.
But, if you want to teach your children ebonics go for it.
Bill Cosby, another liberal suggests not ebonics but Hooked on Phonics.
You definitely missed the point on this one Dean.
As for the objections of the black and hispanic and so on parents at Oakland: Yes they did object exactly as you said. Which is very sad since, as a clear reading of the materials you quoted shows, neither the Oakland school district nor any other school district in America ever had any plan to teach ebonics to the students. It was a ridiculous misinterpretation of a program that's been proven in other languages to work extremely well at improving children's reading and writing skills in the mainstream language.
As for teaching my children Ebonics: That would certainly be interesting, but I wouldn't want it done except perhaps in a course in High School on comparative linguistics or culture. Or maybe in a college course.
I don't read that they wanted to teach Ebonics. Looks to me like they were proposing a program much like you laid out, Dean.
Not to accept that the children in their area were speaking so differently that it was affecting their future ability to function in the mainstream world would be more troubling.
Jesse Jackson uses a language I certainly don't understand and wish would go away. I mean he uses language and I wish he would go away. Wait, I don't like what he says most of the time and he should go away.
Actually if you watch Jackson carefully, his use of language varies by his audience. He speaks in a much more gutteral Black Vernacular for all-black urban audiences than he does for mainstream audiences. Which is kind of funny.
Chris Rock does it too. Indeed, he's most instructive to listen to when he's doing a lengthy standup routine. When he wants to sound proper and formal, his accent and grammar become much more "white" and when he's getting really down and dirty he moves into more "street talk" (i.e. Ebonics).
I've heard some of the funnier British comedians do the same sort of thing with the various dialects of the British Isles, come to think of it.
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I am not a linguist. I speak English as my native tongue, and I speak French, having taken over 40-units of College and Graduate Level French classes, as well as speaking conversational level Spanish (High School), and Finnish (College).
Children in grammar school can learn ANY language almost immediately, because they are in the language learning mode, and at the age where they are programmed by nature and genetics to acquire language; ANY language; even multiple languages.
All foreign language programs agree that "TOTAL IMMERSION" is the most effective method for learning any language. In my College Level French and Finnish Language classes my professors spoke ONLY French or Finnish, and required us to do the same. At the Language Institute in Monterey,CA they use Total Immersion exclusively for their intensive courses taught primarily to diplomats, intelligence, the military, and business executives.
The goal is ENGLISH. Therefore it is important to teach ENGLISH, not Ebonics and not para-Ebonics. As stated in the earlier post, it is perhaps important to teach some of the differences, but only as an adjunct to teaching STANDARD ENGLISH.
The breakdown of the American "3rd Generation" paradigm of Assimilation" with Hispanics in American Society comes directly from the implementation of ESL Classes ("English as a second Language"), and the toleration of Spanish. According to the paradigm the first (immigrant) generation speaks pidgin, the second (first native-born) generation learns English and moves from laborer to blue collar employment, and the 3rd generation goes on to college and a white collar job. But every minority group has succeeded by learning ENGLISH. The Hispanics, without English, are stuck on the bottom as laborers; a permanent under-class.
(The major beneficiaries of the ESL programs are politicians hoping to maintain the allegiance of a mono-lingual Hispanic constituency. But it is politically incorrect to state that universally acknowledged truth out loud in Los Angeles. There was recently a class action suite by Hispanic Parents whose children graduated from High School without having gained fluency in English because of ESL.)
Asians and Iranians typically assimilate (at least in Los Angeles) in one generation by DEMANDING that their children to excel in their studies and go on to college for professional degrees. And this has all been done WITHOUT ESL and WITHOUT EBONICS, or PARA-EBONICS. In fact Asians are now the predominant race in the California University System, and translating from Japanese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, or Cantonese, (with foreign-born parents who are often completely non-English speaking, or who speak only the most broken English) is far more difficult than translating from EBONICS, which however fractured, is still a variant of English.
The current crisis in the Black Community in Los Angeles is that Blacks who have successfully pursued educations, have found better jobs, and are leaving the inner city in droves, without a second thought or a backward glance. They are successfully assimilating (having dropped EBONICS in exchange for education and jobs) into every strata of every other suburban community in and around Los Angeles. And that was the originally stated goal of all the grants, and LBJ's "War On Poverty", the "Job Corps", "Equal Opportunity" and all the rest of it: better jobs and assimilation into better neighborhoods.
(The real (but politically unmentionable) crisis in the inner city is that the aging Politicians representing the Inner City in Los Angeles have a gradually dwindling constituency, which is being gradually replaced by Hispanics, which is a completely different constituency.)
A few weeks ago the French Ministry of Education officially announced that fluency in English would henceforth be a requirement of the French educational system. Quelle surprise! Even the French have finally recognized that English has now become the international language of trade and diplomacy.
The magic carpet to success in every area of life throughout the world at the present time is fluency in STANDARD ENGLISH, and this has now been recognized even by the French (whose powers of denial are legendary). And the best method of teaching a language is TOTAL IMMERSION. Which "total immersion" should be adequately addressed by children attending any English speaking grammar school in the U.S., doing the assigned homework, and turning on the television when they've finished just like the Asians and Iranians.
The problem is that Black Vernacular English is TOO CLOSE to Standard English. You can get away with Black Vernacular English in most of the common American culture and not be completely dysfunctional as you would be if you exclusively spoke, say, Portuguese or Polish. Thus the kids wind up half-crippled. Indeed, what they seem to do most effectively is learn to UNDERSTAND mainstream English just fine, but they don't learn to speak it quite as well, and they learn to READ and WRITE it even less well.
Again, because it's TOO CLOSE to their native tongue.
Once again, if you take the time to read the materials I have linked, you will find that study after study has confirmed what I have said already. When you have one version of a language dominating a culture, and a second, closely-related minority language butting up against the culture, you have a more difficult problem--and repeated studies have CONFIRMED that the compare-and-contrast method is the best method for teaching proficiency IN THE MAINSTREAM LANGAUGE.
By the way, you're utterly mistaken if you believe the kids who leave the ghettos and become successful "leave behind" the vernacular. That's true of 2nd or 3rd generation suburbanite black kids. Ghetto residents who leave and are successful do not "leave behind" their birth vernacular. They simply learn--mostly on their own--how to be proficient in both.
Oprah Winfrey is a perfect example, but there are many, many others.
I am reminded in this discussion to remember an old aphorism: "It is impossible to teach a man what he thinks he already knows."
I sometimes wonder if it isn't entirely a marketing problem...
It may very well be a marketing problem. I hate spin, but it's a necessary evil sometimes. Maybe the right label for this approach would be less controversial. If "Compare and Contrast" became the dominant name, and the social and political aspects were deemphasized, people could focus more on "Does this work?" (For the record, I think "Ebonics" sounds almost like a parody of a name. That may have been the worst marketing blunder right there.)
My one linguistics class at UM (for non-majors) taught me one simple lesson: language happens. You can't stop it (no matter how the French may try). Isolated groups develop their own variants. Sometimes those variants feed back into the main branch. (My term paper at the time was prescient, though I didn't know it then: a study of the English variant used by computer users and programmers. Little did I know in 1983 how much of that language would become mainstream two decades later. But at least Professor Toon gave it a retroactive A for four papers.) But if the social isolation is persistent and deep enough, the languages can diverge to a degree that the difference reinforces the social isolation. That's just common sense and, as you point out, observed history in multiple cases. Gullah was the most famous case I recall from the class: a creole of English (i.e., a pidgin language that developed into an indpendent language of its own).
I do think it's true that Total Immersion is an effective way to teach language; but Total Immersion requires a lot of motivation on the student's part. And there's Total Immersion, and then there's TOTAL IMMERSION. The Army has some courses of the latter sort, where you speak the target language and nothing else from waking to sleeping. Most Total Immersion classes are total only within the confines of that class. Imagine you go to college, and the counselors say, "Oh, you're studying Russian? OK, then your History, Philosophy, and Software Engineering courses will all be taught in Russian as well, so as to ensure you speak PROPER Russian." In a sense, that's what we're asking of some of these students. The Compare-and-Contrast approach is really a compromise: "All right, we'll let you study Software Engineering in English, so you can understand it; but we'll also expect you to learn the Russian version as well."
I had forgotten a couple of incidents in an office situation where I had difficulty understanding a speaker with the AAVE speech pattern and the speaker couldn't fathom my difficulty: I couldn't understand whether they were asking me for a "pin" or a "pen" because their enunciation of the vowel was to my ear completely undifferentiated, and to their ear they were pronouncing it with exactly the same differentiations that I was.
It was similar to the problem most English speakers have with the French accent grave versus the accent aigue; two varieties of a short e which sound very similar to the English ear, but very different to the French.
And I must agree that it's also a HUGE P.R./Spin problem; and that a great deal of the problem comes from naming the language sub-group "EBONICS" which was so easily (and extensively) ridiculed and parodied.
Part of the spin problem in California results also from the failure of ESL programs to bring up the English Fluency levels among Hispanics. The inevitable parallel has been permanently drawn in the minds of the public that any use of "EBONICS" was going mean the creation of more bureaucracy, and yet another culture of public accomodation using yet another dialect instead of English.
More damaging was the persistent perception by vast majority of the public that EBONICS was an unacceptable patois or dialect similar to Gullah and Creole, and that they were being asked to accept it, to accomodate it, and potentially to have to deal with it.
During the entire public debate, I do not ever remember the media presenting a linguist who discussed the fact that Ebonics was to be used as a tool to increase fluency in Standard English. What I remember being presented in the press were demands that EBONICS be accepted as a valid language, as a valid course of college level study, as a valid cultural alternative, and as a valid alternative to Standard English which was to be taught as curriculum in Schools. It was framed by the press as part of a system of Apartheid, where black children would be taught Ebonics INSTEAD of Standard English.
At no time was the problem of mis-understanding presented. At no time was the problem of illiteracy presented. And at no time was the use of Ebonics as a tool for learning Standard English presented to my memory. The media had a field day giving out the impression that Ebonics was the Afro-American answer to Standard English, in the same way that Kwanza is the politically correct and culturally sensitive Afro-American alternative to Christmas; separate but equal.
There is an enormous amount of re-framing which must go on before this debate will actually move forward to the point where "Ebonics" can be recognized as a tool to increase literacy in Standard English. In fact the term "EBONICS" will have to be dropped entirely and it will probably have to be referred to as BVE or AAVE, and be totally divorced from all of that "African Studies" baggage from the last debate, and the focus re-directed as a literacy tool for SE.
In the software development world, we see a similar pattern with Agile Development processes, a spectrum of development processes that emphasize high-bandwidth communication, early discovery of hidden requirements, early delivery of small bits of useful code, and responsiveness to change over more orchestrated and cautious approaches. Leading practitioners get great results; yet the story I hear from their own mouths time and again is, "Agile worked great while I was there. Then I moved on to another opportunity. The guy who replaced me didn't understand it at all, and it all fell apart. Now no one will touch Agile there."
So while I'm not doubting the effectiveness of Compare and Contrast, I think it has to include a component that reinforces the method as it should be. Otherwise, it could rapidly degenerate into its critics' worst fears. That reinforcement mechanism has to recognize the inertia found in bureaucracies, average and below average teachers, and parents and students. That's not a problem I'm going to solve here (nor anyone else here, I suspect, since no one has chimed in as being a primary or secondary teacher). But it's a problem I hope the Compare and Contrast advocates are putting a lot of work into.
I think the real detriment to the learning of standard English in school is the prejudice teachers produce when they don't call it "Standard English" class but just "English" class.
Stay with me, here. When you said "ain't" in class, and we all did, what happened? You got shot down by the teacher for speaking "wrong". You weren't speaking wrong. You were speaking like your buddies. Now, if a teacher were to present the argument that you were speaking wrong for the purposes of THIS class, might it not go over better? If one of my college teachers told me to lose my southern accent because I sound stupid I'd immediately develop a prejudice. If he told me I needed to lose my southern accent if I wanted to read the news on CNN, well, that's different.
It's a subtle shift in attitude, but the ivory tower itself, the world for that matter, would be much better off if it would choose to describe rather than prescribe.
How many kids are invited to hate the hell out of English class? You won't remove the fact that a kid from a "white bread" suburbanite upbringing has a head start in our "standard english" class, but at least you remove the inherent negativity associated with saying the kid from Cabrini Greene can't talk right.
It goes without saying that a teacher who learns how his students communicate will have an easier time teaching anything. Imagine a Korean teacher trying to teach English to a class of Germans. That's close to what you get when you get a teacher who can't understand BVE trying to teach urban kids Shakespeare. You need to understand the kids, certainly, but the kids need to want to learn, too. We need to spin it, market it, whatever, rather than raise hell about it like my buddy Jackson.
No, Dean, he's not. You are the one misreading the resolution, not him. Asssuming, of course, that you've read the resolution at all. If you have, then instead of reflexively dismissing as an "urban legend" the notion that Oakland initially advocated Ebonics-language instruction, how about explaining instead what the hell else the following language was intended to accomplish:
On top of that, the same resolution claimed that BEV/AAVE (note the order of the V and the E in "BEV") was "genetically-based" and "not a dialect of English." That's probably why they didn't list "Black English," BEV or AAVE among the alternate names for Ebonics; they weren't even willing to call it by a name that recognized it was part of the English language at all! Mark Jaquith was right - of Oakland had gotten the idea by watching Airplane and failing to recognize that it was a comedy, they could scarcely have done worse.
The resolution also claims that "Ebonics" (BEV/AAVE) has a linguistic structure of its own that derives from Africa rather than from standard English. This is pure, unadulterated crap, as any serious linguist who studies BEV/AAVE (Labov, Fillmore, whoever) can tell you. Unfortunately, linguists as a group tend to be on the Chomsky-end of the spectrum, and therefore sympathetic to the idea of primary language/dialect instruction, whether it's Spanish-language "bilingual" education in L.A., Ebonics-language "bilingual" education in Oakland, or anything else. So rather than attack the obvious junk science upon which the resolution was based, they simply endorsed the central conclusion of the resolution, and said nothing about the junk science upon which it was based.
Last and least, Chomsky's a bit overrated as a linguist, too, although he did play an important historical role at one point (basically, pulling the field of linguistics away from its own version of behaviorism - a big move that had to happen, and ultimately would have inevitably happened, either with or without Chomsky). Few outside his cult at M.I.T. take his modern theories all that seriously. I'm ABD in Linguistics myself at Northwestern, and also did a year of graduate level Linguistics work at SDSU prior to that, along with a few undergrad course in the 1980s. I can't say that I remember a single instance in which I was asked or even encouraged to read anything written by Chomsky in my lifetime. I can, however, remember more than a few occasions in which a professor mentioned Chomsky in a slightly mocking tone, eyes rolled, etc.
In sum: when it comes to modern linguistic theory, Chomsky's a great political theorist. When it comes to political theory, he's a great linguist.
It does say this. I missed it. That is a lot of crap.
It hasn't been brought up here but that resolution also suggest that they were going to pay "ebonics" speaking teachers a premium. That leaves a hole wide enough to drive a truck through that they want to pay a teacher for being black. Don't pile on, please. I'm one generation removed from the reservation and using the get out of jail free card.
They also took the opportunity to take a few pot shots at the state government,too. "...with such legislation being prejudicially and unconstitutionally vetoed repeatedly by various California state governors" They were spoiling for a fight, it would seem, and got it.
There seem to be some unfortunate holes in their implementation, but ultimately they were accepting that something needed to be done to help their kids learn standard English in the resolution. That fact got lost in the debate, as jjxxviii pointed out. If they'd said they were goig to teach Ebonics in the place of accepted English, they'd be deserving of every bit of derision pointed at them. As it is, it would seem that they squandered an opportunity to change SOP to go pick a fight.
It doesn't change Dean's prescription for teaching the kids the right way. It's unfortunate that the episode played out like it did.
First: "Bilingual Education" works, and works well.
Second: Ninety percent or better of the programs labeled "bilingual education" are nothing of the sort. They are, instead, bureacratic empire building pure and simple.
"Bilingual" teachers make more money, as do their supervisors, in a parallel bureacracy to the standard school; thus such a teacher is not only paid more but has better chances for advancement in the smaller structure.
The result is the now-standard perverse consequence: bilingual teachers and their bosses have no, repeat no, incentive to teach standard English effectively, and every incentive to avoid doing so because an increase in the number of kids who do not speak standard English well results in higher demands for "bilingual" instruction, thus more money, promotion slots, etc. And that's just what happens -- which is why California finally outlawed it.
The Oakland proposal was an absolutely simple and unremarkable (except in its bold-facedness) to carve out yet another patch of "bilingual" territory in which yet another group of public servants could build a bureacratic empire. Its failure came because people realized that, and that failure was the leading edge of the eventual rejection of bilingual education in toto.
Which is a damned shame, because bilingualism using the compare-and-contrast method as Dean lays it out is a powerful and fairly efficient way to teach. (That's not the only type of bilingual education; it's not even the only one that works.) But politically it's simply impossible to keep going, because the only method not immediately apt to capture by the bureacratic empire-building process is total immersion, i.e. teaching nothing but the goal language. Which is hard on the kids, but nothing like as hard on them as not learning standard English will be in later life.
Regards,
Ric Locke
Seems like no one has anything to say about the Cos addressing this secondary English classification in recent months.
Cos, from what I gather, wants young and old Blacks to go straight to the "King's English" in order to speed their advancement to mainstream America.
Feedback anyone?
I don't think anyone here disagrees that Dr. Cosby (he is a Doctor of Education, remember -- earned, not honorary) has the right end goals. "King's English" is the end goal. It's the "straight to" that's the subject of debate.
And while I respect Dr. Cosby a ton, I'm not convinced he has all the answers. He made some provocative statements, many of which I think are right on the money. But he didn't back them up with research, at least not in the big public speeches. He may have the research to back up what he says. I'm willing to look at it if he does.
Dean, meanwhile, has already cited his research: studies that support the view that the straight to the "King's English" road leaves a lot of kids behind. I'm not saying that said research is Gospel; but the answer to research is more research, not "I don't like that research."
Nevertheless if a struggling school district that can't get its kids' reading scores up wants to experiment with a new approach, more power to 'em.
As for Dr. Cosby's position: since he hasn't been either working in education or doing research on it in recent decades I'm not inclined to say that he is the ultimate expert here, regardless of his degree.
The program they intended to establish all along was the program as I have described it: to teach teachers to understand students who spoke AAVE and to use the systems in place in other countries that have proven effective at raising reading and writing and verbal abilities in the mainstream tongue--which the resolution in question does mention, but as I said, it's poorly worded.
The school board admitted this, and clarified its position, and still the urban legend lives. Oh well. [shrug]
By the way, so far as I know, some of the structures in AAVE, which have been documented as far back as the 1700s among slaves who actually came over from Africa, do in fact seem to have an African influence. Which African languages I'm not sure.
Also by the way, open up the dictionary, and you'll find that in any good one, one of the definitions for "genetic" is "In Linguistics: Of or relating to the relationship between or among languages that are descendants of the same protolanguage."
English and Dutch are genetically linked. So are Italian and Spanish. [shrug]
Again, if you carefully read the document, and look at what the linguists have said (they all but universally supported Oakland's proposed policies, by the way), and look at subsequent remarks from the Oakland school board, you'll discover just what I've said: they plan was to teach teachers to be able to understand and communicate with the kids and use well-known programs of compare-and-contrast to help improve their verbal, reading, and writing skills in Standard English.
Teaching Ebonics is the road to promoting chaos:
"Tense and time is important in the English language. In the African language, time is relevant, but not to the same degree. If you say in American English 'I walk, I walked, I have walked' in Ebonics it would be 'I walk, I done walk, I been done walk,' which means 'I walk, I just finished walking and I walked a long time ago." -Aisha Blackshire-Belay, professor and chairman of the department of African studies at Indiana State University in Terre Haute.
The alternative is the road to sanity:
"I don't call it Ebonics. I call it incorrect English." ---Joan Davis Rattary, president and founder of the Washington-based Institute for Independent Education, a national alliance of nearly 400 private black schools serving 70,000 children. She rejects the language completely.
Washington Times, 11/28/96
The very fact that the OUSD Board changed their
resolutions tells us it was done for good cause.
IMHO opinion the final word on the matter belongs to the gentleman from Stanford:
John Baugh, a professor of education and linguistics at Stanford University, called the changes (in the resolutions) an improvement.
"There is a big difference between teaching black English and teaching about black English," Baugh said. "The latter is extremely important so that educators, parents and students can be aware of the differences between African-American English and standard English. But to suggest that you would teach in black English is a retrograde step."
All the fancy talk about linguistics and research
and this or that expert means mostly zero to a ten year old trying to get through grammar school
in a fashion that is educationally acceptable.
I have nothing more to say on this subject except that there are reasonable choices for parents to make about their child's education that involve greater wisdom than the ebonics approach
suggested to date by the experts.
Xrlq, I'd like to hear what you think we should do in "vernacular" areas, for lack of a better term, to get the job done. Ric's proposition that it was empire building doesn't surprise me a bit (Ric, I'd like to see that in print somewhere if you got it) with regards to the Oakland resolution. Where does that leave us?
The German model is great. They do a fine job there. They are fortunat to have a base of parents that is pretty rabid about making sure their kids do well in school. For whatever reason, our teachers in most urban environments don't have that. What is a school to do?
Cosby was wrong in his condemnation of the entire concept of AAVE or of teaching teachers to understand it and use it creatively in order to improve test scores in Standard English--which was always the goal.
BEV/AAVE is not really any more different from standard American English (Inland Northern dialect) than most southern dialects are...
This is incorrect. There have in the past been some southern dialects, mostly dying out now, which were pretty far from mainline English, but most now are much closer to Standard English than the thicker varieties of AAVE, which has been documented for over 3 centuries now has having features unique unto itself. You need only look at the literature of linguists studying it--or to talk to someone who actually speaks it fluently. If you think you've heard it from black comedians, you haven't.
...as are dialectal variations across Europe, Asia, and any other part of the world where communities have existed separately for more than a century or two.
As it happens, the programs that I describe have been used successfully in a number of European and Asian schools to assist students to improve their scores in the mainline tongue. The studies on this have been fairly extensive and successful in many nations, as I've said, which is why some have wanted to bring them to the U.S. to help raise test scores for inner city kids.
Yet, hardly anyone, if anyone, calls on local schools around the world to do even what Dean claims OUSD did, let alone what they actually did.
What I claim they did and what they actually did are one and the same.
However, that quibble aside: if you had read this thread and my comments carefully, you'd find that I do in fact advocate these programs for kids with some other heavy dialects that are so far removed from mainline Standard English that they kids are struggling with inappropriate instruction in the classroom. If you'd also read some of the literature I've linked to you'd see that there are in fact advocates of expanding these programs into other heavy dialect areas.
If cross-dialectal sensitivity were all the be all end all, dontcha think our cousins in the old country (pick one) might have figured this out by now?
Love that use of the word "sensitivity." Kind of implies this is all about touch-feely crap. but again, XRLQ, if you read the materials I've linked carefully, or just what I've said here, you'll discover that our cousins in the old country were the ones to originate these programs, and they've shown excellent success, which is why Oakland was on the cutting edge in trying to import such programs to their struggling school district.
I can't think of much else to add that wouldn't be repeating myself. Oh, except to add that last I heard, Oakland went ahead with the program as they planned to all along, and that the program is now being used in other school districts around the nation. With some success, from what I hear.
What they actually ended up doing, perhaps; I haven't followed Oakland's school system since they stepped in it in 1996. What they advocated in the original resolution that prompted the outcry, not even close. What you decried as an "urban legend" - that OUSD advocated teaching IN Ebonics, and not merely teaching standard English based on a compare-and-contrast methodology - is a fact, which can be easily verified simply by reading the resolution itself, or even the brief snippets I cited.
Therein lies the problem: it would be perceived as hilarious. In a perfect world, everyone would think like a linguist, and no one would care what dialect you spoke, as long as they could understand you (though even that wouldn't work for all English dialects). But we don't live in a perfect world, do we? Nope, we live in the real one, where society does judge people according to which dialect they speak. If you speak the King's dialect, you're going places. If you don't, you're not, and we don't do anyone any favors by pretending otherwise.
In that reply, I dealt with many of the issues that are repeated in this thread, including Oakland's bullshit after-the-fact rationalization of their transparently idiotic "genetically based" line. To recap briefly, I'm ABD in linguistics so I know goddamned well how linguists use the word "genetic," thank you very much. This ain't it. It's one thing to say that English and Dutch are "genetically related" to each other, which of course is true. It's quite another to state in a vacuum that one of these two languages is "genetically based," and then to say nothing else about what genesis you think that language is based upon. What point is there in citing "numerous valid studies" that merely show BEV/AAVE is based on some undefined origin? Isn't everything?
I stand by my comments otherwise and see no reason to repeat myself again.
Not sure why the trackback didn't work.
...and it's a good thing that no one in this discussion pretends otherwise, and that none of the sources I cite say anythign to the contrary. ;-)
Dean, Xrlq you're right, no one has said anything otherwise but I want to add a caveat. It's NOT the guy that speaks the King's dialect that's going places. It's the guy capable of speaking the King's dialect and that can identify when it's use is appropriate that's going places.
Look at any truly successful public person, my buddy Jackson as much as it kills me to say it is one, and you'll find a person capable of chameleon-like linguistic abilities. Why do our friends in the ivory tower look so rediculous, so, well,prissy, when they cling to the King's English like glue in a bar room? Why was Frasier on Cheers so funny?
All this makes it rediculous to me to present King's English and not pay attention to the fact it's not the only way to get a point across. A well-used middle finger is a great communication tool under the right conditions...
IOW, even if we were to accept the oddly timed "clarifications" (that just happened to occur after the shit had hit the fan and OUSD was desperate to save as much of their original proposal as they could), all the clarification would mean was "no, we didn't mean the bullshit you thought we meant, we meant some other bullshit."
I believe they believed it, and see no reason to assume they didn't.