Johanna and Rebecca,
As you point out, Johanna, this is indeed a civil rights issue. If children come to school poorly nourished or not having been read to at home, their school performance will suffer seriously, and this too is a civil rights issue. In all of our discussion of grammar teaching, we have quite naturally not paid a lot of attention to social issues like these, but it is precisely these implicit and nearly universal forms of racism that make fair education so rare. Part of the Indiana Language Arts Standards, that Phil has rightly praised, is a strong emphasis on dialect awareness and valuing the home dialect while teaching Standard English as a public dialect.
For about the last fifteen years, Ball State has required of all its English majors, and now of its ESL licnesure students, a sophomore-level course titled Language and Society. The purpose of this course is to make students aware of dialects, of language attitudes, prejudices, and myths, and to involve them directly in research on language as it is used around them. They study in some depth both the Ebonics controversy and national language policy debates and draw their own conclusions on them.
This sort of language awareness must be a part of any language arts program that pretends to be worthy of its name.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Johanna Rubba
Sent: Sat 9/2/2006 3:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Grammar Certification
Rebecca,
I'd be very interested to know the ethnicity and social standing of the
children in the public schools your son attends (attended?) If they're
African American, and speak natively what is commonly called "Ebonics",
then it's natural that they haven't mastered spoken standard English.
However, they still know (unconsciously) what a noun is. African
American English may not always mark a noun for plural, but "a" and
"the" and "my" and so on will be used as they are in standard English.
Thus, these students could learn to identify nouns by placing a word
alone after "a" or "the" and checking to see if it "sounds right". Few
children come to school with conscious knowledge of what a noun is, but
all children are using nouns correctly (according to the rules of their
dialects). This means they have unconscious knowledge of what a noun
is.
There is no automatic block to these children's learning standard
English. What usually blocks them is language-arts instruction that
informs them, directly or indirectly, that their English is incorrect;
that they have failed to "learn English" or , worse, "learn language".
Also, the criticism I made of the language-arts lesson for standard
speakers has a dark side: while those standard-speaking children will
get all or most of the answers right quickly and with little effort,
children who speak a different dialect will (a) need more time to do
the work; (b) need to rely more on the grammar terminology and rules;
and (c) are much more likely to make mistakes on the exercise. What
conclusions do teachers and kids reach in this situation? The kids
whose native language is nonstandard English must be slower and less
intelligent than the standard-speaking kids. If they are in a class
with standard-speaking kids, everybody comes to this false conclusion.
Add in the other socioeconomic disadvantages, as well as the pressure
in their home community to remain loyal to it (and hence not "talk
white"), and you have quite a few demotivators to learning.
Nonstandard English is also not _necessarily_ a block to learning to
read. Again, the teachers' mindset, their understanding of the
children's home dialect, and how the materials are used are crucial.
If the children aren't Ebonics speakers, but come from other
working-class or rural dialect-speaking areas, the situation is
similar. Stigmatizing a child's natural speech is not only
scientifically incorrect, it is obviously unfair and psychologically
harmful.
I very strongly encourage anyone involved with children from a
nonstandard-dialect background to read this excellent article:
Rebecca Wheeler/Rachel Swords (July 2004) 'Codeswitching: Tools of
language and culture transform the dialectally diverse classroom.'
LANGUAGE ARTS. Vol. 81, No. 6. 470 - 480.
What this article doesn't report is that Rachel Swords' 3rd-grade class
of Afr. Amer. kids brought their standardized test scores up to those
of the white children in the school (a significant improvement) after
just one year of the alternative instruction described in the article.
(The 3rd-graders who did not get this instruction retained the usual
achievement gap.) Not only that, the children's attitude towards
language arts changed dramatically, and their relationship with their
teacher improved. If you have trouble accessing the article, I can send
you a copy.
This work is also expanded into a book, "Code-Switching: Teaching
Standard English in Urban Classrooms". You can see the publisher's
material about the book at this page:
http://www.ncte.org/store/books/grammar/124190.htm
Other versions of the work are cited on this page:
http://linguistlist.org/people/personal/get-personal-page2.cfm?
PersonID=10755
An excellent, but, sadly, out-of-print book by Walt Wolfram and Donna
Christian, "Dialects and Education", has two chapters on dialects and
reading that are extremely informative.
Maybe a lot of people don't read my very long posts. If they do, I am
dismayed that so few have responded to what I have said about children
in inner-city schools. This is a civil-rights issue. The futures of
hundreds of thousands of children are at stake.
Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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