Dr. Wheeler,
I am certainly familiar with your work. Language Alive in the Classroom and your code-switching articles are required reading in my teacher education classes! Thank you so much for your thoughtful response -- I'm going to look into those sources as soon as I get a chance. The ADS work would be fantastic! I hadn't thought to look into Dr. Wolfram's work, but I bet it's a goldmine!
Thanks again -- it's a very surreal experience to receive an e-mail from someone whose work you've dealt with so much! I'm sure all of ATEG's membership is looking forward to your future work!
Jed
"Dr. Rebecca Wheeler" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Dear Jed,
Walt Wolfram's work at North Carolina State University is unsurpassed on
history and systematicity of southern dialects. See some of his stuff at
http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/bios/wolfram.htm
Further, and i don't have the exact cite here, but I believe the
American Dialect Society recently came out with a special volume on
Southern American English, so that's worth checking into.
My own work in teacher education and code-switching is available through
the NCTE -- see either my NCTE consultant website or my CNU faculty
website for articles and a link to my recent book on Code-switching.
Wolfram has a whole middle school curriculum he's co-constructed with
Jeffrey Reaser, his former grad student who is now on faculty with NCSU.
For further south, you might try Bethany Dumas's work -- she's worked on
the languages of the Ozark Mountains. I believe she's at U. Tennessee,
Knoxville.
Have at it!
Cheers,
Rebecca Wheeler
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of English
Christopher Newport University
Newport News, VA 23606
[log in to unmask]
cell: 757-651-3659
work: 757-594-8889
http://www.faculty.users.cnu.edu/rwheeler/
http://www.ncte.org/profdev/onsite/consultants/wheeler
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
----- Original Message -----
From: "John E. Dews-Alexander"
Date: Monday, July 10, 2006 8:51 pm
Subject: Sources for History of Southern American English
> Hi again, ATEGers!
> I already have a question for you! Perhaps I should have sent
> this to a dialectology listserv, but I trust this group to have
> more than one person who knows this subject matter better than most.
> I'm working on a project over the summer that I want to use
> with local secondary schools (11th and 12th graders) here in north
> Alabama to initiate conversations about language variety, dialects,
> etc. I want to eventually convey the idea of what many of these
> students speak (Southern American English, African American
> English, Chicano English, etc) is in no way bad, lazy or any other
> prescriptive nonsense, but just different varieties of English with
> their own structures and rich histories. Basically, I need a way to
> quickly debunk their own insecurities about their language
> competence and get them thinking descriptively (this part of a
> larger project to teach grammar within this context).
> The best way I've found to break down language myths is to
> expose them for what they are using 1) examples of systematicity
> within dialects and 2) tidbits of historical linguistic accounts of
> the language variety in question.
> Systematicity I'm comfortable with, but historical linguistics
> is a relatively new field for me. Thanks to lots of great, easily
> accessible materials on African American English and Chicano
> English, I've had no problems pulling together some highlights of
> the language history, the processes of sound and syntactic change,
> etc. However, with Southern American English, I'm having more of a
> problem.
> I want to be able to tell the students where their language
> variety comes from, where their non-standard grammatical features
> can be traced to, etc. I've got a couple of leads on the Scots-
> Irish immigrants, especially in north Alabama, but my searches
> aren't turning up much.
> Is there a particular author(s) that someone can recommend for
> this topic or some particular works? Herb, based on your posts, I
> thought you might have some ideas of what I should be looking for
> to unravel the history of Southern American English. Is there a
> standard work to consult?
> I would be glad to provide more specific examples of the kind
> of questions I have, but I thought it might be easier to start out
> with just a broad question and see if any references come up.
> Thanks for any help you can provide!
> Jed
>
>
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*****************************************************************
John (Jed) E. Dews-Alexander
Instructor, Undergraduate Linguistics
MA-TESOL/Applied Linguistics Program
Educator, Secondary English Language Arts
English Department, 208 Rowand-Johnson Hall (Office)
University of Alabama
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