Johanna,
   Almost by definition, a test of standard English will weed out those
who have been exposed to non mainstream dialects.  They don't give test
items that no one will get wrong.  They juxtapose very grammatical but
nonstandard forms with standard ones.  Of course,  a non mainstream
speaker will recognize both as possible, while someone else will simply
say that this is not the kind of thing my people would choose in any
circumstance.  By definition, it's a loaded test, far more difficult
for one kind of student than it is for the other.
   It's even more loaded when you realize that holistic assessments won't
correlate well with the results.  In other words, many people who do
poorly on the standard English test will write effective essays, and
those who do well on the standard essay test may write very poorly.  It
was for these reasons that Princeton (the College Board) stopped
advocating standard English tests as the primary means for placement
way back in the 70's.  I got the results of the testing second hand
(Brannon and Knoblauch), but the results seemed very clear to me.>They
are often severely misleading, in particular for the results they give
for students of color. They are designed to gate keep these students
out.
   If we insist on knowledge of language as being the focus of these
tests, we can level the playing field. Insofar as language competence
is narrowly defined around these surface features (for which many face
dialect interference), these tests will discriminate.
    Of course, "standard English" and "standards" are conflated in the
public mind.  Our job as teachers is supposed to "correct" those who
say things "the wrong way." We can't adequately address that unless we
come up with more disciplined standards (knowledge based) of our own.
    We could ask suburban students to determine the appropriateness of
certain forms of urban dialect. It would have the same kind of
usefulness, the same kind of discriminatory result.

Craig


Speaking of standardized tests, I have made an interesting discovery.
> It is preliminary, but I will learn more as I look at more of the
> teaching materials being used in CA.
>
> In looking at a 9th-grade pedagogical grammar, I have found a
> difference between unit exercises/reviews and standardized test
> practice: The test practices rarely focused on terminology except in
> the instructions, and even there it was often lacking. Typically, I
> found instructions along the lines of "choose the letter of the word or
> group of words that belongs in each space". Then there is a paragraph
> with blanks requiring correct word forms, e.g., forms of "who/whom",
> irregular verbs, etc.
>
> So what? Well, students who have the advantage of having grown up in a
> standard-English environment will make fewer mistakes on such tests. In
> a test on irregular verb forms, for instance, my students made
> virtually no mistakes, while on a test requiring identification of
> roles like direct object, they did poorly (in a very brief in-class
> trial). Students from nonstandard-English environments are as doomed on
> those types of items (irregular verbs) as are the standard-speaking
> kids on "who/whom". In other words, the tests give an advantage to
> students who can choose the correct form from their native-speaker
> knowledge, without doing any grammatical analysis.
>
> I found it interesting that the unit exercises had a lot of focus on
> grammar terms, but the standardized-test practice did not (I'm
> assuming, of course, that these practices are based on actual test
> items).
>
> I'll be very interested to see if this is characteristic of most of the
> CA materials.
>
> 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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