While subbing on Friday, I let a kid go to the bathroom. Not in the room of course. A black girl urgently raised her hand and told me he wasn't allowed to leave the room. "Why?" I asked. "Because he...he be doin bad!" she exclaimed. I raised an eyebrow but smiled, knowing exactly what she meant despite her "non-standard grammar."
So Garrard McClendon came up with a book called Ax or Ask? The African American Guide to Better English to solve a crisis of "low expectations" faced by the black community. In the beginning of this interview, he cites reasons for said crisis panic: 64% of black fourth graders are considered functionally illiterate, and blacks are trailing 200 points behind whites and Asians on the SAT. This gives me plenty of hole-poking opportunities, but I'll be brief--"functionally illiterate" doesn't mean shit in light of the semester-long conversation we've been having about what literacy really means, and standardized tests are just silly--those are hoops you jump through to join the Discourse of the business/social world, and the hoops seem to be on fire to boot for blacks (for many deep, messy, and resistant reasons).
I was a little dubious but then he went on to talk about code-switching via a weird analogy about chameleons (the first of many interesting metaphors) and honoring both dialects, so I kept watching. He contradicts himself about giving dignity to both BVE and Standard English around 3 minutes, saying teachers are not aggressive enough about "correcting" primary students' using their home language, suggesting there is something wrong with it at least in academic circles which the authors of this week's articles would have a problem with. Lisa Delpit is cited, for better or worse. He makes some good points.
What's more interesting than Carlton Banks (sorry, couldn't help it) is the discussion and comments in regards to this video on youtube. People have some strong opinions about their and others language in terms of what's right and wrong--reminded me of Gloria Azaldua's Borderlands, a controversial and angry book about the linguistic crossroads of the mestiza. She writes, "Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other...if a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me." The inherent political and racial tension about language isn't restricted to any one dialect or language. Another good video to watch and further proof that Obama needs to get elected can be found here, just scroll down and watch some baracktv about race relations and how students talk about them in a Bronx high school.
I'm not denying there's an achievement gap or racism in hiring practices or any of that. What's discouraging is the resistance and chaos involved in trying to have conversations about these issues--the entire country went nuts after seeing Obama's pastor demonstrate only slightly more than the typical zest seen in most black churches (yes, I'm white, but I have been to black churches in Chicago, and fiery is a good description). Just the topics of racism themselves have people struggling to get a grip on their own opinions and confrontations of racism, and it's all around us. I think standup comedians do the best job of approaching racism, and they can get away with it by wrapping it in a joke.
In Cooks and Ball's lit review of the research on AAVE-speaking adolescents' literacies, they make a valid point, that there are many published works decrying the failures and trouble of Black English speakers (same as the panic-inducing approach for most initiatives, i.e. Nation at Risk) but few focus on providing models of culturally-relevant pedagogy or teacher development. They also suggest more research be done on student writing, technology, and alternative assessment methods, which I think would help most educational dilemmas facing us right now.
"Critically, and futuristically as US society becomes increasingly diverse, we must arrive at a genuine acceptance of the fact that difference does not mean deficiency." (Smitherman, 79)
Smitherman's research with the National Assessment of Education Progress looks at twenty years of black students' writing, and includes a set of criteria for black student writing, such as cultural references, verbal inventiveness, and evocative language. I imagined the melee that would doubtless ensue if a white writer had attempted to do such a thing. Or, even funnier, how about a list of features of white writing?
Incidentally, did you know that 2005 was The Year of Languages in America? Me either.
I took an African American Lit class as an undergrad and was the only white girl in a class of sixty or so. More interesting than that was the professor, a tiny old Korean lady whose second language for her major was Ebonics. Anyway, during that same semester I took an awful grammar class where the entire time was spent diagramming sentences. It taught me nothing, other than I don't like diagramming sentences. It's this kind of approach Godly, Carpenter, and Werner writes about in our third article. The idea too many teachers are espousing involves spending a little time daily on decontextualized and sterile grammar instruction (in the form of correcting sentences, doing practice test items, etc--I've done them) in hopes of raising standardized test scores. By the way, research has shown that explicit grammar instruction doesn't improve student writing. The tests are multiple choice, thus promoting the idea that there is only one correct way to use language and denying students any opportunity to argue or explain their decisions. The authors mentioned Brian Street's ideological theory of literacy, as opposed to an autonomous one, and argue for focusing classroom talk on the power of language ideologies similar to those studied in the other articles. "Like most ideologies, language ideologies have been shown to be most powerful when they are hegemonic, that is, when they are believed to be so natural, so unquestioning true, that their power is not recognized, even by those whom they position as subordinate. For instance, many people do not question the power inherent in the widely held belief that Standard English is the purest, most logical, and most grammatical form of the language." (105)
I liked this study because it examined the sources of these language ideologies--state and district standards and standardized tests, curricular materials, activity structure, teacher talk, and student talk. It also describes the frustration of a well-intending teacher who did what she was told as far as grammar instruction and teaching to the test, and realized upon seeing the tapes from the study on her teaching and classroom how far short that fell. Instead of positioning teachers as the sole possessors of knowledge and the ultimate authorities on language, "literacy education should reflect the necessity and possibility of responsive and responsible uses of language in a world rife with and riven by systems and relations of power."
All that said, it still bothers me when people don't use proper grammar. Is that bad? I'm not talking about ebonics or whatever, I mean when people write things like "your stupid." My stupid what, idiot?
