- The article aims to show what is at stake in teaching Standard English and the role dialects could play in teaching it more effectively
- There is a hypocrisy in denigrating students' dialects while praising/studying its use in literature
- Standard English is a collection of the socially preferred dialects from various parts of the United States and other English-speaking countries
- How do we keep democratic principles intact while questioning why and how that is best accomplished?
- Standard English codifies how the rich and powerful talk
- Language is intrinsically rooted to the identity of speaker and community
- The strength of linguistic diversity should be as valuable linguistically as it is economically or politically
- Meaningful learning begins with what students already know
- Standard English can be an alternative and useful in-common dialect whose forms students should be expected to master
- Students are often silenced in their classrooms or labeled "passive" simply because the conversational framework of home does not promote asking questions or the educational system's ways of exhibiting knowledge might not be their own
- We should teach students to move between the two systems
- We should extend student study of native dialects to understand how dialect traditions have enriched American speech
- We can discover patterns and develop hypotheses about the linguistic content in which the form occurs
- Tension can be a source of creative and generative possibilities
- Teaching suggestions/dialect explorations:
- linguistic autobiography
- personal narratives
- read aloud and listen to recordings
- compare interpretations of a specific dialect
- skits
- rewrite literary passages
- describe grammatical rule systems for their own dialect before comparing to SE
Dialects, Gender, and the Writing Class
- There is a fear and ignorance about language in general and writing in particular
- Everyone speaks a dialect
- Language is political
- Standard English can be viewed by dialect communities as selling out, conforming or being out of place
- Language is intertwined with solidarity between certain groups of people
- Language is created by us and used to shape/limit who we are by gender or other classifications
- Language as political instrument
- Language is a construct that seems to be orchestrated by men or other groups that yield influence
- Women have been given certain values through language and the words that are venerated
- Women live in a male version of reality through language
- Many students think there is a single way to communicate and that English is a place where that one discourse is practiced and refined
- Ebonics as a set of communication patterns and practices resulting from African appropriation and transformation of a foreign tongue during the African holocaust
- Move students beyond simplistic ideas of language as being monolithic and free of identity
- How we speak is one of many registers we use in a complex linguistic world
- Discourse changes with the context and those who are to be effective must adjust and adapt/blend registers
- Moving beyond what is given to us as "correct" makes studying language invaluable
Questions this brought up for me:
I agree almost entirely with the readings, but they did bring up a few questions. At the bottom of p. 172, Shafer's activity utilizing the magazines and Davis quote struck me as a little contrived. I understand the point of the activity, but it seemed like he was asking his students very leading or loaded questions, and I'm not excited about yes/no/one-kind-of-answer types of questions.
The appropriation of AAVE into mainstream culture also interested me. I agree that AAVE can be integrated into white culture as a way of rebelling or breaking away from suburban culture...but what if aspects of AAVE are used by groups who may not be African American but adopt the traits through exposure to that culture or experience in those communities? What if it is a natural by-product of their own assimilation into a community they live in? AAVE has an important and valuable history, but what makes using it "okay" for people who do not identify as African American? Does an awareness for that history make it okay, or is it never okay for communities in close proximity/allies/people of other ethnicities to use AAVE (whether they call it that or not)?
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