There's a blogger, Voodoo Medicine Man, who describes himself as "Part-time emergency doc, farmer and philosopher." In the course of his emergency-room duties, he encounters people with limited education and limited English skills.
Last week he published a classic prescriptivist rant, "The Bastardization of Language".
But, no nation like the United States has butchered language like we do. The United States is quickly becoming a Tower of Babel. But, in the United States, instead of correcting the problem, we romanticize it by giving it cutesy names like “Spanglish” or “Ebonics.” Children who attempt to enter the workforce using Spanglish or Ebonics are doomed to fail (or spend a career at McDonalds).
[snip]
Romanticizing the bastardization of language helps no one. So, the schools should not allow this crap to continue. Bilingual education is fine to help the young Spanish-speaking child transition to English. But, after a year or two, all need to speak English. The same holds true for so-called “ghetto-speak” or Ebonics.
I disagreed with Voodoo Medicine Man's view of Ebonics, and told him so. What I got back was
Are you naive enough to believe that Barak Obama or Collin Powell spake eloquently in public, but go home and say, "Hey, my bitch, I be takin' out the shit and gettin' some 44s?" What liberal, elitist horse shit.
What VMM represented as Ebonics (or to use the preferred term, African American Vernacular English, AAVE) is by no means a good description. First, what he wrote is just the vulgarity that is common in rap music. Futher, it is unlikely, given their backgrounds, that the parents of either President-Elect Obama or Secretary Powell spoke AAVE at all, and therefore it is also unlikely that either man has that dialect in their repertoire of spoken English.
I was going to go back to VMM's and argue the point that yes, all students should master Standard American English (SAE), but the real question is, what are the most effect and efficient ways to get language-minority students and dialect speakers to do that? And in what way is asking that question liberal or elitist?
But then I realized...answering those two questions are a book, not a comment on somebody else's blog post.
So then I began to wonder: like VMM, I encounter people with limited education and limited English skills. Why am I not an angry prescriptivist? Or what Lauren Squires calls a language griper? What do I know about linguistics?
In the course of my undergraduate education, I took several classes in linguistics, which interested me as a discipline, but did not enter the field. But one of the fundamental principles of linguistics is the idea of describing what is in a particular language or dialect, rather than dictating what should be. I also learned the concept of "code switching", which is
the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. Everyone who speaks has learned to code-switch depending on the situation and setting.
The things to know are everyone code-switches, to one degree or another, and the switching is largely unconscious. If you are a native speaker of SAE, do you use the same language in church as you do at, say, a sporting event? Do you talk to your attorney in the same way you talk to your mechanic?
I was living in the San Francisco Bay area in 1996-1997, when the Oakland School District passed the Ebonics Resolution . What stuck in my mind was how ignorant the media were on linguistics issues. Relative to Ebonics, I somewhere along the way read John Rickford's writings on Ebonics, particularly the essays Using The Vernacular to Teach the Standard, the Discover magazine Suite for Ebony and Phonics, and The Ebonics controversy in my backyard: A sociolinguist's experiences and reflections.
The short version of this controversy: Children who speak arrive at school speaking conversational SAE have to learn the conventions of "doing school." Children who arrive at school speaking a dialect or language other than SAE have an additional (or several additional) layers of learning to master: SAE itself in a conversational sense, and then the layer of academic language and the conventions of "doing school." Shaming and ridiculing a child's dialect decreases the child's academic performance. The Oakland resolution was an attempt to "bridge" the gap between AAVE and SAE, and proposed teaching beginning readers using texts written in AAVE.
What else did I know about language and linguistics? As a lay person, I've been a faithful reader of both Language Log and Language Hat for a number of years. In particular, I remembered Geoff Nunberg's quip:
a few of us languagelog contributors were chewing the electronic fat over the perennial question of why linguists get no respect. Despite the best -- and occasionally, bestselling -- efforts of popularizers, people seem disinclined to give up their cherished preconceptions about language, from their conviction that African American Vernacular English is slovenly and without rules....
and Geoff Pullam's May 20, 2004 post on Ebonics, in which he made the point that
of course millions of African Americans don't speak [AAVE]; it is a vernacular dialect restricted mostly to uneducated residents of segregated areas.
This last quarter I took a graduate class in language disabilities from Professor Kimberly Mayfield, in which we read Delpit and Dowdy's The Skin that We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom, which is a collection of essays.
I was particularly struck by Delpit's essay recounting how her daughter, a native speaker of SAE, quickly grasped AAVE when transferred to a new school. Delpit then began to think: why do AAVE-speakers have such difficulty in mastering SAE? Is it something about the way language- or dialect-minority are taught? What needs to change in the classroom, so that AAVE-speakers can master SAE and code-switch appropriately?
I was also educated by some of my classmates who are bi-dialectical in SAE and AAVE, who were very open in discussing when and where each dialect was appropriate, how they learned each dialect, and the place of each dialect in their lives.
I went looking for a page that might capture some of what I heard from my classmates. You might look at Diversity Inc's Slang at Work or the Dreaded Axe and Wiff.
Of course, AAVE isn't the only "stigmatized dialect" in the United States -- Mountain English is also thought to be only spoken by the ignorant. There are various East Coast accents that are status markers -- Jersey, South Boston, and the various New York borough accents all have social connotations.
In the course of writing this post, I re-read several of the articles listed above, including Rickford's essay on the Ebonics controversy The passage below jumped out at me.
One thing that I naively did not expect was the subtle and not-so-subtle nastiness that issues of language can elicit from the public. I encountered this in the occasionally severe distortions of information which I had shared with reporters in good faith, and in the "hate mail" which my quoted remarks in the press elicited. One example of distortive reporting was Jacob Heilbrum's Ebonics article in the January 20, 1997 issue of The New Republic, to which I responded with a letter in the March 3, 1997 issue. One example of the hate mail was a postcard I received addressed to "John Rickford, Linguistics Professor (God Help Us All)" which included, alongside a newspaper report of my remarks at the 1997 LSA meeting, the comment: "It's just amazing how much crap you so-called 'scholars' can pour and get away with. Can you wonder, John Boy, why the general public does not trust either educators, judges or politicians?
I'm unlikely to change Voodoo Medicine Man's opinion of me, or of people who speak a stigmatized dialect.
But as I go forward in my education as an educational therapist, here's a parting thought, also from Rickford:
While admitting that other factors (differences in facilities and teachers, for instance) undoubtedly contribute to the widening gap between African American and White reading scores, my strategy in responding to the educational problem, as a sociolinguist, was to point to the evidence of several studies that, with other factors held constant, a positive response to the vernacular by schools actually IMPROVED students' performance in reading and writing. This evidence was of three kinds:
(1) Piestrup's (1973) study in Oakland itself which showed that teachers who constantly interrupted Ebonics-speaking children to correct them produced the lowest-scoring and most apathetic readers, while teachers who built artfully on the children's language produced the highest-scoring and most enthusiastic readers;
(2) Evidence from the Bidialectal program in 5th and 6th grades in DeKalb county, Georgia and at Aurora University outside Chicago that Contrastive Analysis similar to that employed in the SEP and in Oakland yields greater progress in reading and writing for Ebonics speakers than conventional methods;
(3) Evidence that teaching children to read first in their vernacular, and then transitioning to the standard variety, has led to better reading results, both among African American students (Simpkins and Simpkins 1981), and in Europe. These data are quite striking (see Rickford in press for the details 1999: African American Vernacular English: Features and Use, Evolution, and Educational Implications. Oxford: Blackwell), but to maximize our potential to contribute to this Great Debate of our Time, we need to know more, through research, in relation to all three kinds of evidence.
Rickford's piece was written almost 10 years ago. There does not seem to have been much research on dialect speakers and reading, based on this interview with Maryanne Wolfe from Children of the Code.
In 2005, PBS broadcast Do You Speak American?, three one-hour episodes exploring language diversity in the United States. Later, a classroom curriculum for high school and college was developed.
Below, some linguists and educators talking on teaching language-minority and/or stigmatized-dialect speakers.
Language Log Posts on Prescriptivism and African-American Vernacular English
- Prescriptivism in the Trenches, written by a reader, Laura Petelle, who coaches high school students on college admissions. She is speaking of the direct teaching of Standard American English (SAE) to students who speak a white midwestern dialect.
I always emphasize that it's not so much right and wrong, that people speak differently everywhere, but that there's a certain amount of snobbery in knowing "standard usage" and adhering to it, like it's a password that says, "I know the code, I have learned the secrets of this society of academics/lawyers/receptionists and can be trusted to behave appropriately."
I tell them they HAVE to learn it and know when to use it unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot on resumes and applications, but they don't have to believe it's God's Preferred Way of Speaking English.
I've had more than one student come up to me after an ACT class and say, "You're the first English teacher I've had who didn't tell me my mother spoke like an uneducated hick," or "This is the first time anyone's explained why standard usage is important."
It's sad that pointless prescriptivism may keep these kids from top schools. But that's why we absolutely HAVE to teach it to them, so they're not fighting an uphill battle on the language front. They're already at a disadvantage without the money, resources, and connections wealthy suburban Chicago students have in spades. It would be brutal not to teach them the "code" they need to pass the gatekeepers.
- Roger Shuy: Speaking Good. In the opening paragraphs, Shuy recounts his own history of becoming bidialectical, acquiring academic English on top of his midwestern working-class register.
At some point in their English classes most high school teachers get the marvelous opportunity to let their students meet Calpurnia in Harper's Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. This can be a great opening to teach the importance of acceptable language variability and the need to code-switch. Although teachers promote using Standard English, Calpurnia, the Black maid, shows us how important it is to hang onto our language roots. After Scout asks why Calpurnia speaks one way in their home and quite a different way when she is around her family, she explains to her young charge that folks don't like to be talked down to. Doing otherwise would be considered uppity. In short, Calpurnia appears to have developed the kind of bidialectalism that I found so difficult to master.
Now jump to the mid to late 1960s when racial tensions ran high after the US Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education. Public school teachers suddenly discovered that many African American students didn't talk the same way that most wite kids did. It wasn't long before some educators came up with the silly idea that Black students had cognitive deficits that caused their vernacular speech. This notion encouraged commercial publishers to develop language and cognitive repair programs for Black students. The whole idea was, of course, pretty silly. To combat these materials, sociolinguists went to work, learning about Vernacular Black English (VBE) and eventually proving that the cognitive deficit theory was a crock and that the students were using a different but equally systematic and beautiful language system.
After the structure of this variety of English was discovered, the question became what to do about it in the schools. A number of linguists developed the idea of bidialectalism and, since VBE was systematic and just as cognitively rich as Standard English, contrastive analysis seemed appropriate. The obvious thing to do was to teach VBE speakers how to add Standard English to their repertoires and to use it in socially appropriate and expected contexts but NOT to wipe out their vernacular because, among other reasons, it can be as important to them as it was to Calpurnia, especially with people they love. Bidialectalism was modeled, of course, on bilingualism. Two language systems can be more useful than one.
All was still not well, however, because even some linguists argued that bidialectalism was just another form of racism. James Sledd led this attack in his article, "Bidialectalism," published in The English Journal 58.9 in December, 1969. He argued that if bidialectalism meant anything at all, whites should also learn to speak VBE, which turned out to be a logical but socially unrealistic idea. A number of us had tried this and discovered, much to our embarrassment, that the VBE speaking community thought we were making fun of them. It was okay for them to speak it in contexts they felt appropriate, but whites should not even try. This was considered insulting. The problem appeared to be in the direction of second dialect acquisition. It's apparently okay for speakers of a socially stigmatized dialect to speak a socially accepted one but not for such learning to go in the opposite direction. I think this lesson has been learned by now.
Another problem with bidialectalism came from the education community itself. Many misunderstood it completely, believing that it was meant to teach Black children how to speak VBE, which, of course, would be utter nonsense, since most of them already spoke it. This misperception arises periodically even today, as illustrated by the Ebonics controversy a few years ago in Oakland. It seems that the notion of acceptable variation comes hard to many people, especially to educators.
- Suzette Haden Elgin on dialect and Standard English
I once co-chaired a one-day conference at my university on the perennial topic of "literacy crisis." I've forgotten the exact title, but it would have been something like "The Literacy Crisis in Today's United States." Scholars gave papers all day long, and the papers were recorded so that a "proceedings" of the event could be produced and distributed.
I transcribed all those tapes myself because I didn't trust anyone else to do it accurately, and I was extremely careful. However, when I furnished copies of the transcript to the people who had presented papers I got an immediate flood of messages that I can summarize as follows: "I'm sorry, Professor Elgin, but your secretary has made a number of errors in transcribing the tape of my conference paper." Then there'd be a list of the alleged errors .... for example, a sentence transcribed as "There's three reasons for the difficulties these students face." And the message would close with "I would of course never have said any of those things."
I did not respond to any of those people with "I transcribed the tape myself, and I assure you -- you did say those things. I can prove it. They're on the tape, often several times." Nor did I respond by letting people know that some of their statements about correct grammar contradicted statements being made in the messages coming from other presenters, despite the fact that they were all native speakers of English equipped with Ph.D's. I sent an acknowledgment memo to everyone, saying, "Thank you for your input; the corrections you have specified will be made."
So far as can be determined, Standard American English doesn't exist. I've served on numerous scholarly committees assigned the task of defining SAE so that exams or essays or oral presentations could be judged against the definition; I've sometimes been the administrator to whom a committee charged with that task was supposed to report. In every case, the result has been a report that the committee is unable to reach a consensus. (I've seen no evidence indicating that the situation is different for the other hypothetical Standards such as Standard British English, Standard New Zealand English, and the like.) A rough consensus list exists of items that the hypothetical Standard does not contain, like "ain't got none" and "done went"; there is no consensus on what it does contain.
Like so many other hot-button political issues, this one is handled by ignoring it, a practice that's very hard on the students taking the tests and writing the essays and giving the oral presentations. Official definitions of the Standard ordinarily go like this: "Standard English is the form and style of English commonly spoken and written by educated people."
If Standard American English does exist -- and I don't think it does -- it exists only as written language. That makes it hard for children to acquire it natively.
All over the U.S. students are required to demonstrate their "competency" in the hypothetical Standard American English by writing a brief essay on an assigned topic, using that language variety. If the people who judge the results don't feel that a student is "competent" enough, the consequences can be unpleasant. It can mean that the student doesn't get into a given college, or doesn't get a scholarship; it can mean being required to take Remedial English, a course not famous for being an intellectual delight.
Suppose that instead of requiring students to write a brief essay in SAE we required them to demonstrate their ability to make a Standard American Mince Pie that would be judged "competent" -- fit to eat. The sort of mince pie that educated people everywhere in the U.S. make.
We'd prepare students for their competency exam by telling them what items go into a Standard American Mince Pie, and by telling them what the rules are for combining those items. We would not prepare them by telling them something like this: "No Standard American Mince Pie (SAMP) contains carrots or turnips. No SAMP contains chocolate. Never put olive oil in your SAMP. Be sure that your SAMP contains no lobster, crab, or other seafood." However, this is exactly what we do for Standard American English. We tell students that the English they use should be logical, coherent, interesting, and well-organized; we tell them it should not be awkward. We do not define the terms "logical, coherent, interesting, well-organized, awkward." And then we provide a list of things that aren't supposed to be in it. Like double negatives, split infinitives, and "ain't." Like sentence fragments. Like sentences that begin with a coordinating conjunction. [Notice that although I am educated my last four "sentences" can only be described as one sentence that begins with a coordinating conjunction, followed by three sentence fragments. And of course the one that starts with "and" is by definition a fragment.]
One of the things we do to turn our students into "educated people" is have them read stories and essays and articles produced by individuals recognized as great writers. Anyone who reads these assigned materials will notice very quickly that they're full of sentence fragments and sentences that begin with coordinating conjunctions. We tell the students that the reason great writers are allowed to "break the rules" is because they've proved that they know them and can apply them. (The way Picasso, having demonstrated his ability to draw a flawlessly realistic horse, could then be allowed to paint horses that had both of their eyes on one side of their heads.) It of course has to be true that the great writers are following rules for the appropriate use of sentence fragments and sentences starting with "and/but/or" -- they can't just be doing it at random. But we don't mention that.
When students ask teachers why a particular sentence is judged to be "awkward" ( or illogical, incoherent, disorganized, or uninteresting), they're told that "you just have to know it when you see it." We could do better than that. We could tell them, for example, that when we process sentences the first thing we do is find the predicate, and that any part of a sentence that forces us to delay finding the predicate in a fashion that violates the limits of working memory will be awkward. For example...
1. That John insisted on smoking cigarette after cigarette in spite of knowing full well that three of the five people in the car were allergic to cigarette smoke irritated Elizabeth.
2. It irritated Elizabeth that John insisted on smoking cigarette after cigarette in spite of knowing full well that three of the five people in the car were allergic to cigarette smoke.
Sentence #1 is awkward; Sentence #2, although it contains more words, is not awkward. Sentence #1 is awkward because it begins with an item that is 28 words long. The working memory (also called "short term memory") can only handle seven-plus-or-minus-two chunks at a time; it's awkward to have to hold all 28 of those words, and well over seven-plus-or-minus-two sentence parts, until you get to the predicate -- "irritated Elizabeth." In Sentence #2 there's nothing between the reader and the predicate but "it."
We know things like that and are capable of providing lots of examples, but we don't do it -- because if you gave those two sentences to 100 "educated people" some of them would be sure to say that they thought both of the sentences were awkward, or that #2 was more awkward than #1 or that neither is awkward.
This is entirely irrational. One way we demonstrate our awareness of its irrationality is by the way we decide whether people are "competent" enough to stay out of Remedial English. It's done by defining competency in roughly the same way we define the poverty level. If we have enough funding to support 10 sections of Remedial English, a score of 20 or below will get you dumped into Remedial English. If we only have enough funding to support 8 sections of Remedial English, "incompetent" suddenly becomes a score of 18 or below. (The figures are hypothetical, but I'm sure the principle will be obvious.)
I don't like this system. It's unfair. It's based on a slumgullion of prejudices and myths and snobbery and distortions. A lot of it is based on the principle of "Well, they made me learn that, so you have to learn it too." We should not be allowed to require our students to do something we're too lazy or too ignorant to define and describe to them logically, coherently, and in an organized fashion. (I'm willing to forego a requirement that our definition and description be interesting, although that would be desirable.) I've fought the silly thing all my adult life, despite my colleagues in linguistics advising me repeatedly that I'm wasting my time.
I'm awfully glad I'm not required to try to justify my position to George Bush; at least there's that one thing to be thankful for.
Suzette
PS: My dialect is one that pronounces "witch" and "which" (and "wear" and "where") differently. It is never a fun experience to try to explain to teacher candidates that the "wh" of "which" and "where" is the sound /h/ followed by the sound /w/, even though it's spelled the other way around.
- From the LinguistList
I teach reading and writing methods courses to prospective and practicing teachers and usually spend a class session on language variation, including AAVE. I try to get across the following ideas:
1. English is a collection of dialects, none of which is more "correct" than the others. English belongs to all its speakers, not just a few subsets. AAVE, like other versions of English, is rule- governed and expresses thoughts equally well (e.g., double negatives aren't "illogical"). The students often accept these points at least somewhat, but immediately respond, "Don't we have a responsibility to teach "standard English" to students so they can get jobs?" etc.
2. The reason that some dialects have lower status is not because they're linguistically inferior but because of who speaks them, e.g., because of prejudice. I try to soften this a little by saying that it's normal to be ethnocentric about language and think that the way we speak sounds right while the way other people speak sounds funny, but that as educators we have a responsibility to have a more informed view.
3. Given these linguistic and social facts, the educator has a dilemma. "Correcting" students' language is unlikely to work and sends a message that their language and that of their communities is inferior. Yet shouldn't we give them the tools to live in a prejudiced world?
4. I suggest the following:
For younger children, focus on self-expression, lots of reading and writing, exposure to written language register through wide reading of literature (including that written in AAVE - there are many good children's books).
For older students (middle school and up) - study language variation as part of the English language arts curriculum, including a clear discussion of how AAVE is stigmatized for social rather than linguistic reasons. (I think that this should be explored with all students, not just those with stigmatized dialects.) At that point, help students with stigmatized dialects explore the possibility of bi-dialectism as a tool for survival in a prejudiced world, but with the choice being theirs: any individual may prefer instead to avoid employers who don't accept his or her speech. (An analogy I sometimes use is a Southerner who goes north and is turned down for jobs by employers who are prejudiced against her dialect. She might choose to change her speech, or choose instead to find an employer who will value her as she is.) I believe that we don't have the right to make this choice for students, and that a solid foundation in reading, writing, and oral self-expression is the best preparation for acquiring the new dialect.
Personally, I think that far too much of the Ebonics debate has taken for granted that language prejudice is just fine and that the onus should be on speakers of AAVE to change.
Comments?
Sandra Wilde Portland State University (Oregon)
Interesting post. I've long thought that there is some (though not all) skill involved with code switching. It would be interesting to see research done comparing complexity, vocabulary size, etc. of SAE and AAVE. I've seen linguists say that certain dialects or creoles are just as rich as any other language, but I don't know if the research supports those kind of statements. My gut feeling is that one is not necessarily more advanced, but more difficult to learn than the other, and that effective code switching would require effective learning of the more difficult language or dialect.
Posted by: Paul | Wednesday, December 24, 2008 at 06:47 AM