I’m not a linguist, obviously, but ISN’T a dialect a “subset” of a language? If there was no English, there would be no AAVE, right? I mean, “English” is right there in the name. So while it may not be correct linguistically to call Ebonics a “sublanguage” or a “perverted” form of the “true” language, I think it makes sense for people using plain English and not linguistic jargon. In linguistics, do you use “trees” to organize language relationships? Is AAVE an offshoot of SAE, or an entirely different branch?
Can you name some other dialects in use in the U.S. that might help clarify? For instance, I know English as spoken in New England varies from English as spoken in the Midwest (probably not to the extent of it being a new dialect, but just as an example). Not just accent, but minor variations in word choice and such. I would say this is a “subset” of SAE, and a perverted form of SAE, “perverted” meaning “changed.”
My first response is why does everything have to be practical? There are applied lingusitics stuff, like teaching ESL, dialect awareness, better understanding the brain, speech therapy, coming up with programs to help teach kids how to speak standard English …
But why does it have to be at the expense of all other dialects?
I don’t know if it’s a “terrible need” to have it in the classrooms. I think it’s important that kids are taught dialect awareness, and I think it can be useful tool for teaching these kids who speak minority dialects how to speak standard English, which we all agree is a very useful tool.
Some people don’t need help, but obviously some do. We can’t make sweeping about all speakers of certain dialects or all minorities.
We don’t pick up langauge from TV or teachers or authority figures. We learn them from our peers, usually. Teachers can help, but they usually aren’t the primary influences.
I don’t think anyone on this board is saying treat it as a foreign language. We’re just recomending using models based on foreign langauges to help these kids learn standard English.
I don’t know if that clears anything up; Friday nights aren’t the best times for me to make sense. Oh, crap, that didn’t make sense. Good night.
Andros had focused on the first part of the passage, now you’re focusing on the second. Here is the whole passage:
"Ebonics is a different language, it’s not slang as many believe,’ Texeira said. "For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.’
Texeira said research has shown that students learn better when they fully comprehend the language they are being taught in."
Now ask yourself, based on the whole passage, what do you think Ms. Texeira is trying to say. Go ahead, first assume one, then the other. Does it make sense that her thoughts would even have been cited if she was merely trying to say that kids should be taught in English?
And why do you think that the SB school board issued a press release disassociating themselves from her remarks? Because they didn’t want anyone to think that kids were goiing to be taught in English?
She was describing a Bilingual Education model, in which students in all their classes are taught concepts primarily in their native languages. And which IS being used in some classrooms in America.
Yes, it does. Believe me, I’ve read that whole quote over and over during the course of this thread. “Taught like other students who speak a foreign language” does not mean “taught in a foreign language”.
Because people like you were getting the wrong impression. The quote was ambiguous and, as we have seen in this thread, can be interpreted either way. I prefer to interpret it with the assumption that she is sane and therefore isn’t suggesting kids be taught in Ebonics.
That’s merely your interpretation. You say she was describing a bilingual model, I say she was describing an ESL model. Neither of those beliefs is supported directly by the quote.
Yes, but that’s not the same as calling it perverted.
There is no uber-English that’s the purest form of all. There are merely many varieties of it.
What I’m saying is that, no, it’s not fine to make value judgements like that, no matter how much linguistics you know. I understand most people do make such statements, and I’m just trying to explain why those statements are wrong. I guess I’m not doing the greatest job, and I’m sorry.
Yes, linguists do that, but standard English and AAE are not in such a clean cut relationship. They’re related somehow, but AAE is definitely not an offshoot of standard English. There;s a lot of debate as to where AAE comes from, so I can’t tell you exactly what’s what. The differences in grammar and pronounciation lead most people to believe that, while the same language, they’re not closely related.
Frankly, between the poor reporting and Ms. Texeira’s agenda, I do not know that we will ever know what was really intended. While I see your view, magellan01, I also can interpret the passage this way, without feeling I have strained any points:
"Ebonics is a different language, it’s not slang as many believe,’ Texeira said. "For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.Meaning we should follow an ESL model when dealing with these children.’
Texeira said research has shown that students learn better when they fully comprehend the language they are being taught in.So that once they have been taught SAE following the ESL model, they will better comprehend the SAE in which they are being taught’
Now, I will not insist that either “translation” is correct–which is why I held out for clarification from my first post addressing the topic–but I do not think that the “translation” I provided here can be dismissed out of hand.
No other program has asked teachers to teach in Ebonics, so this one would be the first ever. That would be newsworthy in itself, so if it were true, one would expect it to be mentioned explicitly in the article.
Eh, I would have said that no matter how sleepy I was. I think there should be a debate about whether everything has to be practical … my fiance studies math which is far less practical than linguistics, yet no one ever questions him about whether math has any inherent value … sorry, sorry, off topic…
Dismissed out of hand? No. Although I don’t think it is the most logical interpretation. The final point of the passage is there to explain “These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.” It says that “the way” these other kids are taught are through their own language. So the question is: “What method exists in which students are taught in their own languagess?” The answer to that is not ESL, but Bilingual Education.
But I agree that it might be ambiguous, which is why I retracted that it was “clear”.
Not that this matters to the above debate, which was restricted to the passage in the article only, I think the subsequent information indicates that Ms. Texeira intended to say that these kids should be taught subject matter through ebonics using a Bilingual Ed model. I’m talking about the fact that the school board did not use their press release to merely clarify the language of the article, but to disassociate themselves from her remarks.
You’ll have to scroll down and click on the PDF for the eighth item down “Ebonics not part of helping black students” (I would have pasted and opied the quote from the short article, but it is a scan.)
If the purpose of the article was to announce that this school would be the first in the country to have teachers speaking Ebonics, why didn’t the author just come out and say something like “This marks the first occasion in which teachers will be using Ebonics, rather than Standard English, to communicate with black students.”
Instead, the article says “Len Cooper, who is coordinating the pilot program at the two city schools, said San Bernardino district officials do not plan to incorporate Ebonics into the program”, which is nearly the opposite.
The link you provided only shows that a newspaper’s editorial board came to the same interpretation that you did - or, since it’s the same newspaper that ran the article in the OP, that they had more information about Texeira’s statements than they printed in the original article.
Interestingly enough, the first Ebonics-related PDF on that page (available here as HTML), an editorial by Dave Gibson, demonstrates not just ignorance about AAVE itself, but also about the basic facts of the new school program:
I can see why the school district would want to distance itself from the contents of that article, since everyone who reads it seems to find a different meaning.
Because, as I’ve explained before, it says absolutely nothing about the students’ primary language. It only says students learn better when they understand the language being used, no matter which language that is.
“The language they are being taught in” has always been Standard English, and it would be quite noteworthy if that were to change. The fact that a change was not specifically noted suggests to me that it did not change.
You can start by conjugating the verb “be” in ebonics and then show me how this was developed over time through scholastic effort. If anything, it is the lack of formal education that created this form of speech. That in itself is not a bad thing (as a dialect) but it is educationally detrimental. It poses a barrier to understanding virtually everything that is taught in school (which is the point of the program we are debating).
Spelling has everything to do with language. If you don’t recognize a word by its spelling than how do you know what the meaning of it is? Standard English does not have regional variations. That’s what makes it standard. “Two plus two equals four” is a simple explanation of a mathematical concept. “Tu an tu ekwals for” means nothing but is phonetically correct.
That may explain a lot of our differences in opinion. My parents insisted I speak English correctly throughout my 12 years of Primary education. I was corrected on a daily basis on grammar, spelling and sentence structure. My friend’s parents would correct me accordingly. We were NOT wealthy and my parents never went to college. My Maternal Grandmother was an immigrant. Although she struggled with English she insisted her children learn it and speak it at home. From your perspective I probably come off as a language snob but I was always taught (literally) that language was the common thread that binds us. It’s not that I object to slang or variations in dialect, but they cannot be used as a basis for assimilating information presented in Standard English.
Dialect and slang are absolutely a part of language. And they are complicated further by “expressions” which change continually.
I’ve always lived in the world of “words mean things”. I try to keep my debate opinions as literal as possible to avoid adding any flavor which usually gets misinterpreted. The printed word lacks voice inflection so adjectives/adverbs carry the tone. When you use words like “true language” it conjures up images of someone talking about their religion as the “true religion”. That is not how Standard English should be looked at. It is not culturally bound to any group. In fact, it changes constantly with the introduction of new words (from slang). That is what makes it different from English in the UK and that’s what makes it culturally binding.
The desire to maintain a cultural identity still exists in the African American community. It does so to the extent that there are degrees of “Blackness”. This extends across all financial demographics but is probably more prevalent in the urban environment. To this end, ebonics has become the language of the Black Man and any suggestion that it is not Standard English becomes a challenge to cultural identity. And I understand how it would be taken as an insult. But I also believe that learning Standard English from day one will eventually work its way into the scheme of things.
Oh, piffle. The only aspects of Standard English that entered the language through “scholastic” efforts are the rather silly rules such as those distinguishing shall and will (ignored by the overwhelming number of speakers), the insistence that a sentence may not end with a preposition (which arbitrary rule has been violated by every great author in the language), and the rule claiming that an infinitive may not be split (which, like the prepositional rule, is an attempt to pretend that Enghlish is actually Latin and, like the prepositional rule, has been violated–to the improvement of the language–by all great authors.)
The conjugation of the verb “to be” in AAVE is probably one indication of the strong African contributions to the dialect. Interestingly, classical Greek and a number of other Indo-European languages have similar constructions in which the copula may be omitted or may be used in ways that are unfamiliar to speakers of Standard English. For example, the sentence “The man is good.” may be rendered to Greek as 'o anthropos estin agathos, but the Greeks would have been more likely to say 'o anthropos 'o agathos, “the man the good” with no copula at all.
You make several assertions, here, that are in error. You and liberty3701 may have talked past each other on the spelling issue, so I will include it here.
AAVE has been codified. It has been codified for over 35 years (in my experience) and probably longer. There are, indeed, texts that will demonstrate the conjugation of verbs in AAVE and there have been citations to much of that research earlier in this thread. I do not know for sure of an on-line grammar of AAVE, (although this Outline of AAVE Grammar (a .pdf) appears to be one), but there are several in print. liberty3701 is correct regarding spelling, although she may have missed your point. AAVE is a spoken dialect which has not necessarily been transcribed, formally, in a written form. To deny that it is a language on that pretext is to say that Hawaiians spoke no language before the American missionaries created a dictionary of Hawaiian in the 1830s. Written language is a relatively new phenomenon among humans (less than 6,000 years out of the 100,000 year history of humanity). You are correct that SAE requires a consistent written form, but you presume too much when you demand it of any dialect or other language.