This is pretty dismissive: “I put Ebonics up there with parents making cute baby names for common things.”
Are you retracting that statement? If so, congratulations. If not, how about answering the question about Scots and Hawaiian pidgin?
Then you won’t have much opposition. No one here is saying it should be taught to students, and no schools are teaching it.
This “Scots” tangent, while worthy of a quick point, has now gotten us stuck. Scots is a language/dialect (there seems to be no definititive meaning attributed to these terms by linguists, and it doesn’t matter for this post so let’s not reargue that), but if we are talking about teaching kids SAE, then Scots may be as correct, and incorrect, as Japanese or French or Maori or Hawaiian or Navaho.
A few pages back I asked those who think there is no such thing as incorrect or lazy speech something to the effect: “Can any speaker of AAVE ever speak incorrectly, or lazily?”
If not, I think every one of us should immediatley adopt AAVE. For this language, in which one can never make a mistake, is truly an amazing thing. Maybe we should look to adopt strains of it for economics, medicine, mathematics, and space flight. Thiink of the wonderful world it would be.
No one addressed the question, so I ask it again, leaving SAE out of it, is it possible for a kid who uses AAVE 100% of the time to speak AAVE incorrectly at home or on the playground?
If the answer is yes, then these kids are just like kids learning languages all over the world. And they will be right and wrong as they struggle to acquire this their new language just like other kids. If the answer is no, doesn’t that mean that AAVE lacks the rule structure to be classified as a language? And is it more a dialect, or even closer to slang?
Someone on the previous pages asked about my use of “legitamize”. Although it should be clear even from the last few pages, my point is that I think we do these kids a better service telling them that there is, in fact, one “correct” language (in the practical sense not the absolute sense). My fear is that without this guidance they may feel "Well, why do I have to learn another language, I already know one, why don’t they learn mine (AAVE)?
I don’t think anyone on this thread would view that as a desirable outcome.
Not, I admit, that it is the necessary outcome. It may very well be that by showing these kids that they’ve already “mastered” one language, they might be more inclined to want to learn another. That would be a good thing. But which method do you choose?
I think this goes to what Kimstu framed as the heart of the debate.
If I was asked to vote which way to go I would say we should present SAE as the language they are expected to learn, the language that will connect them to the world outside their neighborhoods. And, yes, at times, they might very well be told that their current speech, in the context of the new challenge, is incorrect. Or wrong.
I do not find this disparaging to the child, his family, or the community. This does NOT mean that anyone should be made to feel bad about making a mistake. (That might be the biggest impediment to learning!) When my speech was corrected as a child I did not view is as some moral failing, but as something I had to work on. I consider it healthy that I was taught that if I kept using “ain’t” instead of “isn’t” that people might view me as being less than I might like them to. I think the teachers had an obligation to relay that truth to me. Just as they had the obligation to give me the tools to effect the outcome.
We know for a fact that millions and millions of people have learned to speak and write correctly thought this method. Why should it not work for the kids in question? Are they, somehow, that different?
It’s been pointed out that their language is tied to their culture and their self-image. This can be a fine, positive thing, just as with any children from any culture. But if they romanticize and become infatuated with it, while not acquiring the key that opens more of the world to them, SAE, it becomes a millstone, encumbring them their entire lives.
I vote for not gambling with this next generation of children. We know what works, let’s make sure it works better.
Of course. AAVE has rules like any other language, which are described in the PDF tomndebb linked to. If you say “Johnny be listening to jazz” when Johnny is only listening to jazz for the first time at that moment, that would be an incorrect use of the habitual form. If you say “there he” instead of “there he is”, that would be an incorrect copula deletion.
Yes, every child makes mistakes as they’re learning to speak their home language, whether that’s SAE, AAVE, French, or Mandarin.
Isn’t the whole purpose of this new program to address the cases where it isn’t working well?
Yes. But while I think the proposed solution is well-intentioned, I think it is misguided. We know that soemthing has to be done, the question is what. The proposed program is one option. Adopting a more Bilingual Ed approach is another option (worse, in my opinion). Fuller Immersion is another, just like with any other language. There are also no doubt other options outside the “new language” model, something that might work equally well for math as it does for SAE.
As I’ve stated, and I know you disagree, I think that in the long run, the more we create the impression that AAVE is different from SAE
that Italian, Greek, Swahili, and Spanish are different from SAE, the more we are seeking to have a lie sit at the foundation of part of our education sytem. I think it will exacerbate the problem, making it much, much harder to get AAVE-speaking youth to adopt SAE 10 and 20 years down the road.
It think it wiser to let the culture outside the schools define itself. Dialects will change, slang will come and go, fads wil wax and wane. But let the school offer a steady course. I’d argue that no one needs that more than kids who are trying to adopt a new language.
Yes. These “millions and millions of people” learned to speak SAE in an SAE environment because that’s what they were raised speaking. People who aren’t raised that way will have more trouble, whether their native language is Japanese or AAVE.
As an ESL teacher, if you have a classroom full of Japanese students learning English, you don’t say “that’s wrong” when they speak Japanese. Japanaese isn’t English, so it would be silly and counterproductive to call Japanese “wrong”. It’s apples and oranges. You just remind them that they’re supposed to be practicing English, and explain to them how to express what they want to say. (I use this example because I have firsthand experience with it).
I was talking about the millions and millions of immigrants, like my parents, who did not speak English (SAE or otherwise) at home. Yet, miraculously–to the tune of millions and millions, they mastered the language.
That doesn’t mean that we should automatically do everything the same way it has been done in the past. But we should look at the options and the risk/rewards associated with them.
You are, of course, correct. The use of “wrong” went to a debate much earlier in the thread exploring whether or not AAVE can ever be “wrong”. We can ignore that part of the debate here. (In fact, I, for one, won’t get in to it again.) But I think you would agree that Japanese differs from SAE in a very different way than AAVE differs from SAE, and therefore might require a different approach.
Actually, I (indirectly) answered that question with “Yes” and Gorsnak explicitly answered that question with “Yes” (and you replied to him), and I believe that a couple of other people may have also answered “Yes” to that question, so I have no idea why you claim that no one has addressed that question.
Of course kids who speak AAVE can use it incorrectly. There are almost no people on the planet who can and do speak any language flawlessly.
Therefore, I wonder why you bring up the “we should all speak it” strawman?
Then why not just tell them that there is a practical reason to learn SAE, rather than making an issue of telling them that either one is “correct”? Why do you need to impose right and wrong on the issue?
The kids are not different, the degree of separation in the language is different. And since no one is talking about teaching the kids in AAVE I think you are throwing up imaginary barriers to the idea of giving the teachers information to deal with the situation.
I have already noted that the problem is one of psychological interference. When a speaker of German or Mandarin learns English, English is so foreign that the person has little to confuse him or her regarding the rules of the “new” language. When a person grows up in a neighborhood where the standard speech is already a variant of SAE, then teaching the “right” way to speak simply imposes special case rules on the language already spoken. However, when a language/dialect is just sufficently removed from SAE that it has a separate grammar in many cases, but is sufficiently close that some people refuse to recognize that it is different, calling it slang or other terms, then the speaker faces a specific difficulty in trying to determine when to apply new rules. If you tell a child to say “They are gone” would it not be appropriate to be able to tell them whether they would understand that expression if it expressed “They gone” or “They be gone”? Or do you simply tell them that they have to say “They are gone” without ever telling them what the sentence means?
Exactly! Japanese is thoroughly different and there is no point of confusion which rule applies to which language. Each language has separate rules that can be recognized as applying only to the different language. However, when we attempt to teach SAE to AAVE speakers, we have rules that differ when the languages sound very similar. We need to be able to distinguish where to switch codes.
This does not mean that every black kid or every kid from a predominantly black neighborhood needs to have special instruction. Many of them are familiar with code-switching already. Where we need to make special preparation to teach SAE are in those instances where a very large number of students will have little to no exposure to SAE and will have the most difficulty recognizing that there are two dialects that they are attempting to master.
You’re right. I think I was fixated on it because some people earlier were actually took the other opinion. I’ll be glad to not bring it up again.
I have focused on practical reasons–check even the last few threads. But if I’m fixating on it I am doing so only to the extent that others insist that it is OFF the table. In my view, in the course of a class it might be used, it might not. And even were it to be used, I don’t see it being used in some mean-spiritted, dictatorial manner. For me it’s the same as in math class. If a kid says that 3 x 5 = 17, I see nothing wrong with saying he’s wrong. The teach may express himself that way one time, and another way another time. I used to tutor math and I would often say things like “that’s not right”, “you made a mistake here”, “you might want to recheck what you did over here”, “you’re using the wrong equation”, “you’re wrong in your multiplication”. What is the big deal? I know that there is a school of thought (no pun intended, I promise) that says you should never say “no” to a child, to only accentuate the positive with reward, and I think that is just utter nonsense. (We can start another thread if you’d like.)
As I’ve statee much earlier, I do not think that there is anything wrong with making teachers more aware of AAVE vernacular. In fact, it can only be helpful. The question is to what degree, and in what manner should they use AAVE in speaking in the classroom. I’m thinking it’s more a matter of tone. My teacher’s used “ain’t” to explaiin that it was an incorrect or slang form of “isn’t”. But they didn’t use it as if it were accepted speech when referring to some other topic.
How this question is expressed seems a little awkward, but I think I get your meaning. I would say that you get them to express the idea, e.g. “If Johnny and Susie were with you in your home, and the ledt to go someplace else, and then someone asked you “Where are Johnny and Susie?”, what would you say?” When they come up with the answer “They be gone.” you then explain something to the effect, “That may be how you would express it when speaking with your friends, but that wouldn’y be proper English. How would you communicate that thought…” I think you get the idea. I just woldn’t want improper speech coming out of the mouths of a teacher without the acknowlegement that it is incorrect speech. The “ain’t” example above I think is a good one.
If your school happened to be in an area where octal math was pretty standard, and that’s what all the kids were taught at home, used at home, etc., then telling them that the above equation is wrong wouldn’t help any. They’d be correct in their math, just not correct in decimal math. The teachers job would be to get the students to understand decimal math, and how to recognize whether decimal or octal math is appropriate in any given situation. That’s the exact same thing being discussed in this thread. There is no reason to tell the kid they are wrong, as they’re not wrong, they’re just using a different dialect/language. This has nothing to do with any “touchy-feely, can’t tell someone they’re wrong because we’re all liberals” type thing. The kids are truly not wrong, so why tell them they are?
Perhaps a better way to make the point I’ve made several times throughout this thread is to aks you a hypothetical: If a kid is in an English class and spells “learn” “l-i-r-m”, is that wrong? If it is, what would be so bad with sharing with the kid a fact: that “lirm” is the wrong way to spell “learn”.
To use your example, what if the kid in math class gave an answer that was incorrect in every known base system, type of math, etc, so that his answer was unequivocally wrong, would it then be okay to utter the taboo “wrong”?
I’m just trying to establish a baseline here. Are you arguing that kids shouldn’t be told they are “wrong”? Or that in the case of AAVE, they are not (or may not) be wrong? Or both.
I am truly baffled by the need some people feel to take “wrong” off the table. We established earlier (even as recently as a few posts back) that kids can be wrong. So why this overdriving compulsion to strike the word from the teacher’s vocabulary. My guess is that it’s precisely what you claim it is not: “some touch-feely approach that is over-coddling and over-protective of children.”
Now we can have an honest debate as to whether kids should be so protected, but let’s do in another thread.
And please reread even this last page of the thread. It should explain much, including the answer to the question in this post.
Of course not. If he spells a word wrong, feel free to tell him that it’s incorrect, and give the correct spelling.
As above, sure, tell him it’s wrong.
That in the case of AAVE, they are not wrong. Have you really followed this thread?
I haven’t seen a single poster here posit that students can’t be wrong, nor that they shouldn’t be told that they are wrong. What’s been argued throughout this thread is that a student who speaks AAVE is not wrong, and therefore shouldn’t be told that they are. Much like switching between octal and decimal, both of which are correct, the goal is to teach the child SAE as a real world skill, including when to use it, but without telling him that his current language/dialect is wrong, as it isn’t.
Can we finally burn this strawman?
Do you consider AAVE to be wrong, invalid, or lazy?
Well, if I asked the child to write ‘learn,’ and he writes ‘aprender,’ I might take a different correctional approach if I recognize his mistake to be one of subbing in a Spanish word for an SAE one, rather than willfulness, stupidity, or inability to learn. Same thing goes for kids that put adjectives after nounds rather than before- it’s them struggling to translate from the language they know into the one you are teaching.
Perhaps the issue is that AAVE is so similar to SAE in many respects?
Kids can be wrong…but understanding why they are wrong is an important part of helping them learn.
In college, it’s almost cliche to say that, all things being equal, if 50% of your students flunk a test, the problem is not with the students, it’s with the test, or the instruction method. At what point do we acknowledge that our current teaching methods for SAE leave something to be desired?
I believe he was stating that this particular speech is a lazy version of English, which it is. Skin color (as you are attempting to point to in the second line I quoted) is irrelevant.
Some of you are talking about Ebonics as if it were the apotheosis of young, black, inner city, or ghetto language. It isn’t. Like any language, there are many different dialects that exists within many different regions. Some East Coast dialects sound different from those of the West Coast variety, etc. Are you prepared to teach each and every variation in class? If so, I suspect you aren’t going to be teaching anything in school except languages. Math, Science, History, etc. are all going to suffer. This attitude is exactly why so many other countries are kicking our collective asses in education. We can’t even decide what language to teach!
This shouldn’t be a debate. If my parents came to me when I was in school and told me that we were moving to Germany, I’d say, “Well, I guess I have to learn to speak German.”
Piffle. What, exactly is “lazy” about the sentence “I be broke.” (And do you even know what it means?)
Another poster who seems to have not actually read the thread: Every poster who has contributed more than two posts in this thread has agreed that what we should be teaching kids is SAE.
AAVE is “lazy,” Euthanasiast? I think lazy better describes your powers of reading comprehension. Did you read this thread? Did you read the continual debunking of the myth that AAVE is lazy, the debunking that is repeated on nearly every page? And if you actually did read it and still disagreed, don’t you think it might have been smarter to approach the arguments used to debunk that myth, rather than simply leap in with your opinion?
Indeed, your post was so lazy that you wrote it on the assumption that someone was actually proposing to teach AAVE in class. I’m going to bold this so that even if you are feeling lazy, you’ll still be able to read it: No one is proposing teaching AAVE in class. This has been said non-stop, throughout this thread.
I have a suggestion for you. If you read threads, you can comment intelligently on them.
I also have a question for you:
Would you learn to speak the German of Bavaria, or the German of the northern areas of Germany? Let’s say you moved to Bavaria, learnt the Bavarian version of German, and then moved out of Bavaria. Would you stick with your Bavarian German, or would you change? How about when you were talking to Bavarians?
The problem you seem to be having is trying to compare something writing in stone, with something that isn’t as static. Language is fluid. Yes we have rules of grammar and of usage, but those rules have evolved and are still evolving.
Your spelling example is too extreme. I be out, is close to, I am out. Aks, is close to Ask and may be a matter of speech patterns, as opposed to not knowing what Ask is.
Let’s say that where this kid comes colour is the correct spelling of color. You do him to disservice to tell him that the only right way to spell color is color, especially if he’s spent his whole life and everyong around him spells color as colour. You need to KNOW that, before you say he’s spelling it wrong, because as far as he’s concerned he’s not.
You need to be able to understand why he spells colour, as color and the reasons why, or you won’t be able to teach him what the rules of spelling, of grammar, of speech are, for this new environment in which colour is spelled color.
It seems to be that “we’re” lumping accents, dialects, written and spoken grammar all in one and I don’t think the rules that apply to one, applies to all.
I am at work and I have been reading this thread bit by bit. When I got to the bottom of page 3 (which was the page I quoted from) I had to step out for a bit. When I came back I had the notion that the end of page 3 was the end of the thread, which was a mistake. I posted my comments in reference to the first three pages.
S’allright.
I notice that earlier in your post you use the term “AAVE vernacular” but in your classroom example we’re back to calling it playground speech. There is no mention of Ebonics/AAVE as a distinct dialect with its own set of rules.
Do you believe that AAVE does not exist? Or is it just that young students should not be made aware of its existance lest they lose focus on learning SAE?
I guess my point is that kids are curious. They’ll want to know why the “correct” way to talk is so different from what they hear at home. You can only get so far with “because I’m the teacher and I said so!”
nitpicks: In your classroom example the proper AAVE would be “They gone”, and the V in AAVE stands for vernacular.