Where are the copy editors of yesteryear? The more electronic journalism becomes the more useless young journalists are revealed to be. There was a time when there was a cigar-chomping editor to slap them around and turn them ito WRITERS but I swear that now articles are lucky to be sent through a spell checker before they are published.
Where I’m from we call this type of speech ‘Jive.’ Not African-American Vernacular English, not Ebonics…it’s called ‘Jive.’
We get it. You don’t like how them black folks talk. You’ve made it abundantly clear, however, that you don’t have the first clue about the linguistic aspects of this discussion, and so your opinion is worthless.
Did you go to high school? One of the most common activities around is asking kids to translate Shakespeare in to modern youth-oriented language. I fondly remember our skater-punk version of McBeth (How fair and fowl a day it is! Thats why I’ve got one pant leg up and one down!) This sort of activities not only forces kids to really dig in to the text, but to understand that Shakespear’s themes are pretty universal and that his writing is no more difficult than our own vernaculars.
I’m sorry, I’ve spent this summer talking to every last public school student in Richmond and a good chunk of Oakland and I’ve never found a single one to be “rejecting” society because it is cool. None of them have “turned their backs on it and opportunities it would afford him”. Most all the African-American kids I’ve been working with have been polite and well-spoken, a bit bewildered and upset by the current traumas in their neighborhoods, but excited about their futures and full of the same big dreams as any other youngster.
I went to high school but I never did anything like this…not that I think it’s all that bad an idea, you understand.
magellan01:
Really? Huh. My friend has taught ESL in the South Bronx for five years now and knows the barest smattering of Spanish – she certainly never speaks in it. She had two Indian boys in her class this year, and doesn’t speak their language. I respectfully suggest that your friend, if she does indeed initially teach the students “all the subjects in their native tongue,” is ridiculously unrepresentative of ESL teachers at large. Knowing a second language is not a requirement to teach ESL in any of the programs of which I’m personally aware.
Stephe96. Watched a lot of AIRPLANE growing up, did we?
dropzone. I was one of those hard-hitting cigar-chomping newspaper editors – in college, anyways – not that you’d know it from the dozens of spelling errors I make in a given thread.
even sven. I have met a lot of those kids, and they take pains as well as pride in not sounding white or being perceived as academically gifted in anyway.
Debaser. Here, here. With such stoic and unflappable defenders such as yourself to protect her, the Queen’s English is quite safe. A toast to the un-fucking-believeable!
Johanna. groan That’s not Ebonics, that’s some bastardization of Noel Chandler Harris and Zora Neale Hurston with sme gratuitous cussin’ thrown in.
acsenray. The guy who coined the term ebonics (literally black phonics) is black, and it was the seventies. Be thankful it wasn’t “Afrobonics” or “Blackenese.”
I say, hey, sky! S’other say I won say…I pray to J I get the same ol’ same ol’.
Knock yourself a pro, slick! Gray matter back got perfrom’ us down…I take TCBin, man.
I’m a little confused now. I’ve the arguments explaining the legitimacy of AAVE and what appears to be some well founded roots across multiple cutures. In that respect I can see many similarities to Yiddish - something close to my cultural background. But I’ve still not heard a compelling argument why it needs to be integrated into the curriculum to succesfully teach SAE in black American communities.
QuickSilver. Short version, because I’m about to get on the road: there’s some evidence that to interrupt the cycle of African-American generational poverty new methodologies need to be adapted to get students to at least be willing to code-switch, ie. speak a standardized American.
I don’t have any problem with dialect-related education at all. I’m a southerner, but my accent is lighter than my parents’ who’s accents are lighter than their parents. In my parents’ lifetime this happened.
I want Southern, Creole, Cajun, Appalachian, African-American, New England, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, California, Upper Midwest (and other) accents to flourish, not go down the TV rathole.
And is there evidence that this approach will work or are the educators simply trying to test a theory at this point?
If I can ask an honest question then–and I really do mean this, I’m not trying to be snarky–what exactly does this educational approach entail? We’ve established that it doesn’t mean teachers going into classrooms and embarrassing themselves trying to speak “street.” But then what does it mean? What are the actual sorts of things a teacher trained in this approach would do in a classroom?
You are aware that literature in the vernacular, such as Italian, was not really taken seriously in Dante’s time, are you not? As I understand it (IANA historian or a linguist), the Inferno was written in the equivalent, for the time, of mall-speak.
Also bear in mind that confusing “your” and “you’re” is grounds for public humiliation on the SDMB. I’d be surprised if there isn’t significant overlap between the group of persnickety amateur English teachers and the “no objective standard” crowd.
Didn’t FisherQueen provide her detailed understanding of this in her first post of the thread?
She did, but I’m looking for something a little more specific. All American students should read works by great Black American authors, and should learn Black history, which is part of American history. And many authors used vernacular in their writing. Twain’s books are often little but vernacular. If this approach is nothing more than including Afro-American works into high school English, that’s fine, though I hardly see what the fuss is then. I just have the idea that it’s more than that, though I wasn’t able to make head or tail out of that article.
But she discussed more than that:
Well, it takes diff’rent strokes to move the world.
Aphronics!
Anyway, I find it amusing that when I hear about people who have a huge bug up their ass about “language purity,” they tend to fall into one of two camps: political conservatives, or the French. Strange bedfellows, n’cest pas? Hopefully, the association alone will be enough to make one group or the other re-examine their preconceptions, because it’s such a tedious, tired, and ill-informed prejudice.