[Most
readers are probably aware of the “Ebonics” debate that
took place in the USA earlier in the year. This arose from the December
1996 decision by the Oakland [California] School Board to recognize
Ebonics, also known as African American Vernacular English (AAVE),
as the home language of a large proportion of the school district’s
students. The purpose is not to teach this variety or to validate
it as the school language. Rather it is to use the students’
home language as a basis for learning standard English.
There
is a great deal of information on the internet about the issues
surrounding the debate. One valuable website with many links to
others is John Rickford’s: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/
Here
is a piece John Rickford submitted to the New York Times
in January 1997 (but, like other pieces favourable to the decision,
it was not published). This is taken from the website with the author’s
permission. }
The
Evolution of the Ebonics Issue
by:
John
R. Rickford
Dept of Linguistics
Stanford University
Standford, CA 94305 USA
rickford@Csli.Stanford.edu
In the month that has elapsed since the Oakland School Board passed
its original Ebonics resolution on December 18, 1996, public discussion
of the subject has evolved in several respects. Particularly since
the Board's recent revisions of its wording, more people now realize
that the School Board's goal is to help vernacular speakers master
Standard English, so the holiday party jokes and the editorial fulminating
about limiting students to the vernacular seem somewhat passé.
Some
people – most of them bereft of linguistic training and unaware
of relevant linguistic research – are still knotted up over
questions of whether Ebonics is a language or a dialect, or the
extent to which its features can be attributed to African languages,
English dialects, or pidgin-creole influences.
But
many of us, although intrigued by these sidebars, have come to realize
that the central issue is the limited success which schools across
America have had in educating African American youth from the working
and under-classes, particularly in the curriculum-central areas
of reading, writing and the language arts. These devastating failures
were the starting point for the Oakland task force’s deliberations,
and their causes and solutions have become the focus of many recent
editorials…
In
one respect, however, discussions of Ebonics have NOT evolved. Whether
pro or con, most commentators have failed to consider research evidence
on the value of recognizing the vernacular in teaching the standard,
the kind of evidence which California Superintendent of Education
Delaine Eastin called for one month ago.
Such
evidence is not that easy to come by, since experimental programs
of this sort (for instance in Chicago, Washington DC, Hawaii and
Toronto) have either not lasted long enough to produce measurable
results, or they have been conducted over several years without
the rigorous experimental methods, including control and experimental
groups, pre and post tests, that would make assessment possible.
But
by scouring the library and sending out research queries to cooperative
colleagues worldwide, I have been able to locate several relevant
studies, six of which I will briefly mention – two from Europe,
and four from the United States.
One
perhaps unsurprising finding of this research is that, almost universally,
students who speak non-standard or vernacular varieties of a language
tend to do relatively poorly in school, especially in reading, writing,
and in subjects which require competence in the standard variety.
More surprising, however, and of relevance to the Oakland School
Board’s proposal, is evidence that taking students’
vernaculars into account can facilitate their development of reading
and writing skills as well as mastery of the standard variety.
One
of the earliest relevant studies is Tore Osterberg’s 1961
book, Bilingualism and the first school language –
an educational problem illustrated by results from a Swedish dialect
area. It documents an experiment in which an experimental group
of dialect speakers (D) in the Pite district of Sweden was taught
to read first in their nonstandard dialect, and then transitioned
to standard Swedish, while a parallel control group (R) was taught
entirely in standard Swedish. After thirty-five weeks, Osterberg
reported that the “dialect method showed itself superior both
when it was a question of reading quickly and of rapidly assimilating
matter ... The same applied to reading and reading-comprehension”
(p.135).
A
recent replication of Osterberg's approach in a Norwegian dialect
context was provided by Tove Bull, in a 1990 article entitled “Teaching
school beginners to read and write in the vernacular” (in
Tromsø linguistics in the eighties). In her research
project, ten classes of beginning students, including nearly 200
students each about 7 years old, were taught to read and write either
in their Norwegian vernaculars (Dialect group) or in the standard
language (Control group). After assessing their progress on several
measures, Bull concluded that, “With respect to reading and
reading abilities, the results ... show that the vernacular children
read significantly faster and better than the control subjects.
It seems as if particularly the less bright children ... made superior
progress during the year compared with the poor readers in the control
group” (p.78).
The
US study most similar to these European studies was described in
Gary Simpkins and Charlesetta Simpkins’ 1981 article entitled
“Cross-cultural approach to curriculum development”
(in Black English and the education of Black children and youth,
edited by Geneva Smitherman). Their Bridge readers, published by
Houghton Mifflin in 1977, provided reading materials in three varieties:
AAVE, a transitional variety, and Standard English [SE]. They were
field tested over a four-month period with 417 students in 21 classes
throughout the United States. A control group of 123 students in
six classes was taught using “regularly scheduled remedial
reading” techniques. After four months, scores on the Iowa
test of Basic Skills indicated that students taught by the Bridge
method showed an average gain of “6.2 months for four months
of instruction, compared to only an average gain of 1.6 months for
students in their regular scheduled classroom reading activities”
(p.238). Despite this success, the experimental program was discontinued
because of hostile attitudes towards the use of the vernacular in
the classroom, attitudes not dissimilar to those which have been
expressed across America over the past month. (See John and Angela
Rickford, 1995, "Dialect readers revisited," in Linguistics
and Education 7/2, for discussion of other experiments and
the attitudinal issues.)
It
should be noted that while these studies all suggest that teaching
initial reading in the dialect and then transitioning to the standard
is an effective technique (note that far from “dumbing down”,
it represents a considerable challenge to students, who have to
negotiate through at least two varieties, but seem to do so successfully),
this is NOT what Oakland has so far proposed to do. Oakland appears
to have more in mind an extension of the contrastive analysis techniques
used in California's “Standard English Proficiency”
program, in which students are taught explicitly the differences
between vernacular and standard features.
One
US study which suggests the value of this approach is reported in
Hanni Taylor's 1989 book, Standard English, Black English, and
Bidialectalism. Taylor tried to improve the Standard English
writing of inner-city Aurora University students from Chicago using
two different methods. With an experimental group of 20 students,
she raisedstudents’ metalinguistic awareness of the differences
between Ebonics and Standard English. With a control group of another
20 students, she did not do this, but simply followed “traditional
English department techniques”. After nearly three months
of instruction, the experimental group showed a 59% REDUCTION in
the use of Ebonics features in their SE writing, while the control
group, using traditional methods, showed a slight INCREASE (8.5%)
in the use of such features.
One of Taylor’s points was that students were often unaware
of the precise points on which AAVE and SE differed, and that raising
their awareness of this difference through contrastive analysis
helped them to limit AAVE intrusions and improved their language
skills generally. Bull’s explanation for the superior progress
of the Norwegian vernacular group was similar: “… the
principle of vernacularization of the medium of initial teaching
may have made illiterate children more able to analyze their own
speech, thus increasing and improving their metalinguistic consciousness
and phonologi-cal maturity” (p.78).
Even
more recently, Doug Cumming, writing in The Atlantic Constitution
on January 9, 1997 (p.B1), reported on a program that has been going
on for the past ten years in DeKalb county, Georgia in which fifth
and sixth grade students in eight schools are taught to switch from
their “home speech” to “school speech” at
appropriate times and places. The program, originally emphasized
differences between AAVE and SE, but now stresses bidialectalism
more generally, taking into account the international backgrounds
of many students. The program, which is similar to Taylor’s,
and to the methods followed in California’s “Standard
English Proficiency” program in some respects, has produced
excellent results. According to Cummins, “The program has
won a ‘center of excellence’ designation from the National
Council for Teachers of English. Last year, students who had taken
the course had improved verbal test scores at every school. At Cary-Reynolds,
their scores rose 5.2 percentage points.”
Finally,
there is a wonderful 1973 study of 208 African American first grade
children in Oakland itself which has escaped the notice of everyone.
Ann McCormick Piestrup, in her UC Berkeley dissertation, Black
dialect interference and accommodation of reading instruction in
first grade, showed first of all the typical relationship in
which children who used more AAVE features also had lower reading
scores. What was more interesting, however, was the relationship
between teachers’ teaching styles – the way they responded
to their pupil’s language – and the children's success
in reading. The LEAST successful teachers were those in the “Interrupting”
group, who “asked children to repeat words pronounced in dialect
many times and interpreted dialect pronunciations as reading errors”
(p. iv). They had a stultifying effect on their students’
reading development, reflected not only in lower reading scores,
but also in the fact that some children “withdrew from participation
in reading” (ibid).
By
contrast, teachers in the “Black Artful” group, the
MOST successful of Pielstrup’s six groups, “used rhythmic
play in instruction and encouraged children to participate by listening
to their responses. They attended to vocabulary differences of Black
children and seemed to prevent structural conflict by teaching children
to listen for standard English sound distinctions”. Not only
did children taught by this approach participate enthusiastically
in reading classes, they also showed the highest reading scores.
These
studies, although varying to some extent in philosophy and method
of implementation, all demonstrate that the vernacular variety which
children bring to school IS relevant to their scholastic success,
especially if teachers recognize and use it creatively to build
bridges to the standard variety which everyone agrees is vital.
Although some commentators have rightfully pointed to the importance
of school facilities, teacher training and other factors which retard
the progress of children in inner city and low income schools, the
experimental evidence suggests that when these factors are controlled
for, approaches which take the vernacular dialects of students into
account are more likely to succeed, in general, than those which
do not.
Once
we recognize that we agree on the ends, and that there IS evidence
in favor of the means which Oakland and other educators have attempted/are
attempting, then we can take the discussion of this Ebonics issue
to a higher and more fruitful level.
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