AAVE in Education

AAVE has been the center of controversy on issues regarding the education of African American youths and the role it should play in public schools and education, as well as its place in broader society. Educators have held that attempts should be made to eliminate AAVE usage through the public education system. Criticisms from social commentators and educators have ranged from asserting that AAVE is an intrinsically deficient form of speech to arguments that its use, by being considered unacceptable in most cultural contexts, is socially limiting. It is often argued that incorporating AAVE in schools would only impede the academic progress of young African American children.

Changes in formal attitudes regarding the acceptance of AAVE as a distinct dialect correlated with advancements in civil rights. One notable shift in the recognition of AAVE came in the " Ann Arbor Decision" of 1979 (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al., v. Ann Arbor School District). In it, a federal judge ruled that a school board, in teaching black children to read, must adjust to the children's dialect, not the children to the school.

Prior to this, the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication), a sub-division of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) issued a position statement on students’ right to their own language. This was adopted by members of the CCCC in April 1974 and appeared in a special issue of CCC in the fall of 1974. The resolution is as follows: “We affirm the students' right to their own patterns and varieties of language-the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its-diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.”

The formal recognition of AAVE was revisited when a resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1996, wanted " Ebonics" officially recognized as a language or dialect. At its last meeting, the outgoing Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board consisting of members who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education-related issues.

The Oakland resolution declared that AAVE was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of black children belonged to " West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems". This claim was quickly ruled inconsistent with current linguistic theory, that AAVE is a dialect of English and thus of Indo-European origin. Furthermore, the differences between modern AAVE and Standard English are nowhere near as great as those between French and Haitian Creole, the latter being considered a separate language. The statement that " African Language Systems are genetically based" also contributed to widespread hostility. Supporters of the resolution later clarified that " genetically" was not a racial or biological term but a linguistic one.

Proponents of AAVE instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The underlying belief is that black students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciation norms.

For black students whose primary dialect was AAVE, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for " maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.” Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the " errors" in Standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, and indeed were not errors at all but instead were features of a grammatically distinct form of English.

Rather than teaching Standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach Standard American English to Ebonics-speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to Standard American English.

Framers of the Oakland resolution recognized that, when teaching anyone a language or variety with which they are unfamiliar, it is important to differentiate between understanding and pronunciation.

Pedagogical techniques similar to those used to teach English to speakers of foreign languages appear to hold promise for speakers of AAVE. A group of educators developed a comprehensive set of dialect readers, called bridge readers, which included the same content in three different dialects: AAVE, a bridge version, which was closer to SAE without being prohibitively formal, and a Standard English version. The results were very promising, but in the end the program was not widely adopted for various political and social reasons related to the refusal of school systems to recognize AAVE as a dialect of English. Opinions on Ebonics still range from advocacy of official language status in the United States to denigration as " poor English”.

Teaching children whose primary dialect is AAVE poses problems beyond simply those commonly addressed by pedagogical techniques, and the Oakland approach has support among some educational theorists. However, such pedagogical approaches have given rise to educational and political disputes. Despite the clear linguistic evidence, the American public and policymakers remain divided over whether to even recognize AAVE as a legitimate dialect of English, perhaps due to unfounded beliefs that AAVE is a degradation of English.

The overwhelming controversy and debates concerning AAVE in public schools insinuate the deeper, more implicit deterministic attitudes towards the African-American community as a whole. One scholar describes this as a reflection of the " power elite’s perceived insignificance and hence rejection of Afro-American language and culture". It is also asserted that since African Americans, in order to succeed, are forced to conform to European American society this ultimately means the " eradication of black language…and the adoption of the linguistic norms of the white middle class." Others say the necessity for a " bi-dialectialism" (AAVE and SAE) creates problems as well. Some blacks contend that being bi-dialectal not only causes a schism in the black personality, but it is also like saying black talk is 'good enough' for blacks but not for whites.

Language discrimination or linguiscism can come in many different forms. Another type of discrimination is sexism or gender descrimination in language. Now, I am not at all familiar enough with the Russian and Ukrainian languages to understand how these languages may or may not be guilty of gender descrimination. It would be interesting to find out more—I’d like to suggest this as a possible paper topic. It is especially interesting because Russian and Ukrainian have a gender system in the language—much like French which I will only discuss very briefly. I can, however, tell you more about gender descrimination in English.