John R. Rickford’s article “Suite for Ebony and Phonics” contains an interesting discussion of Ebonics, the “vernacular or informal speech of many African Americans.” Rickford’s project is to explain how the Linguistic Society of America came to support the Oakland School Board’s resolution recognizing Ebonics as “the primary language of African American students.” In brief, the society considers Ebonics not “lazy English”–a common misconception (to put it kindly)–but rather a bona fide, i.e., systematic and rule-governed, dialect.
The upshot of the resolution is that the Oakland School Board adopted an approach to teaching Standard English that takes “students’ vernaculars into account,” rather than “ignor[ing] the vernacular altogether,” as conventional approaches have done. The success rates of this approach have been impressive: the “Contrastive Analysis approach in which SE and Ebonics features were systematically contrasted through explicit intruction and drills showed a 59% REDUCTION in [students'] use of Ebonics features in their SE writing after eleven weeks, while a control group taught by conventional methods showed an 8.5% INCREASE in such features.”
There are some striking parallels here to the arts. I don’t know if Rickford intended to imply such a connection through his title, but there is certainly an Ebonics/SE kind of tension between, say, African American “vernacular” musics (jazz, rap) and the canonic “Standard” still commonly offered in introductory music classes for the non-major. Does anyone out there have any experience in (or ideas about) applying the Contrastive Analysis linguistic approach to other disciplines?
I also found the link to the arts a very interesting aspect of this article. The work that I was doing with the Writing professors was basically to expand the types of assignments they offer their students for assessment purposes. By using theatre-inspired activities, they would really offer students a different kind of language–oftentimes, more similar to their own vernaculars–as a way to access texts. In theatre courses, students are often asked to creatively respond to or analyze a text first–through images, music, etc.– and then may be asked to write a more formal (but short) essay to accompany this. They might construct the place in which a story or play takes place. They might be asked to transform a scene into a song, dance, image, poem, and then to write a short essay that discusses the differences in genre between the original and their versions. I think this does what the Oakland school district hoped to do–acknowledge and build upon a student’s more comfortable language in order to help him/her use the “acceptable” dialect.
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