A Review of Developmental and Applied Language Research on African American Children: From a Deficit to Difference Perspective on Dialect Differences

by stockman

because absence of inflectional morphology and substitution of /f/ for /th/ is a symptom of language disorders in native speakers of SAE, AAVE speaking children are sometimes sent to special ed. Clinicians need to know about dialects!

Unendangered dialects, endanegred people

by Labov

"The argument of this paper may be outlined as follows:
• African American Vernacular English [AAVE] is not an endangered dialect; on
the contrary, it is continuing to develop and diverge from other dialects.
• The primary condition for such divergence is residential segregation.
• Residential segregation, combined with increasing poverty, has led to a
deterioration of many features of social life in the inner cities.
• In these conditions, a majority of children in inner city schools are failing to learn
to read, with a developing cycle of poverty, crime and shorter life span.
• A reduction of residential segregation will lead to greater contact between
speakers of AAVE and speakers of other dialects.
• If at some future date, the social conditions that favor the divergence of AAVE"

Review: African American English and the Composition Classroom

review by David west brown

praises the book in general, but has two caveats: register is a far more complicated issue than the authors make it out to be, and cite Hillocks and Smith 1986 as proof of that sentence-combining is useful in teaching grammar.

The book is fair and balanced, written for the layperson, and makes complex ideas accessible to teachers.

MIDDLE-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICANS: REACTIONS AND ATTITUDES TOWARD AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH

by rahman

Rahman asked middle-class blacks at her university to listen to audiotapes of other blacks speaking and rate them according to perceived blackness.

"Findings here show that there is a strong correlation between the dense
use of certain grammatical and phonological features of AAVE, including
intonation, and strong judgments of African American ethnicity. But the attenuation
of AAVE features and use of features associated with other groups
can reduce the salience of speech as African American. The next section
will show that while the heavy use of AAVE features leads to the belief that
a speaker is black, being identifiable as black does not equate with low
judgments of standardness. Yet, it does appear that judgments of “black” or
“white” can be closely related to judgments of standardness and to judgments
of social class and appropriateness"

Use of falsetto voice or highly contoured intonation is one marker of ethnicity. SO is use of /a/ instead of /ay/.

Black Standard English was deemed appropriate at an all-black family barbeque or at a corporate meeting, whereas SE and AAVE were each only appropriate for one.

Linguistic COntroversies, VBE Structures, and Midwest Attitudes

by Timothy J. Riney
in heartland english

p 85 "...VBE and vernacular Midland share a lot of common grammatical structures."
p. 85-87 differences and similarities in Midland and VBE
Waterloo is 21% black

Subjects rated standard English, black accented Eng. with historical present, and VBE on an perceived intelligence scale.

Of course, VBE was associated with less intelligence, standard with highest intelligence, and black accent in the middle.

Afrcan American Vernacular English in "Middletown"

by Huang

Muncie has a small African American population which must interact with whites on a daily basis.

p. 245 "this study has found linguistic convergence of Muncie AAVE with WVE phonologically in the last two decades."

p. 252 also syntactically

p. 253 "a linguistic change in which Muncie AAVE is converging with WVE both syntactically and phonologically" due to linguistic accomodation and close daily contact

contrast to Labov 1986, where in a city setting the dialects are diverging

Retention and Writing Instruction: Implications for Access and Pedagogy

Pegeen Reichert Powell

Composition instructors should pay attention to the discourse at their institution about retention.

It has been shown (by Astin using CIRP data) that retention rates can be predicted by the characteristics of teh students the institution allows in. Unfortunately, raw retention rates are used to rank colleges without taking student characteristics into account.

"...Eleanor Agnew and
Margaret McLaughlin, who demonstrate how a writing program’s own assess-
ment practices can prevent students from graduating: their study of the results
of placement and exit exams revealed that the presence of features of African
American Vernacular English led to an alarmingly higher rate of failure (90)."

These black students have already accessed the gate, but the assessment policies and prejudices keep them from graduating.

Access and retention will become even more important as the economy worsens.