African American English - Education

       

      

     Little Rock Nine is the nine African American students who involved into the desegregation movement in Little Rock Central high school. This famous picture makes me think about the current situation for African American students.

           Do they have equal opportunities to get education and success in their school life? Do teachers treat them equally?  How their classmates and teachers think about their accent?

I continue my research by searching more information about the situation of African American students. The first source I found was a survey report: “A Comparison of Oral and Written English Styles in African American Students at Different Stages of Writing Development.”  

The purpose of this survey is to compare the rates of using African American English grammatical features in spoken and written language at different points in literacy development of African American students. In this report, researchers stress the differences between African American students and Caucasian students, and they also create their credibility  by applying data from other related research in order to show their study is part of the “conversation.”

 There are some really attractive data in this research.

These data indicate that African American students are underachieving, compares to the Caucasian students. But  I question the credibility of these data. Is there any problem with examining the learning ability of African American speakers by using Standard English? 

The reports from 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in Writing indicates that nearly 75% of African American fourth and eighth graders reached at or above the basic level of achievement, whereas 90% of Caucasian (same-grade) students attained the same level of performance.

 Furthermore, the data of NAEP in 2007 illustrates the same phenomenon: approximately 81% of African American eighth graders are or above the basis level of achievement compared to 93% of Caucasian eighth graders.

According to this research, older students show higher abilities of dialect shift from African American English to Standard English in their writing than the fourth grade students. However, both fourth grade and eighth grade students frequently use African American English when they are speaking and talking to each other.

To explain these results, researchers apply Kroll’s model of writing development, which proposes that the differences and similarities between the oral and writing disclosure of typically developing children may be the result of developmental trends in acquiring language skills.  Namely, higher-grade students use less African American English in their writing because they occupy a higher ability to separate the language they use for academic life and their daily life. 

On the contrary, younger students have not developed the capability of shifting dialect between different situations, thus they tend to use the same dialect, their indigenous language, both in their writing and speaking.

This research also points out the relationship between African American student’s ability of dialect shift and their academic achievement, which illustrates that children with higher dialect shifting abilities will have better academic performance than children without this meta-awareness skill. 

But does this mean that we should not allow African American speakers to use their own language in school, in order to help them achieve a higher academic achievement? Why do African American students achieve less than other students? Is it because of their social status, family income or other reasons?  

 There is an article named "Spoken Soul: the Language of Black Imagination and Reality," which is written by Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz. After reading this article, I find that though African Americans are creators and descendants of a rich and complex culture, they continue to battle the stereotypes of having cultural and language deficiencies.

As I mention before, it seems to be unfair for African American students who are evaluate by the standard of Standard English. Yolanda impresses that American schools administrators’ refusal to accept the language of African-American students and their over-zealousness to frame language and literacy skills in terms of an “achievement gap.

They use Standard American English in settings such as workplaces and schools- spaces that represent and reinforce the values of the broader European-American society. For those African American students, although they know they have to speak Standard English to survive in this country, virtually they are all bidialectal and able to understand both African American English and Standard English.

Nearly every African American, at some point, has spoken what is recognized as African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).This language, which is also known as Black English Vernacular(BEV), Ebonics, Spoken Soul or, Simply, Black English.

AAVE is a spoken language rooted in the oral tradition of Africa. IT was transcribed by writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, and today is the language spoken by almost African-American urban youth. The language, as well as the people who speak it, are perceived as being of low status.

For the underachievement of African American students, the author points out that there are three aspects that we should pay more attention to: first, school achievement is distributed along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, and language. Studies show that students who use nonstandard English in school do not do as well as students who use Standard English. Second, we should keep in mind how teachers’ negative responses to students’ language can lead to unsuccessful results. Thus, there seems to be some connections between teachers' rejection of Black English and the children who speak it engenders learning problems. Next, African Americans themselves sometimes internalize the negative perception of their language and implicit degradation of their people, and as a result, they performe poorly in school.

One of authors’ statements reminds me that African American students are still under the unequal treatment even in the 21th century.

“African Americans have suffered in schools because of their language and ethnicity connection. This torment and labeling of underachievement are related directly to how the broader society views their culture.”

 What do you think?

Do you still think that African Americans students are lack of language skill?  When you find you cannot understand what they are talking about, please be patient and learn more about African American English instead of judging their language. It is not their problem, it is ours.