To reiterate your parent: The point is not that they should not be taught ASE. The point is if a young child writes, "No tengo", you'll say, hey, we need to get a Spanish speaker in here to teach this kid some ESL. But if they write, "I ain't got none", you'll say, hey, we need to put this kid in remedial English because that's incorrect.

But that's just factually false. Both of these children speak a proper first language at home, and both need to be taught to respond to English questions in English without being taught that their first language is somehow wrong.

But it still would be right to put both kids (the Spanish- and AAVE-speaking) in remedial English because both are at a low level with respect to American Standard English. The fact that they're good in another language doesn't somehow mean they're at the class's expected level in ASE.

Unless, of course, the class is so young that they can reasonably be expected to learn from mere immersion, at which point the advice of this article is correct, that you should provide the "AAVE-native" students the awareness that there are two forms of English going on, at they have to be able to switch to the standard one and use it in the appropriate context. (Spanish-native students generally figure this out on their own.)

Not remedial English. ESL. There's a big difference. English class is where speakers of ASE learn the grammatical rules of their language in ASE. Doing that again, or more slowly, will not help someone who does not speak ASE at home. ESL is where a speaker of your native language teaches you ASE as a foreign language, because it is.

Only once they are fluent in ASE (and that should happen rapidly for young AAVE speakers, mind) will English classes geared toward native speakers be productive.

Should we put other native speakers of english with an inability to write a sentence with correct grammar in with the ESL too then? Based on this map of American dialects, it seems like standard english is the lingua franca of many different offshoots of the english language.

http://robertspage.com/diausa.gif

This whole thing seems rather silly to me. Maybe instead of worrying about checking our privilege, we can worry about making sure everyone from all backgrounds is able to communicate in a professional way and graduate high school with a basic grasp of proper english. (your vs you're, etc)

(Because even if you don't want to call it remedial english, that's where they'll end up in college. If you've lived in America for 18 years but want to take ESL in college, they're justifiably going to think you're insane.)

Yes. If you are trying to teach children "correct" grammar rules that they will go home and unlearn because their peers speak a different grammar, you are getting teaching very wrong and you should do it differently. As has been reiterated exhaustively in these comments, that does not mean you do not teach them SAE. It means you teach it so they actually learn it.

Don't take this the wrong way, but highlighting "your" vs. "you're" indicates you really don't understand what we're talking about here. That is a difference of orthography, of spelling, which is completely unintuitive and frankly stupid to speakers of dialects in which those words are pronounced exactly the same way. Any native speaker, however perfect you consider their English, must be taught spelling by rote. All English is "broken" in that regard. (Did you know there are languages where there is no such thing as a spelling bee, because there is exactly one possible way to spell any word?)

But we're not talking about that. We're talking about people who go home every day and speak a real language, one just as proper, correct, consistent, coherent as your own. Just different. Your insistence that your language is "proper" because it is the language used in formal speech by the rich and powerful is, yes, incredibly unaware of your privilege.

And your calling that "silly" is, o irony, quite ignorant. Did you read the article? Did you read these comments? Did you go on Wikipedia and look up AAVE? Southern American English? Appalachian English? These are not broken forms of English, these are forms of English you do not speak. This is all completely uncontroversial among people who study the use of language scientifically.

Frankly, this post makes you look really ignorant of the actual experiences of disadvantaged people in America (of which I am one, by the way). Maybe you should check your assumption privilege.

I like to swear a lot when I'm at home, but that doesn't mean it's proper language for when I'm in the workplace. Why can't my bosses stop oppressing me with their managerial privilege!? :( :(

But by all means, continue the condescending ad hominems, I actually find histrionic people hyperventilating into comment boxes really hilarious.

O...kay? I'm not sure how you're reading my rather lay summary of the state of modern linguistics as histrionics, but maybe that's just a dialectal thing. I was kind of hoping you would go ahead and check out the Wiki articles[0], but I guess I'm glad you're even bothering to read my comments.

[0] If this is still on the table, I'd also like to add "ad hominem" to the list. To quote The Princess Bride, "You have six fingers on your right hand. Someone was looking for you."

Your argument seems to rest on the premise that teaching them in Standard English will imply that ebonics is wrong. And that is somehow bad. I, meanwhile, just don't care. The world will not care about their feelings - and the earlier they learn SE, the better.

I am only interested in what is the most effective way to learn SE (any variety that news anchors speak in Anglophone countries).

I want them to succeed outside the area where people speak ebonics. And I think the best way that would be achieved is if they learn proper English at school, full stop. The difference with Spanish is that spanish-speaking kids simply would not understand English. These kids do. It just seems an exercise in protecting their feelings.

P.S. This comes from someone who actually was in an ESL (English Second Language) class in high school. And we actually had native-born black kids there - circa early 90s.

> And I think the best way that would be achieved is if they learn proper English at school, full stop.

Of course you're entitled to an opinion, but this is not the opinion of, among many notable others, the Oakland school board since 1996.

I entreat you to consider that they (and I) might have a good reason that extends beyond "feelings". Perhaps a good reason elaborated upon at length in the article linked at the top of this very page?

>Of course you're entitled to an opinion, but this is not the opinion of, among many notable others, the Oakland school board since 1996.

You do realize the point of that was to tap into bilingual education funding, right?

"but this is not the opinion of, among many notable others, the Oakland school board since 1996."

Yes - and they've been considered a joke because of it since 1996. The decision was "derided and criticized, most notably by Jesse Jackson and Kweisi Mfume who regarded it as an attempt to teach slang to children". So my opinion is shared by many prominent black leaders.

So your answer to my entreaty is "no", then?

Yep :)

There is a very good essay on the topic by David Foster Wallace that someone linked to in the comments. I was pleasantly surprised that he makes exactly the same points as myself (albeit much more eloquently). Do check it out.

I... am really confused. AFAICT there is only one DFW essay linked in these comments, and it seems to say basically what I, others here, and the linguistic consensus is saying: That there is a dialect of English used in the great majority of formal English speech and writing which is not spoken natively by many intelligent English speakers, and that the best way to deal with this is to acknowledge that their dialect is valid and appropriate when spoken with peers while also instructing them in the rules of SAE that will be necessary for them to interface effectively with formal society. There are differences in that DFW is talking about college-age writers who have to more or less be told to suck it up and learn it the hard way, while young schoolchildren can be taught much more effectively by early immersion, but the general thrust is much the same.

What are you reading in that? I'm legitimately, deeply baffled.

Exactly - I believe that school kids should also suck it up and learn to speak properly (I will not shy away from this nomenclature) early, rather than wait for college (and what about the majority who don't make it there?) where an English professor will give them this speech.

My impression of your viewpoint is that kids should be taught in AAVE and have a separate Standard English class to learn how 'white folks speak'.

That said - I have nothing against same kids using AAVE at home and with their friends if they prefer - as long as they realize that knowing SE is instrumental to their success in life.

I also have two niggling points to make: 1) Standard English is not a dialect. That's just a matter of definition. 2) I'd also say that 100% of formal English speech and writing is using it. As far as I can tell, anytime a dialect is used in a book (Huck Finn, William Faulkner) - it's done to demonstrate a character who speaks a particular way. Do you know works written in a dialect where it's not done to this purpose?

> speak properly (I will not shy away from this nomenclature)

I just wish you'd reconsider this. It seems you acknowledge that if we could magically swap AAVE and ASE completely, such that news anchors talk about how Obama ain't got no sense and young black children go home crying because they were marked down for using "whom" as an object, nothing else would change; What you call proper English would be the despised language of the underclass and the well-to-do would look down on them every time they ignorantly used a single negative in a phrase that requires the full construction.

And if you do acknowledge this, can you see how the classification of English dialects into "proper" and "improper" groups, which could more rightly be labeled "potent" and "impotent", amounts to massive institutionalized racism (for ethnolects) and classism (for sociolects)?

Or to put it in more personal terms, could you see yourself recognizing that the privileged in our society will look down on the underprivileged for speaking their native language correctly while simultaneously making some effort to be less of one of those people yourself?

> My impression of your viewpoint is that kids should be taught in AAVE and have a separate Standard English class to learn how 'white folks speak'.

Is that your impression of how ESL is employed for young native Spanish speakers? It is not. Once or if a person is fluent enough in the second language that the classes designed for native speakers can be productive, they are included in those classes and graded accordingly (perhaps with auxiliary tutoring if necessary). What is your argument for forcing them into those classes before that point, or without that auxiliary tutoring?

> 1) Standard English is not a dialect. That's just a matter of definition.

Whose definition are you using? This is the first line from Wikipedia: "Standard English (often shortened to S.E. within linguistic circles) refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country." That is, by definition, a dialect. (Or, generically, a group of dialects.) Accordingly:

> 2) I'd also say that 100% of formal English speech and writing is using it.

And yet British news is written in British English and Australian news in Australian English and so on. The differences between these Englishes are relatively minor, apparently so minor that you do not consider them distinct dialects -- and perhaps that's my fault for not using the more PC term "variety" -- but they assuredly are.

Or do you mean to say that, since "standard" refers to the dialect used in formal speech in a country, the language of formal speech is by definition "standard"? To that I would say, 1) Duh, and, 2) So?