Wednesday, June 30, 2004

As a teacher in a predominantly African-American school where the majority of students exhibited some features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE, also called Ebonics or "Spoken Soul"), I needed to learn the rules and history of the language so I could help students move between the two language systems.

In my student Larry's narrative about shoes, for example, I needed to keep track of his patterns of punctuation errors, but I also had to help him understand when he used features of AAVE:

Them old Chuck Taylor high top nasty looking Converse these are the ugliest shoes I had ever seen. I thought as I put them on. "Mom why I have to wear these ugly shoes." My mom say they was in style. "Larry be quiet these are in style right now." "I don't see how they raggedy."

While Larry made some basic errors in punctuation, many of his "mistakes" correctly use the grammar structure of AAVE. This can be difficult for a teacher without a linguistic background to understand. As Geneva Smitherman noted in her groundbreaking book Talkin' and Testifyin', "Linguistically speaking, the greatest differences between contemporary Black and White English are on the level of grammatical structure." It looks like Larry's errors are simply grammatical, but if a teacher studied the grammar of AAVE, she would recognize that he follows many of the linguistic features of black vernacular.

For Larry, simply correcting these grammar errors without acknowledging their roots in his home language is not only inefficient, it sets Standard English up as the "correct language" and AAVE as wrong.