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I don't think you read the article. "Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize wh

I don't think you read the article. "Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way. Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow up with AAVE. “The consequences are that students are being terribly misassessed in our schools. Teachers think that black kids are making mistakes, when really they’re re-creating what they hear and learn at home,” Wheeler says. “They’re counting as mistakes things that are patterns and rule-based, so [the students are] being placed in lower reading groups.”" The point of recognizing AAVE is not to teach it as a replacement language. It's to treat it similarly to Spanish for example. By recognizing where kids are coming from, the system will better be able to direct them to where they need to be.

dsfasfasf 14y ago
Seriously, you are equating AAVE with Spanish. AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak, even if it's not politically correct to say it. Spanish is an actual language hundreds of years old and spoken by multiple nations. By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language. -Edit: So for those arguing that AAVE is a dialect, then If I add a few rules to any other language does that mean I've just invented a new language. That is what AAVE is, it is just English with a few additional rules that some people of low socioeconomic mean have learned (reinforced through bad education). Hardly what I would call a new language. Maybe in 500 years if the people speaking it become isolated, right now is just bad English. In spanish there are people with low socioeconomic means that will also talk a bit different. Even with their own rules for some things. You do not call that a new language to spare their feelings. You call them uneducated and rightly so or else when will they learn if they are not ever corrected? Being politically correct just to spare the feelings of some people is not doing anybody any good. I know is insensitive but by trying to be too nice problems never get solved.
- Afton 14y ago
  I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect. No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AAVE. Simply declaring it 'not a language' gets you nothing. It's not 'just slang', it's a system of speaking with its own set of rules, just like any other language.
  - pekk 14y ago
    Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.
    - Afton 14y ago
      Sure, and if you want to go down the road of constructing metrics for language, you can. I should warn you that you will likely find it fruitless and arbitrary. Your point about how every variation makes a language is correct. The term is idiolect. Language (like 'English'), is an abstraction over idiolects. But getting people who want to argue about "correct English" to an understanding of idiolects is more work than I can put into a comment during a work day. I'll try and dig up a general description of the issue and link it here. Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language is the best I could do on short notice.
    - Crake 14y ago
      This.
- nollidge 14y ago
  > AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak That doesn't make it not a language. What you're saying is that we should base categorize forms of communication based on the social status of their speakers. I hope you can see why that might be problematic. > By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language. This doesn't make any sense. AAVE is not slang, which you'd know if you read the OP.
smsm42 14y ago
So should there be AAVE-English academic dictionaries with entries like "ain't: are not", etc.? What about l33tsp34k and txtng spk, u wnt 2gt dctnrz 4 it 2?
- nollidge 14y ago
  The differences between American Standard English and AAVE are primarily grammatical, not lexicographical. So an AmE-AAVE dictionary wouldn't be very thick. And Leetspeak, txt-speak, and AAVE are not equivalent entities. Leetspeak is an alternative alphabet, txt-speak is a system of abbreviations and slang, and AAVE is at minimum a dialect.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    Leetspeak can be classified as a dialect too, if you'd like, it has its own words (leet, pwnd, haxor, etc.) and you can find grammar differences if you look hard enough[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar
    - Cushman 14y ago
      That's pretty unconvincing. Despite the heading "Grammar", it mentions differences that are lexicographic or merely orthographic in nature. The only real grammatical process mentioned is "changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect" which has some obvious problems. "All your ___ are belong to ___" is an idiomatic expression in Internet Standard English, but that does not a grammar rule make.
      - pekk 14y ago
        You haven't articulated any real objective principle to distinguish when two ways of talking are the same language. The decision seems to be based on politics (in this case politics of race)
        Cushman 14y ago
omonra 14y ago
Unless these kids are going to be reading books written in ebonics, perhaps they don't belong in higher reading groups? Same works for Spanish speaking kids - if they don't speak / understand English, they would be placed in remedial classes, right? Since the world (outside the neighborhood) speaks standard English, they are probably served well to learn that that's what they need to know to succeed. The approach advocated would produce the opposite effect - kids would think that what they hear at home is OK and that the world should accomodate them.
- Cushman 14y ago
  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.
  - SilasX 14y ago
    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.)
    - Cushman 14y ago
      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.
cpsales 14y ago
Shizzle mah nizzle fo rizzle. The problem with AAVE is that as much as some academics try to imprint it with French grammar history or specific qualities of a major language, it is too easily corrupted with non-standard pidgin fads even within its everyday usage. A lot of it is emotive slang that can mean a myriad of things without supporting context clues in regular English. Specific pronouns often refer to unconventional nouns so that it becomes an inside joke. Haphazardly juxtaposing SOV/SVO word order and verbing nouns does not a ginuwine phat language roll. Honestly, it's closer to an alternate form of English poetry than a separate language.

dsfasfasf 14y ago

Seriously, you are equating AAVE with Spanish. AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak, even if it's not politically correct to say it. Spanish is an actual language hundreds of years old and spoken by multiple nations. By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language. -Edit: So for those arguing that AAVE is a dialect, then If I add a few rules to any other language does that mean I've just invented a new language. That is what AAVE is, it is just English with a few additional rules that some people of low socioeconomic mean have learned (reinforced through bad education). Hardly what I would call a new language. Maybe in 500 years if the people speaking it become isolated, right now is just bad English. In spanish there are people with low socioeconomic means that will also talk a bit different. Even with their own rules for some things. You do not call that a new language to spare their feelings. You call them uneducated and rightly so or else when will they learn if they are not ever corrected? Being politically correct just to spare the feelings of some people is not doing anybody any good. I know is insensitive but by trying to be too nice problems never get solved.

Afton 14y ago
I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect. No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AAVE. Simply declaring it 'not a language' gets you nothing. It's not 'just slang', it's a system of speaking with its own set of rules, just like any other language.
- pekk 14y ago
  Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.
  - Afton 14y ago
    Sure, and if you want to go down the road of constructing metrics for language, you can. I should warn you that you will likely find it fruitless and arbitrary. Your point about how every variation makes a language is correct. The term is idiolect. Language (like 'English'), is an abstraction over idiolects. But getting people who want to argue about "correct English" to an understanding of idiolects is more work than I can put into a comment during a work day. I'll try and dig up a general description of the issue and link it here. Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language is the best I could do on short notice.
  - Crake 14y ago
    This.
nollidge 14y ago
> AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak That doesn't make it not a language. What you're saying is that we should base categorize forms of communication based on the social status of their speakers. I hope you can see why that might be problematic. > By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language. This doesn't make any sense. AAVE is not slang, which you'd know if you read the OP.

smsm42 14y ago

So should there be AAVE-English academic dictionaries with entries like "ain't: are not", etc.? What about l33tsp34k and txtng spk, u wnt 2gt dctnrz 4 it 2?

nollidge 14y ago
The differences between American Standard English and AAVE are primarily grammatical, not lexicographical. So an AmE-AAVE dictionary wouldn't be very thick. And Leetspeak, txt-speak, and AAVE are not equivalent entities. Leetspeak is an alternative alphabet, txt-speak is a system of abbreviations and slang, and AAVE is at minimum a dialect.
- smsm42 14y ago
  Leetspeak can be classified as a dialect too, if you'd like, it has its own words (leet, pwnd, haxor, etc.) and you can find grammar differences if you look hard enough[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar
  - Cushman 14y ago
    That's pretty unconvincing. Despite the heading "Grammar", it mentions differences that are lexicographic or merely orthographic in nature. The only real grammatical process mentioned is "changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect" which has some obvious problems. "All your ___ are belong to ___" is an idiomatic expression in Internet Standard English, but that does not a grammar rule make.
    - pekk 14y ago
      You haven't articulated any real objective principle to distinguish when two ways of talking are the same language. The decision seems to be based on politics (in this case politics of race)
      - Cushman 14y ago

omonra 14y ago

Unless these kids are going to be reading books written in ebonics, perhaps they don't belong in higher reading groups? Same works for Spanish speaking kids - if they don't speak / understand English, they would be placed in remedial classes, right? Since the world (outside the neighborhood) speaks standard English, they are probably served well to learn that that's what they need to know to succeed. The approach advocated would produce the opposite effect - kids would think that what they hear at home is OK and that the world should accomodate them.

Cushman 14y ago
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.
- SilasX 14y ago
  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.)
  - Cushman 14y ago
    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.

cpsales 14y ago

Shizzle mah nizzle fo rizzle. The problem with AAVE is that as much as some academics try to imprint it with French grammar history or specific qualities of a major language, it is too easily corrupted with non-standard pidgin fads even within its everyday usage. A lot of it is emotive slang that can mean a myriad of things without supporting context clues in regular English. Specific pronouns often refer to unconventional nouns so that it becomes an inside joke. Haphazardly juxtaposing SOV/SVO word order and verbing nouns does not a ginuwine phat language roll. Honestly, it's closer to an alternate form of English poetry than a separate language.