Language and Power

The Flynn article hit home for me because the issues he talk about are very important to me. I strongly believe that lack of awareness around linguistic competence and poor communication between teachers and students, especially between white teachers and students of color, is something contributing to the achievement gap in Minneapolis schools.

It can be hard for teachers who come from different background than their students to communicate. Sometimes, there is a language barrier, but more often it’s a coded language difference that creates tension. The biggest example of this is how AAVE (African American Vernacular English, also called Ebonics or Black Vernacular) is treated in the classroom. Among some communities of Black people, AAVE is the common language. AAVE is a form of English, but has its own set of vocabulary, syntax rules and grammar structures that distinguish it form SAE (Standard American English). Many white teachers do not know about the unique structures and rules of AAVE, they only know it as “improper”, or “not the right way to speak”. Students who speak AAVE are told, from a young age, that AAVE is “wrong”. Imagine being a 5 year old person and being told from your teacher that the way your brothers and sisters speak, the way your mother and father speak, the way your neighbors speak is wrong. This only serves to disengage the student or make them feel they are coming into school with a deficit of some kind. This may also influence how the teacher sees that student- “they don’t speak correctly”; already you have a deficit mindset regarding that child.

            What that teacher has done is called prescriptive grammar. In education, it’s the notion that one form of grammar is correct (Standard American English, usually) and should be upheld in the classroom. Not only is this a hegemonic and ethnocentric mindset, but it’s ignoring the needs of the student; it’s not meeting them where they’re at.

Prescriptive grammar can start affecting students when they’re very young, with pre-k students. Many times, teachers don’t even notice they’re doing it. It has long-reaching affects as well, some as bad as a permanent stuttering. I have perpetuated this prescriptive grammar myself when I was in the Summer Reads program through the Minnesota Literacy Council. The program prepared us well, and armed us with hundreds of vocabulary games and alphabet-learning activities. I started working at Hospitality House in North Minneapolis, and loved working with the K-2^nd graders every day. A big part of Summer Reads was literacy testing, and it was our job to correct words that were pronounced incorrectly. A few students pronounced “brother” like “bruvver”, which is correct in AAVE but incorrect in SAE. I made them read the word again, thinking that they had not comprehended the word. This only made them read slower and less fluently, with one child in particular becoming angry that I kept asking him to correct this one word. I had the best intentions, but I was set on the idea that what they were saying was not correct. In the process, I alienated some students who had the potential to be much more fluent readers if I had only acknowledged the alternate pronunciation of “brother” which was correct in the grammar they were used to.

            What is the solution? Teach all teachers about linguistic competence and the dangers of prescriptive grammar. This isn’t to say that teaching SAE is off the table, in fact, teaching SAE and its grammar rules are just as important, but instead of prescriptive grammar, frame it around descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar is less about a right and wrong grammar binary and more about useful grammar rules. It’s also important that students learn SAE because of its position as the dominant form of communication in our world today. As Gloria Ladson Billings puts it, “My job is to make sure that they can use both languages, that they understand that their language is valid but that the demands placed upon them by others mean that they will constantly have to prove their worth. We spend a lot of time talking about language, what it means, how you can use it, and how it can be used against you” (Ladson-Billings, 82) Teachers can present SAE as a necessity, but not as “better” or “the only right way” to speak and write. Some teachers have found success in a “bilingual” approach, teaching students that SAE is actually their second language, even if English is a part of their first language. Charlotte Evans, a deaf educator, has used an approach similar to this with her students. She acknowledges that American Sign Language is their first language, and English writing is their second, and teaches with this in mind (Evans, 17). Lisa Delpit advocates for this dual-minded approach, imploring that speaking and writing in AAVE is not a deficit to any student, but actually a useful skill in the classroom. “Through winding back and forth through orality and literacy, the students begin to understand the stylistic differences between their own language and that of standard text” (Delpit, 62)

 In order to solve this problem that contributes to the achievement gap, teachers need to accept linguistic differences and stop teaching prescriptive grammar, especially in the case of AAVE. Teachers should be aware of important concepts like privilege, cultural capital and linguistic competence, and how they play out in a classroom where the students speak AAVE but the teacher is an SAE speaker. This awareness can hopefully spread beyond teachers to staff and other organizations that support literacy. What makes this so important is that usually teachers have the best intentions, but without this knowledge the teacher may end up negatively impacting the child, like I did.  This awareness may take some teachers a while to become used to, but it will be worth it for the new awareness they have that benefits their AAVE-speaking black students.

Delpit, Lisa. Other People's Children. 2nd ed. New York: New, 2006. Print.

Evans, Charlotte J. "Literacy Development in Deaf Students: Case Studies in Bilingual Teaching and Learning." American Annals of the Deaf 149.1 (2004): 17-27. Print.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994. Print.