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Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction
What Should Teachers Do?
Issues of group identity may also affect students’ oral production of a different dialect. Researcher Sharon Nelson-Barber, in a study of phonologic aspects of Pima Indian language, found that, in grades 1-3, the children’s English most approximated the standard dialect of their teachers. But surprisingly, by fourth grade, when one might assume growing competence in standard forms, their language moved significantly toward the local dialect. These fourth graders had the competence to express themselves in a more standard form, but chose, consciously or unconsciously, to use the language of those in their local environments. The researcher believes that, by ages 8-9, these children became aware of their group membership and its importance to their well-being, and this realization was reflected in their language.1 They may also have become increasingly aware of the schools’s negative attitude toward their community and found it necessary — through choice of linguistic form — to decide with which camp to identify.
What should teachers do about helping students acquire an additional oral form? First, they should recognize that the linguistic form a student brings to school is intimately connected with loved ones, community, and personal identity. To suggest that this form is “wrong” or, even worse, ignorant, is to suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family. To denigrate your language is, then, in African-American terms, to “talk about your mama.” Anyone who knows anything about African-American culture knows the consequences of that speech act!
On the other hand, it is equally important to understand that students who do not have access to the politically popular dialect form in this country, are less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do. How can both realities be embraced in classroom instruction?
It is possible and desirable to make the actual study of language diversity a part of the curriculum for all students. For younger children, discussions about the differences in the ways television characters from different cultural groups speak can provide a starting point. A collection of the many children’s books written in the dialects of various cultural groups can also provide a wonderful basis for learning about linguistic diversity,2 as can audio taped stories narrated by individuals from different cultures, including taping books read by members of the children’s home communities. Mrs. Pat, a teacher chronicled by Stanford University researcher Shirley Brice Heath, had her students become language “detectives,” interviewing a variety of individuals and listening to the radio and television to discover the differences and similarities in the ways people talked.3 Children can learn that there are many ways of saying the same thing, and that certain contexts suggest particular kinds of linguistic performances.
Some teachers have groups of students create bilingual dictionaries of their own language form and Standard English. Both the students and the teacher become engaged in identifying terms and deciding upon the best translations. This can be done as generational dictionaries, too, given the proliferation of “youth culture” terms growing out of the Ebonics-influenced tendency for the continual regeneration of vocabulary. Contrastive grammatical structures can be studied similarly, but, of course, as the Oakland policy suggests, teachers must be aware of the grammatical structure of Ebonics before they can launch into this complex study.</p
