Black Communications and Learning to Read

Building on Children's Linguistic and Cultural Strengths

Terry Meier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000149623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

This book is about effective literacy instruction for students in grades K-4 who use the language variety that many linguists call African American English, but which, as explained in the Introduction, the author calls Black Communications (BC). Throughout, considerable attention is given to discussing the integral and complex interconnections among African American language, culture, and history, drawing significantly on examples from African American historical and literary sources. Although it is theoretical in its description of the BC system and its discussion of research on language socialization in African American communities, the major focus of this book is pedagogy. Many concrete examples of successful classroom practices are included so that teachers can readily visualize and use the strategies and principles presented.*Part I, 'What is Black Communications?" presents an overview of the BC system, providing a basic introduction to the major components of the language—phonology, grammar, lexicon, and pragmatics, and illustrating how these components work in synchrony to create a coherent whole.
*Part II, "Language Socialization in the African American Discourse Community, " examines existing research on African American children's language socialization.
*Part III, "Using African American Children's Literature, " draws connections between strategy instruction and the linguistic and rhetorical abilities discussed in Part II. Each chapter ends with suggestions for using African American literature to help children develop their speaking and writing abilities.
*Part IV, "Children Using Language, " moves from a focus on teaching comprehension strategies to helping BC speakers learn to decode text. This volume is directed to researchers, faculty, and graduate students in the fields of language and literacy education and linguistics, and is well-suited as a text for graduate-level courses in these areas.

Chapter 1 Introduction

This is a book about effective literacy instruction for children who use the language variety many linguists currently call African American English (AAE), but which I refer to as Black Communications (BC). After much deliberation, I have chosen to use this term because I think it conveys in a very clear way the important point, made by Geneva Smitherman (2000a) and others, that this language variety includes both a linguistic component (i.e., pronunciation and grammar rules as well as distinctive vocabulary) and a stylistic/pragmatic component (i.e., ways of using the language effectively and appropriately). As I argue throughout this book, knowledge about both of these components is essential for teachers to be successful in teaching BC speakers to read.

I realize of course that many people would strongly disagree with this view. Indeed, popular consensus on this subject seems to be that as long as teachers have respect for the language variety children bring from home, it is not really necessary for them to possess detailed knowledge about specific features of that variety. After all, so proponents of this position argue, the goal of literacy instruction is proficiency in reading and writing standard English (SE). Surely, this argument continues, the particulars of Black Communications, or of any other "nonstandard variety of English," are largely irrelevant to achieving that goal.

As an education professor who teaches courses in language and literacy and who frequently conducts workshops with teachers on the topic of linguistic diversity, I have heard this position articulated literally hundreds of times. In many cases, I have found that even bringing up the topic of Black Communications raises strong emotions in teachers and prospective teachers. This was particularly the case during the period following the Oakland, California School Board's widely publicized decision in 1996 to recognize what they termed Ebonics as the home language of many of its students and to build upon that linguistic foundation in designing literacy instruction. At that time I frequently heard education students and workshop participants express the view, often in advance of any actual discussion of the subject, and often in heated tones, that they were "against Ebonics."

But as educator Lisa Delpit (1998) points out, in actuality, "[one] can be neither for Ebonics or against Ebonics any more than [one] can be for or against air. It exists" (p. 17). Like all languages, Black Communications/ Ebonics resides in the minds of its users and therefore cannot be summarily dismissed from the classroom by teachers who consider it irrelevant to instruction. Black Communications not only finds expression in the sounds, sentences, words, and gestures its users produce when they communicate, but is present as well in the assumptions they make about the meaning of other people's utterances and in the ways they make sense of events, including, of course, what happens in school.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the technical nature of much of the literature about BC, for the most part it has been linguists, not educators, who have had the most to say about the relationship between BC and literacy instruction. With few exceptions, linguists who study BC have been strong proponents of the position that teachers need to take BC into account in teaching literacy effectively to BC speakers (e.g., Ball, 1992; Baratz & Shuy, 1969; Baugh, 1981, 1999; Green, 2002; Labov, 1972, 1995, 2001; Lee, 1993; Rick-ford, 1999; Smitherman, 2000a; Wolfram, Adger, & Christian, 1999). In the words of linguist John Rickford (1999), "The undeniable fact... is that most African American children come to school speaking the vernacular. It will emerge in the classroom, and how teachers respond to it can crucially affect how the students learn to read, and how well they master standard English" (pp. 337-338).

The Oakland Ebonics Resolution

The linguistic community's position on the importance of building literacy instruction on the foundation of students' native language abilities was evident in its support of the Oakland Ebonics resolution. Some readers may recall the Oakland, California School Board's decision in 1996 to recognize Ebonics (BC) as the home language of a large percentage of its students and to utilize that language as a means of helping students develop proficiency in standard English (SE). In terms of classroom instruction, the Oakland School Board basically advocated two measures: (a) that teachers acknowledge and celebrate the legitimacy and beauty of Ebonics/BC, and (b) that teachers use the method of contrastive analysis to draw students' conscious attention to systematic differences between the phonological (sound) and grammatical rules of Ebonics/ BC and those of SE.

In essence, the goal was for Ebonics/BC speakers to become bilingual/ bidialectal, proficient in both Ebonics/BC (the language variety they presumably already knew) and SE (the language variety they were acquiring in school). In addition, the educators and community activists who developed the Oakland resolution, in close collaboration with linguist Ernie Smith, envisioned professional development opportunities for teachers to learn more about African American language, culture, history, and literature so that they could incorporate this knowledge into the design of motivating and intellectually challenging curriculum for students.

Given the fact that in 1996 African American students comprised over half the Oakland school district population and that the pedagogical strategies advocated by the Board were entirely consonant with what is arguably the most fundamental principle of learning—that is, that new knowledge is most easily acquired in the context of familiar knowledge—the Oakland resolution was hardly revolutionary. Yet public reaction to it was swift and condemnatory, erupting with what linguist William Labov (1999) aptly characterized as "all the force of madness mixed with racism" (in foreword to Rickford, J. R., 1999). For months following announcement of the resolution, the media, and the public influenced by it, went wild, vilifying the Oakland School Board and ridiculing the notion that Ebonics was anything more than slang and "bad English."

At its annual meeting in January, 1997, the Linguistic Society of America issued a resolution in support of the Oakland Board's position, characterizing the Board's decision to recognize children's vernacular (i.e., Ebonics/BC) in teaching them SE as both "linguistically and pedagogically sound" (reprinted in Perry & Delpit, 1998, p. 161). However, the Linguistic Society of America's endorsement was hardly the stuff of front-page headlines for a media industry enamored of its own negative version of the Ebonics story. J. M. Rickford (1999) recalls how during this period he and other linguists submitted Op-Ed articles on the issue to major national newspapers, only to have their offerings declined:

Sometimes the newspapers would say, "Well, the issue is passe." But the next weekend you would see another editorial or Op-Ed piece ranting and raving about the horror that Ebonics represents or the wrongness of the Oakland resolutions, so it was clearly not the timeliness of the issue that was in question but the take on it which linguists represented, (p. 342)

Also missing from the discussion . . .

What was missing from the public discourse about the Ebonics resolution was not only informed discussion about the linguistic and pedagogical legitimacy of the Oakland Board's position, but also any real discussion about the educational conditions that had motivated the Board to act in the first place: namely, the low levels of literacy and the high academic failure rate of African American students in Oakland schools—and, indeed, in schools across the country. In an article responding to critics of the resolution, written shortly after the story about it broke in the press, Oakland school superintendent Carolyn Get-ridge describes what she terms the "dire situation" prompting the Oakland Board's initial formation of a task force to study African American achievement in Oakland schools: an aggregate grade point average of 1.8 for African American students compared to the district average of 2.40 as well as vastly disproportionate rates of truancy, suspension, and referral to special needs compared to other children in the district. Getridge writes:

These statistics are both mind-numbing and a cause for moral outrage. The situation has not improved itself during the decade of reform launched by the landmark report, A Nation at Risk, and yet there has been little public reaction to the failure of our public schools to educate minority children. . . . The question is not whether or not we must act; rather we are confronted by questions of how best to act, and how quickly can we act? (reprinted in Perry and Delpit 1998, p. 174)

The same sense of moral urgency echoes in the words of Oakland School Board member Toni Cook as she describes for a reporter an older man from the community who would regularly attend board meetings: . . he would stand with those trembling hands and talk about the performance of African American kids—test scores, truancy—and he said, 'I see having four black board members has made no difference in what these kids are doing'." "And we hung our heads," Cook tells the reporter, "because it was true! We had a crisis situation and we kept coming up with old ways. Or ways that were so homogenized they didn't really wake anybody up" (Asimov, 1997, reprinted in Perry and Del pit. 1998, p. 174).

African American Children and Literacy Achievement

Tragically, the language these two women use to express their anguish over the educational plight of their community's children (e.g., statistics that are "mind-numbing" and "cause for moral outrage"; the urgent need to wake somebody up) held then (in 1996/97), and holds now, little possibility of waking up the consciousness of a public long since numb to the underachievement of African American students. Elaine Richardson opens her book African American Literacies (2003) with her own sense of moral outrage as she analyzes the messages encoded in a bookmark produced by the organization Teach for America. This bookmark, which is reproduced in Richardson's book, highlights the image of a young African American male with the following words: "He is in the eighth grade but he's reading at the fourth grade level. Will you change this?" As Richardson rightly observes, without major changes in current pedagogical practices, persuading young college graduates to commit to spending 2 years teaching in low-income communities is hardly likely to make a significant difference in literacy outcomes for poor children in this country. Even more germane to the discussion here, however, is Richardson's observation of how the image of the young Black male body in the bookmark is used to symbolize illiteracy (p. 6). Indeed, for many people, low literacy outcomes for African American students, especially males, are so taken-for-granted as to be hardly worth comment, let alone cause for public alarm.

We have abundant evidence that, overall, African American children, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, perform less well on standardized measures of reading achievement than do their European American counterparts (Bankston & Caldas, 1998; Entwisle & Alexander, 1988; Hedges &Nowell, 1998; NAEP, 1997; Singham, 1998). Furthermore, these performance differences actually increase as children proceed through school, creating the anomalous phenomenon discussed by Steele (1992) that the longer African American students spend in school, the worse they do (see also Rickford, J. R., 1999). In the area of literacy, this is a phenomenon made all the more anomalous by 30 years of ethnographic research whose findings suggest that children socialized in the African American speech community enter school with extremely sophisticated linguistic abilities (Goodwin, 1990; Haight, 2002; Heath, 1983; Labov, 1972; Vernon-Feagans, 1996).

This phenomenon becomes less puzzling, however, when one considers the fact that neither the literacy curriculum, nor anything else about most schools, has been designed with the aim of fostering African American achievement. It is in fact a tribute to the intellectual and linguistic resourcefulness of African American children that in spite of most teachers not knowing anything about the systematic, rule-governed ways in which they use language, in the absence of school curricula that draw to any significant extent upon African American cultural practices, literature or history, and in the face of teachers' pervasive, poisoning underestimation of their intellectual potential, the majority somehow manage to emerge as literate from our schools. The reality is that many BC speakers become literate not because of, but in spite of, what happens in our classrooms. It is they, not their teachers, who end up figuring out the connections between old and new knowledge. If children were not so resourceful, if African American children in particular were not so alert to linguistic nuance, so skilled in reading social context, then we would have a great deal more literacy failure to account for than we already have.

If BC speakers have the inner resources to survive in our schools, there is no question of their potential to thrive, given teachers who recognize their intellectual potential and know how to build on their strengths. This is the conviction that has guided me in writing this book and that has fueled my work as a teacher and teacher educator over the past 30 years.

My interest in the topic of Black Communications is a long-standing one. It began in the 1970s when, as a young White teacher, I took a job in a community college teaching writing to a student population that was predominantly African American. Although I believed fervently in ray students' potential and was committed to their success, I quickly discovered that I lacked the linguistic and cultural knowledge I needed to actually help them achieve. As a result, in addition to talking with students about their lives and perspectives, I began to read from an African American canon I had previously known little about—the autobiography and speeches of Malcolm X, the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the work of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara, just to name some of the many writers whose work I eagerly devoured.

Soon after its initial publication in 1977, I read Geneva Smitherman's now classic Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (1977). This book, written in a style that mixes academic English and what was then termed Black English, was my first real introduction to a comprehensive view of Black language. What made the book so compelling, in addition to its creative style, was that Smitherman not only provided a description of the linguistic system—its sound patterns, grammar, and vocabulary—but also discussed the language's stylistic features and its relationship to Black culture and the Black oral tradition. My community college students found Smitherman's ideas and descriptions as exciting as I did. Talkin and Testifyin led me to other books about Black language and, with its intriguing pedagogical possibilities, was part of my inspiration for eventually returning to graduate school to learn more about language development, literacy, and linguistics. Eventually, I moved from teaching writing to become the director of a community college/university partnership program designed to recruit and prepare teachers of color. As part of my work, I began spending significant amounts of time in urban elementary schools, observing and working with teachers on issues of literacy. This work quickly became my passion.

Over the past 13 years, I have had the good fortune to teach and work with preservice and practicing teachers in two very different geographical areas of the United States, one a large metropolitan city in the Northeast and the other the largely rural Sea Island area of South Carolina. Much of my practical knowledge about BC and literacy instruction in the primary and elementary grades has grown out of my experiences working with some of these very talented and committed individuals. I am grateful for all that they have shared with me—their insights, dilemmas, exciting curricular ideas, and especially the opportunities many have provided to spend time observing, working, and learning in their classrooms. I draw significantly on their wisdom in this book.

The relationship between BC and literacy education is a subject about which there has been considerable, and sometimes passionate, scholarly and popular discussion over the last 30 years. At least since the 1970s, linguists focused on BC and educational issues—Beryl Bailey, Geneva Smitherman, William Labov, John Baugh, and John Rickford, to name just some of the most prominent over the years—have taken a strong and vocal stand on the importance of building literacy instruction on the foundation of students' BC abilities. The scholarly discussion about BC and literacy instruction has also extended beyond a sole focus on BC's phonological and grammatical patterns. This part of the discussion has been going on for a long time, beginning, for many people, with the publication of Smitherman's influential book Talkin and Testifyin in 1977. Since then, many scholars have argued, often with great eloquence and many examples from classroom practice, for the importance of incorporating stylistic and rhetorical aspects of BC into literacy instruction. Among these scholars are Arnetha Ball, Evelyn Dandy, Lisa Delpit, Michele Foster, Mary Rhodes Hoover, Carol Lee, Jabari Mahiri, and Elaine Richardson, again, to name only some. Quite clearly, we do not lack for excellent scholarship on this topic. Nor, in what Smitherman has recently described as "this late hour in the history of the African-centered Educational Movement," do we lack models of successful schools or of exemplary teachers whose curricula and pedagogical strategies draw heavily on knowledge about Black Communications. As Smitherman notes, some of the schools incorporating curricula and pedagogical strategies built upon Black students' linguistic and cultural abilities have been successful for almost 3 decades (Smitherman in foreword to Richardson, 2003, p. x).

Yet in spite of substantial scholarship and many examples of effective practice, we cannot claim widespread acceptance among teachers of even the most basic assumptions represented in this body of work—for example, that Black Communications is a rule-governed linguistic system instead of just "standard English with mistakes," or that BC speakers come to school with a rich repertoire of linguistic resources for literacy learning. Little wonder that literacy outcomes for African Americans in our schools continue to be so problematic. Like many of my colleagues in this field, I write in the belief that the majority of teachers truly want to be effective with all of their students. I also write with the knowledge that most teacher preparation programs do not offer courses on Black Communications or even on linguistic diversity in general. It is my hope that this book will be a useful introduction to the topic of BC and literacy instruction for teachers and future teachers and that it will inspire readers to further exploration of the issues raised.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• PART 1—What Is Black Communications?
• PART 2—Language Socialization in the African American Discourse Community
• PART 3—Using African American Children's Literature to Teach Essential Comprehension Strategies
• PART 4—Learning to Decode
• References
• List of Children's Literature Cited
• Author Index
• Subject Index