How can i learn ebonics

Comment on their pronunciation a bit more, and they begin to subvocalize, rehearsing pronunciations for themselves before they dare to say them out loud.

They begin to guess at pronunciations. They stumble; they repeat. In short, when I attack them for their failure to conform to my demands for Atlantis English pronunciations, they sound very much like the worst of the second graders in any of the classrooms I have observed. They also begin to fidget. They wad up their papers, bite their fingernails, whisper, and some finally refuse to continue.

They do all the things that children do while they are busily failing to learn to read. The moral of this story is not to confuse learning a new language form with reading comprehension. To do so will only confuse the child, leading her away from those intuitive understandings about language that will promote reading development, and toward a school career of resistance and a lifetime of avoiding reading.

Unlike unplanned oral language or public reading, writing lends itself to editing. While conversational talk is spontaneous and must be responsive to an immediate context, writing is a mediated process which may be written and rewritten any number of times before being introduced to public scrutiny. The verbal adroitness, the cogent and quick wit, the brilliant use of metaphor, the facility in rhythm and rhyme, evident in the language of Jesse Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates, Tupac Shakur, and Maya Angelou, as well as in that of many inner-city Black students, may all be drawn upon to facilitate school learning.

The teacher must know how to effectively teach reading and writing to students whose culture and language differ from that of the school, and must understand how and why students decide to add another language form to their repertoire.

All we can do is provide students with access to additional language forms. Inevitably, each speaker will make his or her own decision about what to say in any context. But I must end with a caveat that we keep in mind a simple truth: Despite our necessary efforts to provide access to standard English, such access will not make any of our students more intelligent.

It will not teach them math or science or geography — or, for that matter, compassion, courage, or responsibility. Let us not become so overly concerned with the language form that we ignore academic and moral content. Access to the standard language may be necessary, but it is definitely not sufficient to produce intelligent, competent caretakers of the future. Lisa Delpit is holder of the Benjamin E.

Clair and W. Leap, Eds. Michaels and C. Schieffer Ed. Although educators using translation techniques have claimed success in raising the scores of Ebonics speakers on standardized tests, others find these claims unproved. Moreover, it seems alienating and misdirected to teach English as a second language to students who already speak English as their first language, if you believe as I do that Ebonics is just a dialect of English.

When the Oakland school board explained that it was simply having students translate from Ebonics to standard English, rather than teaching students both Ebonics and standard English, many critics began to relax, for that strategy looked like something they could live with. But second-language educators do not rely on translation alone.

Instead they offer a rich combination of immersion and explicit teaching: students not only study vocabulary and grammar, they converse, role play, read newspapers and magazines, watch television and movies, and most important, interact with fluent users of the language in authentic communication situations.

Similarly, students who speak nonstandard varieties of English will become fluent in the more mainstream forms of English only if they can first break down social barriers and participate as equals in authentic, mainstream social contexts.

Even with such varied methods, foreign language instruction in our schools does not typically create fluent speakers. Everyone who has taught or taken a foreign language in school knows the difficulty of getting students to learn a language well in a classroom situation. Simply translating from one language to another is never enough to achieve fluency. Do we really want to condemn students to speaking English as well as the typical American high-schooler speaks French or Spanish?

But it is also true that discrimination—on account of their language—against people who speak non-standard English usually masks other, more sinister forms of prejudice. Women and members of every ethnic and racial minority have found that mastering the mainstream varieties of English—say, legal language, business English, or technical jargon—by itself will not guarantee them equal treatment.

Even if your language is irreproachable, if teachers, employers, or landlords want to discriminate against you, they will find another way to do so. A significant number of whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans who live and work closely together speak dialects that can be characterized as black English.

As linguists study AAVE, they find that, just like standard English, it is not monolithic, but comes in flavors and varieties. So, in many ways, it is easier to conceive of all the dialects of English as variable and continuous, rather than categorical and separate.

For another thing, the problems Ebonics speakers face are shared by speakers of other nonstandard dialects as well, whether they live in the inner city, in rural America, or even in the suburbs. It raises crucial questions about the workings of language and our attitudes toward its use, especially in school contexts. Many teachers assume that their students are empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. But by the age of five or six, students already have learned more about their native language than they will learn from school.

Structural linguists, sociolinguists, and applied linguists battle over terminology. Some linguists criticize everyone. The Ebonics project, with its emphasis on phonic-inclusive literacy methods and on improving teacher attitudes one of the major characteristics of a successful school , may solve the problem of Black illiteracy — if the recommendations of the Task Force for African-American Education are implemented.

For administrators, teachers, parents, and community activists who decide to implement the research on bringing African-American students up to and above grade level, the research — available through the education data base ERIC and in library card catalogs — has been there since If public schools are to survive, they must find a solution to the systematic failure to teach African-American children.

Parents consider reading to be the most important outcome of schooling, and employers view it as one of the most important skills for a worker in the 21st century.

Yet discussions of the appropriate methods for teaching literacy to African-American children continue to be an invisible topic in school districts. Mary Rhodes Hoover is a professor in the school of education at Howard University. Skip to content African-American parents and community members have fought for literacy throughout history. Related Issue: Volume 12, No. Poplack, Shana, ed. The English history of African American English.

Rickford, John R. Spoken Soul: The story of Black English. New York: John Wiley. Smitherman, Geneva. Black talk: Words and phrases from the hood to the amen corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Wolfram, Walt, and Erik R. The development of African American English.

Donate Jobs Center News Room. Search form Search. John R. Rickford Download this document as a pdf. What does Ebonics sound like? What do people think of Ebonics?