African American Language

The interaction of language and cultural identity is central to the themes portrayed in the Harlem Renaissance literature. Zora Neale Hurston's short story Spunk illustrates the cultural element and interaction among Blacks during the Harlem Renaissance. This paper aims to focus on the language dynamics, specifically code-switching, in the short story Spunk. As part of her depiction of her characters' multilingual identities, Hurston emphasizes code-switching between Standard English and African American Vernacular English within the context of what may be characterized as quotidian discursivity. She also makes connections between the code of speech and issues of class, power, and subject positioning. The study is mainly qualitative and text-based; it utilizes code-switching to understand the motivations, interpersonal dynamics, and inner struggles of the characters. Hurston was already using language to portray the characters' socioeconomic positions and identity problems as they negotiated a racist society, according to the research, she effectively portrays a more sophisticated and perceptive understanding of language as a tool for plot advancement and symbolic cultural history definition in the play. From a perspective on the power dynamics in language and culture, this paper concludes that Hurston had a significant impact on the growth of African American literature and that her distinctive depictions of the Black experience remain influential.

This article stems from a project titled "Reanimating African American English Oral Histories of the Gulf South." This collaboration is primarily between the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida (UF), but it also involves statisticians, computer scientists, and K-12 education experts, as well as the African American community in Putnam County, Florida, where the state's first Black high school stands. The linguistics team has two computational linguist faculty and several student assistants who are mainly from the departments of Linguistics and Computer and Information Science and Engineering at UF and the Department of English Language and Linguistics

This thesis examined discourse strategies and their function in radio evangelism in Ghana from Christian perspective. Using Fairclough’s Relational Dialectic approach, a qualitative ethnographic design was adopted to purposively collect sixteen sermons from a radio station in Takoradi produced by Roman Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, and Charismatic priests and pastors and analysed textually and thematically. The analysis established that religious discourse is highly structured speech event consisting of micro and macro discourse strategies. The micro strategies include adjacency pair, hedge, repair mechanism, backchannel, code-switching/code-mixing, and discourse markers. The macro discourse strategies were re-voicing, questioning, pause, stress,
illustration, fillers or hesitation, repetition, paraphrase, and quotation. With regard to the functions, the strategies were identified to be used for persuasion, providing information, reflection, spicing up, and for feedback. Others are attention, time creation, emphasis, explanation, invitation, mitigation, and conjunction. The rest are delay, boundary marking, floor holding, organization, showing understanding and agreement, socialization, and clarification. The analysis also showed that discourse strategies such as discourse marker, pause, filler, adjacency pair, repetition and code-switching function as time creating devices in radio evangelism. Based on the results, it is argued that preachers utilize discourse strategies judiciously to make their radio preaching
comprehensible to their listeners far and near (Fairclough, 1988), and that they cannot be decoupled from spoken discourse, especially at the radio level, where negotiation of meaning between speaker and listener wants are crucial.

Black students are marginalized in mathematics education in the USA, including through their language. However, there is little research on how mathematics teachers can best serve Black Language (BL) speakers. Because BL is a significant sensemaking resource for Black students in mathematics, we investigate how BL-speaking mathematics teach- ers use their language to support BL-speaking students. Drawing on semi-structured inter- views with ten BL-speaking mathematics teachers, we find through thematic analysis that these teachers use BL in three primary ways: (1) as access; (2) as community; and (3) as liberation. These findings provide important implications for teachers of Black students, including that teachers must familiarize themselves with BL, use language to connect with students, make space for BL in the mathematics classroom, and disrupt the marginalization that happens through language.

Recent research has highlighted that natural language processing (NLP) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. The bias errors are often caused by poor representation of linguistic features unique to African American English (AAE), due to the relatively low probability of occurrence of many such features in training data. We present a workflow to overcome such bias in the case of habitual "be". Habitual "be" is isomorphic, and therefore ambiguous, with other forms of "be" found in both AAE and other varieties of English. This creates a clear challenge for bias in NLP technologies. To overcome the scarcity, we employ a combination of rule-based filters and data augmentation that generate a corpus balanced between habitual and non-habitual instances. With this balanced corpus, we train unbiased machine learning classifiers, as demonstrated on a corpus of AAE transcribed texts, achieving .65 F 1 score disambiguating habitual "be".

School of Education, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education, and professor of African American Studies and Linguistics, by courtesy, at Stanford University. Her re search and publications address the relationship between language variation and ed ucational practices and policies across the educational lifespan, particularly for Black students. She has a special dedication to creating high impact practices for underrep resented students in higher education. She is the co author of numerous publications

This thesis is structured in the form of the African American rhetorical strategy Jubilee, which involves "optimistic notes [to] precede the tragic" (Gilyard 6), or in the case of this thesis, where the tragic notes precede the optimistic; for Gilyard, these notes can be reversed, but both are always present. Readers will notice throughout the thesis, I "call" on my Black ancestors, scholars and educators who opened the door so that I, and others like me, may take this discourse further and continue to open doors for others. As this thesis is designed in Jubilee, it attempts to meet four of the six goals Boulware notes: (1) it files a grievance [why you people don't pay no attention to how us Black folk teach using our language?]; (2) it states a complaint [White folks got to be crazy if they think we talk like them in the class]; (3) it demands rights [Black teachers got rights to be heard]; and (4) it advocate cooperation [showing students that collaboration be a better way to achieve certain writing goals] (qtd. in Gilyard 5). This is not to suggest that themes of racial consciousness and pride do not present themselves within the composition classroom, but this thesis looks specifically at the language and rhetorical strategies used by two African American teachers, one male and one female. When reading this text, readers should attempt to visualize a wave, flowing from the bottom, rising to the top, and flowing back down. Every chapter is designed to take readers on a journeya strugglewhich culminates at the end of each chapter. Readers will also note that each chapter starts with a narrative, harkening back to previous chapters and other Black scholars and orators. The Introduction (Chapter I) is designed to replicate "the struggle," keeping in mind that there can be no Jubilee without a struggle. I discuss the reasons and the difficulties African Americans have faced attempting to become recognized as contributors not only to American society, but also to American education. One should think of the Introduction as a particular history of Black people, their language, and the rhetorical strategies of their language that they use to persuade multiple audiences, including students. While the Introduction provides a history of the struggle, the preceding chapters are designed as the path, the road one must travel in order to attain Jubilee. The struggle and the journey are equally important in order to form Jubilee. These chapters take the reader on a journey from African American Language (AAL) and its rhetorical strategies in the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X, to the use of African American Rhetorical (AAR) strategies when teaching composition, shown in data collected on Antoni, my research participant, and myself. The conclusion is the end of the journey (the Jubilee). The Conclusion chapter is not to be misinterpreted with "and they lived happily ever after." The final chapter is to be seen as a resting spot between journeysthe previous journey and the one ahead. This chapter presents some possible solutions, asks questions, and calls on current scholars to help lead the way to recognition of Teacher's Use Of Own Language(s) in the classroom. Finally, readers will note that I use a good deal of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), sometimes called "Black English" (BE). At a recent symposium, "Composition at Historically Black Colleges and Universities," hosted at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Vershawn Young was asked by a participant whether AAVE, BE, African American Language (AAL), and Black English Vernacular (BEV) are all the same thing or if they are different. For Young, these terms are mostly interchangeable, but he noted that sometimes, scholars choose different terms for political reasons; the different terms have different resonances in linguistics, composition, rhetoric, and other circles. Like Young, I have chosen to use them interchangeably in this thesis. This, you see, be a purposeful choice because in order to challenge and expand views on how academic language is defined, it be mad difficult to explore the rhetorical strategies of one's language and its complexities without, at times, using the very language being defined. And I also use BE to help ensure that readers hear my voice. Although this thesis is written in my voice, The Man's language be my second language. I talk better, think better, and write better when I use my mother tongue. In essence, when I feel like they be only one way to say what I mean, and what I mean be said only in BE, then BE be the language I choose. However, when I feel as though an explanation is needed either about my use of BE or its rhetorical strategies, then I will shift into Standard Academic English (SAE) for those non-native speakers of BE. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES The "Struggle," 1 as so many African Americans have said, "Is Real!" But the struggle for what? The struggle to be what? So many White folk beg, scream, almost yell, "What is it you people WANT?" and "Haven't we done enough?" We want what we always wanted: freedom. And no you can't never do enough, because you can't never wash the stain of slavery from your White skin-Deal with it. We have to. The point isn't that anyone can fix it. It's about remembering. And that I suppose, that we suppose, is why White folk continue to oppress us in both subtle and overt ways. One such way is through language. I swear, White folks always meddlin' 2. Black English (BE) is not a new concept. In fact, White folk been trying to figure out what us Black folk do when we speak for a long time, but it's like they ain't been listening to what we been telling them. The argument over the reality or the validity of Black English, as James Baldwin notes, "has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the otherand, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him" (649). This lack of recognition and this refusal of a people to turn over and submit their language to The Man 3 contributes to the continual oppression, objectification, and subjugation of Black English. This oppression coincides with the attempts to 1 Readers can find further explanation of terms like "meddlin'" in Appendix A. I have included Appendix to cover any regional terms that may not have widespread usage, even among African American people. Each time I use one, I have footnoted with a brief reference to consult Appendix A. 2 See Appendix A.

In Alaska, as elsewhere in the United States, standardized American English is privileged over both local varieties of English and Indigenous languages. This privileged position is maintained, in part, through a deficit model of language acquisition and a model of school success which locates the source of underachievement among K-12 students within the child rather than within the broader sociopolitical context of school and schooling. Using a critical participatory action research approach, this article examines a single graduate course for K-12 teachers intended to address ideologies of linguistic deficit and demonstrate that the varieties of English spoken by adults and children in Southwest Alaska are systematic and rule-governed. Data are analyzed in terms of trajectories of learning, focusing on three distinct points within this trajectory: Pre-course questionnaire, Mid-point questionnaire and post-course artifacts (e.g., final projects for the master’s degree). Through the l...

In Alaska, as elsewhere in the United States, standardized American English is privileged over both local varieties of English and Indigenous languages. This privileged position is maintained, in part, through a deficit model of language acquisition and a model of school success which locates the source of underachievement among K-12 students within the child rather than within the broader sociopolitical context of school and schooling. Using a critical participatory action research approach, this article examines a single graduate course for K-12 teachers intended to address ideologies of linguistic deficit and demonstrate that the varieties of English spoken by adults and children in Southwest Alaska are systematic and rule-governed. Data are analyzed in terms of trajectories of learning, focusing on three distinct points within this trajectory: Pre-course questionnaire, Mid-point questionnaire and post-course artifacts (e.g., final projects for the master’s degree). Through the l...

In Alaska, as elsewhere in the United States, standardized American English is privileged over both local varieties of English and Indigenous languages. This privileged position is maintained, in part, through a deficit model of language acquisition and a model of school success which locates the source of underachievement among K-12 students within the child rather than within the broader sociopolitical context of school and schooling. Using a critical participatory action research approach, this article examines a single graduate course for K-12 teachers intended to address ideologies of linguistic deficit and demonstrate that the varieties of English spoken by adults and children in Southwest Alaska are systematic and rule-governed. Data are analyzed in terms of trajectories of learning, focusing on three distinct points within this trajectory: Pre-course questionnaire, Mid-point questionnaire and post-course artifacts (e.g., final projects for the master’s degree). Through the l...

The many connections between Native Americans and African Americans throughout US history provide a reason for discussing these peoples and their languages together. The similarities in their experiences in North America are primarily the product of US white supremacist racism, which, to take one example, has created black ghettoes and Native American reservations. One language, with many regional and social varieties, unites African Americans, while Native American languages number in the hundreds, divided into dozens of language families. As they struggle for social justice, Native Americans face urgent issues of language endangerment and revitalization. As African Americans continue the struggle for full equality, they will probably continue to speak the very robust African American Vernacular English, which in its current form has significantly been shaped by residential segregation but also by ethnic pride. There is every indication that the African American Vernacular will have to play an important role in the teaching of African American schoolchildren if the cycle of low educational achievement, as measured by test scores, is to be ended.

We examine how culturally sustaining pedagogy that fosters linguistic and cultural pluralism might be taken up in writing instruction. Using data collected through semistructured interviews with nine urban elementary and middle school writing teachers, we document teachers' conceptualizations and enactments of culturally sustaining writing pedagogy. Findings indicate that these teachers tended to make space for explicit discussions of language, culture, and power in the writing curriculum and to problematize expressions of dominant culture, such as an emphasis on official languages. We also explore the tensions that these teachers experienced in their pedagogy while engaging in culturally sustaining methods; for example, we documented teachers' sense that writing needed to be more formal than speech and instances where their critical practices put them at odds with stakeholders in their schools. This work represents an emerging understanding of how culturally sustaining literacy pedagogy might be implemented in practice.

The many connections between Native Americans and African Americans throughout US history provide a reason for discussing these peoples and their languages together. The similarities in their experiences in North America are primarily the product of US white supremacist racism, which, to take one example, has created black ghettoes and Native American reservations. One language, with many regional and social varieties, unites African Americans, while Native American languages number in the hundreds, divided into dozens of language families. As they struggle for social justice, Native Americans face urgent issues of language endangerment and revitalization. As African Americans continue the struggle for full equality, they will probably continue to speak the very robust African American Vernacular English, which in its current form has significantly been shaped by residential segregation but also by ethnic pride. There is every indication that the African American Vernacular will have to play an important role in the teaching of African American schoolchildren if the cycle of low educational achievement, as measured by test scores, is to be ended.

To develop a framework for further study of pragmatic behavior in young children from African American English (AAE) speaking backgrounds, one aspect of pragmatic behavior is explored in this article, specifically, speech acts. The aims of this article are to (1) examine examples of how external taxonomies (i.e., an "etic" or "outside-in" approach) have been applied to the speech act behavior of AAE child speakers and to note that etic approaches alone do not identify cultural characteristics that influence the presentation of speech acts in this population; (2) conceptualize a culture-sensitive framework where components of AAE speech act behaviors can be identified as gleaned from existing linguistic research; and (3) explain the utility of analyses of speech act behavior using taxonomies that have emerged from the cultural language style of AAE speakers, that is, an "emic" or "inside-out" approach.

Nas salas de aula, os professores envolvem explicitamente e implicitamente os alunos na exploração das ideologias linguísticas que influenciam suas atitudes sobre a variação da linguagem e as relações raciais. O estudo de caso relatado aqui usa análise do discurso etnogeograficamente detalhada para examinar como as conversas instrucionais em uma sala de aula de artes de língua secundária convidaram os alunos a refletir, desconstruir e reconstruir ideologias linguísticas isso influenciou a forma como eles viam o uso da linguagem e as relações raciais.  Empregamos um quadro mircoetnográfico, analítico do discurso, informado por sociolinguística interacional, teoria racial crítica e raciolinguística para analisar a conversa instrucional.    A análise tornou visível como a conversa instrucional orientou a desconstrução e a reconstrução da variação da linguagem pelos alunos através do posicionamento uns dos outros para questionar binários linguísticos, ligações entre ideologias linguísti...

Recent research has highlighted that natural language processing (NLP) systems exhibit a bias against African American speakers. The bias errors are often caused by poor representation of linguistic features unique to African American English (AAE), due to the relatively low probability of occurrence of many such features in training data. We present a workflow to overcome such bias in the case of habitual "be". Habitual "be" is isomorphic, and therefore ambiguous, with other forms of "be" found in both AAE and other varieties of English. This creates a clear challenge for bias in NLP technologies. To overcome the scarcity, we employ a combination of rule-based filters and data augmentation that generate a corpus balanced between habitual and non-habitual instances. With this balanced corpus, we train unbiased machine learning classifiers, as demonstrated on a corpus of AAE transcribed texts, achieving .65 F 1 score disambiguating habitual "be".

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affirm the students ’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language – the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style… ” (p. 9). This resolution was reaffirmed in 2003 due to its contemporary relevance. As an anniversary publication, this book is devoted to examining the results of the resolution, to strengthening the connection between pedagogy and policy, and to drawing attention to language ideologies. The book consists of 24 chapters divided into four sections. The first section, consisting of two chapters, provides historical context through interviews with educators and linguists. The second section (seven articles) documents the educational policies and attitudes which prevent realization of SRTOL. The third section (eight articles) provides pedagogical examples of SRTOL implementation. The fourth section (seven articles) examines linguistic diversity in other nations. This review will focus on the main themes of the ...

The many connections between Native Americans and African Americans throughout US history provide a reason for discussing these peoples and their languages together. The similarities in their experiences in North America are primarily the product of US white supremacist racism, which, to take one example, has created black ghettoes and Native American reservations. One language, with many regional and social varieties, unites African Americans, while Native American languages number in the hundreds, divided into dozens of language families. As they struggle for social justice, Native Americans face urgent issues of language endangerment and revitalization. As African Americans continue the struggle for full equality, they will probably continue to speak the very robust African American Vernacular English, which in its current form has significantly been shaped by residential segregation but also by ethnic pride. There is every indication that the African American Vernacular will hav...

and Culture concentration. She currently works as an ELA teacher at the middle school level, but has been a teacher focused on the teaching of writing at various grade levels for more than 20 years. Her research areas include writing and composition; narrative theory; and the literacy practices of adolescents.

In this reflective essay, we explore key life experiences of one African American teacher-(the first author of this paper)-who has taught kindergarten, fifth grade, and is presently a 9 th grade English teacher in the high school from which she graduated. We couch the first author's story in the professional literature to analyze and illustrate what happened in her life when her teachers worked effectively with her to help her learn to use language and literacy for her own purposes. The overall story about the first author's memories of her most powerful school experiences serves as a vehicle for sharing ideas that teachers can implement in their own classrooms to foster the language and literacy learning of children.

Religious sermons are aimed at persuasion with the speaker's intention often to influence the audience to adopt, reinforce or modify certain beliefs. Although, sermons are not normal conversations, this study investigates select sermons of Pastor E. A. Adeboye with the view to identify and analyse the discourse strategies and conversational features that characterise the sermons and the role they play in influencing audience perception and response to achieve the speaker's intended goals. Three selected sermons of Pastor E. A. Adeboye are examined with the view to identify and analyse the conversational features that characterise the sermons. The theoretical framework of Schlegloff's Conversational Analysis (CA) was adopted for the study. Transcribed audio versions of the sermons were obtained and analysed using CA to reveal the conversational features that characterise the sermons. The findings showed that the sermons are characterised by conversational features such as feedback (call-response, adjacency pairs, openings and closings), repair mechanism, and selection of next speaker. The study further revealed the presence of non-verbal conversational features such as pause, smile, laughter raise of the hands and head. The study concluded that Pastor Adeboye carefully combines these features to enhance his audience involvement and to trigger his desired response from the audience. The presence of conversational features in the sermons suggests that sermons could be classified as a type of conversation and not monologues as previously held by some scholars.

This article discusses the assets-based pedagogical theories used in one higher education classroom while analyzing the ways the co-authors, instructor, and students' learning process and identities were impacted by such pedagogies, lessons, and structures. We examine the ways members of the classroom community were impacted and impacting one another as a result of trialogic interactions-with one another, with multiple scholars whose pieces were read and discussed, and with/in themselves. We then offer pedagogical implications while discussing main themes that emerged from reflective discussions: grappling, citationality, and incompleteness. We frame this work as a community of learners who came to understand their own incomplete and in process growth as learners. This article details a case study for the ways projects in humanization, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and storying can be operationalized in classroom spaces to center moments of tension, grappling, and awakening. "We should see ourselves as stewards not of specific pieces of knowledge but rather of the productive and generative spaces that allow for finding knowledge."-Leigh Patel (2015, p. 79) Pedagogical practices and theories have remained largely unexplored in higher education (Bozalek, Ng'ambi, Wood, Herrington, Hardman & Amory 2014). 1 Educational research should focus on the equitable pedagogical practices instructors use in higher education classrooms that center the experiences, lived realities, tribal and cultural knowledges, and histories that students bring with them (Tachine, Cabrera & Yellow Bird 2017). Although not always the case, much of the teaching practices that occur in higher education rely on what Freire (1970) refers to as the banking style of education, where instructors/professors hold all the pertinent knowledge related to the course and their job is to transfer that knowledge to students. The assumption of the banking style of education is that students have little to no knowledge currency. Often, this results in unidirectional learning settings where instructors make knowledge deposits to students. To counteract inequitable learning settings, Webb and Alvarez (2018) argue for the importance of moving "beyond an adult-centered or institution-focused approach to social capital and wellbeing" and toward "community-building capacities and cultural agency" (p. 419) for students and instructors within schooling settings. Many pedagogical theorists have countered banking styles of education; however, the context of such research usually lies in K-12 school settings, rather than in higher education settings (K.

affirm the students ’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language – the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style… ” (p. 9). This resolution was reaffirmed in 2003 due to its contemporary relevance. As an anniversary publication, this book is devoted to examining the results of the resolution, to strengthening the connection between pedagogy and policy, and to drawing attention to language ideologies. The book consists of 24 chapters divided into four sections. The first section, consisting of two chapters, provides historical context through interviews with educators and linguists. The second section (seven articles) documents the educational policies and attitudes which prevent realization of SRTOL. The third section (eight articles) provides pedagogical examples of SRTOL implementation. The fourth section (seven articles) examines linguistic diversity in other nations. This review will focus on the main themes of the ...

The following article considers the missions of public Black colleges and universities, asking whether or not these missions are focused on liberal arts or professional education, or perhaps a hybrid of these foci. More importantly, we will explore the long term impact of these institutional missions on African Americans. Our discussion and examination will be contextualized using historic arguments put forth by African American leaders Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. These arguments, although often simplified, are highly complex and can offer insight into the purpose of education at public Black colleges and universities in the current day.

We demonstrate that Black children are not faring well in early childhood settings and suggest ways educators can work toward ensuring that Black children thrive and flourish in schools. Five types of daily violence/traumas that Black children experience in schools are described against the ethical backdrop First Do No Harm (Boutte, 2008). Evoking the Maasai legend that asks, How are the children? we share two examples of Black males’ school experiences, though we readily acknowledge that Black females experience parallel issues. We present an overview of five types of school violence (physical, symbolic, linguistic, curricular/pedagogical, and systemic), and conclude by offering ways to interrupt these to ensure that Black children are well.

Building on Critical Race Theory, Black Critical Theory in education (BlackCrit), and Black Male Studies (BMS), the author theorizes what he terms Black PlayCrit and, by extension, Black PlayCrit Literacies. Black PlayCrit brings attention to the specificity of Blackness and anti-Black misandric violence in the play experiences of Black boys, including Tamir Rice, who was murdered by two police officers while playing with a toy gun in a public park in Cleveland, Ohio. Black PlayCrit Literacies serves as a conceptual and pedagogical tool to challenge anti-Black misandry in Black boys’ play experiences. Given that the play experiences of Black boys (and other children of Color) are racialized and gendered, yet undertheorized in extant literature, specific recommendations are provided for urban literacy education research and practice to acknowledge and protect Black boys from the anti-Black misandric violence they face during boyhood play.

Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

This paper considers the impact of language on literacy and learning within the contexts of linguistic theory, language acquisition theory, and social cognition as having a causal relationship with low achievement in reading, writing, and speaking Standard American English. In expanding the concept of literacy, this paper is premised on the notion that African-Americans, who exhibit difficulty learning to read, write, and speak Standard American English, qualify as English Language Learners in the United States. As such, these individuals are entitled to the same considerations as other English Language Learners. Drawing on the 1996 Oakland Resolution on Ebonics and tracing the events that followed its passing, this research aims to provide librarians and library and information science (LIS) educators a contextual framework of African-American students that will be useful in building the unique skills, knowledge, and abilities that today's librarians needif they are to effectively provide the cutting-edge library services this country's growing number of distinctly urban environments require. Language, Learning, and Literacy: Understanding the Social Linguistic Context of African-American Students as a Value in Library Services to Diverse Children in the United States "Wants I get order, I can be sucksexful" (11th grade African-American Student) In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Colbert King (2016) levied the following postmortem: "The final page has been turned on D.C. Public Schools' 2015 calendar. But 2016 begins with the same uncompromising problem: the school system's huge racial achievement gap" (para.1). His commentary was in response to the latest Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test results, which revealed that only 25% of third through eighth graders in the District of Columbia met or exceeded the new benchmarks set for English. At 24%, the number was even lower for math. "Were it not for white [sic] test-takers in this majority-minority school system, the results would have been even worse" (King, 2016, para.5). King (2016) notes that Black students, who comprise 67% of the school population, had achieved a proficiency rate of only 17% in both math and English. More significantly, these students lagged behind Hispanics, who at 21%

While there has been a wealth of research on verbs of quotation in recent decades (Butters 1980, Blyth et al. 1990, Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999, Buchstaller 2001, Singler 2001, Waksler 2001, Rickford et al. 2007, Vandelanotte 2012), including studies focusing on African American English (AAE) (Cukor-Avila 2002, 2012), the discussion has focused on a handful of variables, most notably be like, go and say. In this study, we draw on the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (PNC), on popular media (novels, television, music), and on social media to describe an AAE-specific verb of quotation, talkin’ ’bout/talmbout. Unlike other verbs of quotation, it is used to introduce both direct and reported speech, as well as unuttered thoughts and non-lexical sounds, and it co-occurs with a range of complementizers that are not available in other varieties of English. While it has not been discussed in the literature beyond mention as ‘other’ in typology of verbs of quotation, it has been present in A...

For the Classroom 1. Shobe's piece is written in the style of a Bad Ideas about Writing entry. Look up the open access collection Bad Ideas about Writing: https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/24.2/reviews/bohney-et-al/tableofcontents.html. The editors of Bad Ideas about Writing describe it as "an effort to name bad ideas [about writing] and suggest better ones" (Ball and Loewe 2). As you scan the table of contents for this collection, you'll notice that the titles for each entry succinctly capture the bad idea that each writer goes on to challenge in their entry (as Shobe's title does). Look up and read Jennifer Cunningham's piece, "African American Language is not Good English," which Shobe is responding to here. What issues does Shobe take with Cunningham's argument, and why? 2. Browse the table of contents for Bad Ideas about Writing. Pick two other entries to read. Perhaps the titles represent ideas about writing that you have been taught before. After reading these entries, have your ideas about writing changed? Why or why not? brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

We examine how culturally sustaining pedagogy that fosters linguistic and cultural pluralism might be taken up in writing instruction. Using data collected through semistructured interviews with nine urban elementary and middle school writing teachers, we document teachers’ conceptualizations and enactments of culturally sustaining writing pedagogy. Findings indicate that these teachers tended to make space for explicit discussions of language, culture, and power in the writing curriculum and to problematize expressions of dominant culture, such as an emphasis on official languages. We also explore the tensions that these teachers experienced in their pedagogy while engaging in culturally sustaining methods; for example, we documented teachers’ sense that writing needed to be more formal than speech and instances where their critical practices put them at odds with stakeholders in their schools. This work represents an emerging understanding of how culturally sustaining literacy ped...

This study looks at hybridity as an everyday interactional phenomenon using conversations on lived experience, amongst Black British people of Caribbean heritage between the ages of 16-40 who are from London, the Midlands and West Yorkshire. Black British identifications in talk-in-interaction are conceptualised as texts of social practice so as to look at Bhabha's notion of 'translated hybrid subjects' who function within a 'third space of hybridity' where there is a denial 'of a prior given original or originary culture'. The conversations are analysed using an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis- a framework that I develop which is influenced by Foucauldian approaches to discourses, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis. I generate a model for looking at the hybridity of the everyday in talk-in-interaction, which is based on its constitutive components: statement, translation as reflexivity, new addressivity. Using analyses of ...

Jamie A. Thomas "It's hard for me to understand what you mean, de way you tell it. And then again Ah'm hard of understandin' at times." ("Phoeby" in Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, 1937) "Miss Hurston can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged the Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley (sic). Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that's as far as it goes." (Richard Wright, 1937) "High poetry." (Mary Helen Washington, foreword to 1990 edition of Their Eyes Were Watching God) "So, how many of you liked Their Eyes Were Watching God?" Having come to the stage only minutes before, poet Alysia Harris would soon be performing her poem "Southern". But first, she began with a brief anecdote. As it turned out, the question had come about a decade earlier, from her high school English teacher, who had assigned Hamlet and Their Eyes Were Watching God for summer reading.

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes anti-black linguistic racism and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following this, the author provides an ethnographic snapshot that shows how Black students in a ninth grade English Language Arts (ELA) class perceptions of Black Language reflected internalized anti-black linguistic racism. The author offers Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy as an approach that English Language Arts teachers can implement in an effort to dismantle anti-black linguistic racism and white cultural and linguistic hegemony in their classrooms using Angie Thomas' (2017) novel The Hate U Give. The author concludes with thoughts about how an Anti-Racist Black Language pedagogy can help ELA students develop useful critical capacities.