DW 4A

Throughout the semester, my papers have discussed common misconceptions among the public about the legitimacies of nonstandard dialects, particularly those of AAVE. For my last paper/project, I intend to do the same. To do this, I have chosen four different genres that will each portray ways in which the majority of the miseducated public views AAVE. By showing how blatantly naïve the public is about AAVE through the use of four different medium, I am hoping to highlight the need for change and indirectly show viewers how to change their attitudes about AAVE.
The first genre is an editorial magazine feature similar to those found in popular magazines such as Glamour or Teen Vogue. The page layout will consist of two columns, and have pictures, a title, and a bolded attention grabbing quote. The article will be broken down into several subheadings, such as: “Unfair Education”, in which statistics explain dated teaching practices that often provide an unfair education for AAVE speaking students; “Past Failures”, in which prior attempts to undo these oppressions have failed; and “Positive Future”, which offers strategies for readers to help ease the controversy of integrating AAVE into the classroom.
The second of my multigenre projects is to construct an unfairly graded paper submitted by an AAVE speaking student. It will be a handwritten essay with common latent AAVE rhetorical features and also more noticeable grammatical features that are often graded as “incorrect” or “sloppy” by many teachers. I’ll include unconstructive and degrading comments marked by the teacher (in red pen of course) on one copy. Another copy will be provided with constructive and encouraging comments that the teacher should write in order to successfully fulfill the student’s learning quota.
The third genre (and the one I am most excited to construct) is a mock facebook template showing an inbox conversation between two friends discussing AAVE. One friend will be complaining how annoying it is when they hear AAVE spoken in public. The other friend will try to defend AAVE by explaining things she has read/learned about in her Ebonics class and therefore changing her friend’s mind about the legitimacies of AAVE.
The fourth and final genre I have chosen to help educate the public about the equality of AAVE to any other dialect is to create a collage showing African Americans society deems as sophisticated and who also practice AAVE. By doing this, I am hoping to clear the foolish notion among many people that just because a person speaks AAVE that he or she is uneducated or of low status.

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated List of Works Cited
Ball, Arnetha E. "Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students." English

Journal (1996): 27-36. Jstor. National Council of Teachers of English. 20 Mar. 2009 .

Through his empirical case study consisting of a series of assignments, Ball provides several oral and written samples from African American students and analyzes each one by highlighting key features of African American Vernacular English used in the samples. He goes on to explain why each feature is important and how it either helped the student elaborate their point in ways they would be unable to do in Standard English or how their AAVE features hurt the student by making them seem unintelligent. By comparing oral and written work, Ball discovers that the more successful students in his study were able to comfortably move between two communities of discourse.

Nembhard, Judith P. "A Perspective on Teaching Black Dialect Speaking Students to

Write Standard English." The Journal of Negro Education 52 (1983): 75-82.

This article argues that teachers need to stop taking sympathy on black students and constructively point out their errors in Standard English. To do this, Nembhard suggests teachers employ either a principle of eradication, in which Black Dialect is supplanted by Standard English or a system of bidialectism, in which students retain their home languages but expand their linguistic range by learning Standard English. Teachers also need to focus on teaching students how to write instead of focusing on the grammaticism of writing. By gaining a greater understanding of the prewriting, writing, rewriting process of writing as well as how to be more clear, convincing, and original in their writing, students will eventually pick up on grammar of Standard English and will be stronger overall.

Ramsey, P. A. "Teaching the Teachers to Teach Black-Dialect Writers." College

English 41 (1979): 197-201. Jstor. National Council of Teachers of English. 20 Mar. 2009 .

Ramsey states that most African American students want to learn Standard English because they value it more than their own dialects. Unfortunately there is no “fool proof methods for teaching black dialect writers” (198). Like Nembhard, Ramsey stresses the importance of teaching any student the basics of how to write, not just black dialect speakers the grammar of how to write. Compared to the inability to successfully formulate a thesis and organize a paper around that thesis, minor grammatical irregularities are minor. To make writing aracial, Ramsey suggests that the attitudes of white students needs to change before the writing styles of black students can improve.

Whitney, Jessica. "Five Easy Pieces: Steps toward Integrating AAVE into the

Classroom." English Journal 94 (2005): 64-69. Jstor. National Council of Teachers of English. 25 Mar. 2009 .

Here, Whitney discusses the hesitance and intimidation she faced as a white, non-AAVE speaking teacher. However Whitney is not the only one struggling to find ways to successfully incorporate AAVE into the classrooms. To ease this frustration, Whitney developed five steps to help teachers teach students as effectively and painlessly as possible. The first step is for educators to educate themselves to recognize not only common features of AAVE, but also to recognize that AAVE is just a different dialect. Understanding a student’s home language helps ensure a broader academic success upon the student. The second step is to incorporate multidialectism into the classroom so that students can explore and appreciate different forms of dialect. Creating a learning environment rich in oral language by having students practice a variety of discussions, brainstorming, storytelling, and debates is the third way to bring AAVE into the classrooms. The fourth and possibly most important step is to have students practice code-switching as a way to internalize appropriate times to display certain dialects. Similarly and lastly, Whitney describes the importance of letting students write like real writers by exploring appropriate ways to write to appropriate audiences.

DW3b

As a non-AAVE speaker and teacher, Jessica Whitney discusses this in her article “Five Easy Pieces: Steps toward Integrating AAVE into the Classroom”:

Recognition of AAVE in the classroom is not about eradicating education about the English language. It is not about raising a new generation of students incapable of speaking anything other than AAVE. Advocates in the AAVE debate are calling for students to no longer be unfairly penalized for the use of their home language in the classroom. They are also pleading for teachers to build on home language to teach about Standard English…rather than ignoring it… (64).

The controversy over ways to “create a classroom environment that genuinely respects the diverse home languages of…students” (64) has been going on for decades. Neither the Student’s Right to Their Own Language document in the 1970’s nor the historic Oakland Ebonics case in 1996 has done a good job providing concrete methods to help teachers better educate their students to become more successful rhetoricians, therefore making many people “as confused about AAVE today as we were eight years ago” (64). This confusion has lead to uncertainty as to how to approach AAVE by educators, often resulting in unsuccessful integration techniques, inaccurate reflections of the legitimacies of AAVE, or naivety to the point of complete avoidance of AAVE. The fact that only “56 percent of African American students graduate from high school…” (66) is evidence of the ignorance of teachers. When teachers do try to address AAVE by the use of “hypercorrection, avoidance, or punishment of students' use of their home language in the classroom” (65), it only further frustrates students and leaves them no better off. To help combat this, Whitney offers five steps for educators to take to alleviate the hesitance associated with AAVE: that teachers educate themselves by correcting common misconceptions society seems to have about AAVE; that teachers incorporate multiculturalism into the classroom by providing “students with a more accurate view of Western culture and allows experiences and voices that have been ignored to be heard and appreciated’; that teachers create a learning environment rich in oral language by engaging students in “small-group discussions, brainstorming, word games, choral reading and creative dramatics, debates, storytelling…” (67) to enhance their reading and writing abilities; that teachers encourage and demonstrate code-switching in the classroom to “work with students to build on their repertoire of linguistic skills” (67); and that teachers allow students to write like real writers by having them cater to difference audiences in appropriate ways (68). Once these steps are correctly instituted, teachers can lay a solid foundation for the revolution towards helping students feel more comfortable in classrooms and flourish in their further education (68).

DW3A

Ramsey: “Teaching the Teachers”
In “Teaching the Teachers”, Ramsey points out that one dialect is not superior to another, that dialects are merely different. However, “pragmatically, some dialects are better than others: some open doors and create positive impressions, while others lose jobs by creating negative impressions”. Unfortunately, this is the sole reason many students value “Standard English more than their own dialect” and want to “learn to write effectively in Standard English”. Accomplishing this goal and teaching black and Spanish speaking students to more proficiently write in Standard English as “effectively, sensitively, and painlessly as possible” was proven to be a difficult task because many teachers are too worried about messing with racial boundaries to do it successfully. When teachers to try to correct dialectal related errors, they often go about it in the wrong way, by correcting grammatical errors but not elaborating on how to more successfully fulfill the writing process and therefore write a paper of literary merit.

“Of course there are special nuisances when teaching dialect writers: how to get that "s" on the third person present tense singular and the "ed" on the past tense. But these grammatical irregularities, though they grate on the ears and eyes of almost every English teacher, are minor when compared to the problems of teaching that essays”

Sometimes, the papers submitted containing AAVE features are poorly written, but the main culprit of this is that the student just does not know how to properly write a paper (200). To correct this, teachers should focus on teaching students in general how to write, not students of a certain race how to write. “The basics of writing-how to organize, how to develop a paragraph, how to write with specificity rather than in generalities-are aracial.”
Ramsey later argues that teaching Standard English to black students who want to learn it will not destroy black culture. If a black student wants to learn Standard English, they should be taught it, not told to just use their own language styles because it is easier for the teacher. If the student is discouraged to learn Standard English by being encouraged to just use their own dialect style, then the teacher is rid the trouble of having to make a lesson that effectively teaches black students Standard English.

IAR 2: Regina E Spellers

Regina E. Spellers, “The Kink Factor: A Womanist Discourse Analysis of African American Mother/Daughter Perspectives on Negotiating Black Hair/Body Politics”

What is invention? (What activities did the writer have to engage in to create the text?)
• Find 10 heterosexual African American participants that range in age from 8-59who are from a variety of socioeconomic statuses, from different educational backgrounds, come from different kinds of households (single parent to “traditional” nuclear structures), and all share the mutuality of having to negotiate hair/body politics
• Conduct a preliminary study of in-depth one hour interview
• Find a way to have an efficient and effective interview in which the interviewees guide most of the conversation
• Make a list of “open-ended” guide questions for the interview
• Audiotape, transcribe, and analyze results from interviews
• Relate work to that done by other scholars (Banks, Smitherman, Collins ect…)
What is being invented? (What ideas, practices, arguments, etc. are created by the text?)
• Hair plays a significant role in the lives of many African American women
• Kinky means something completely different in Black culture than it does in White culture
• African American Women from all classes, ages, family structures, and geographic locations have experienced the “Kink Factor”
• Kink Factor= tensions associated with wanting to be self-defined, yet also wanting to avoid the consequences associated with self definition
• Self definition requires courage
• The idea that African American boys/men may experience similar traumas
What is being arranged? (What is being put in relation to what?)
• Kinky hair is a black thing + Kinky hair is nappy by nature + Kinky hair is a state of mine/mind = Kink Factor
• Experiences/feelings/ideas of women in the study are relative universal among all African American women
What is arrangement? (How are things being put in relation to one another?)
• General examples of scholarly work to specific past experiences of the participants in the study
• Analysis of stories from participants
• Break down each of the three parts of the Kink Factor
What is being revised? (What is the writer trying to change (e.g. what ideas, practices, etc.))?
• The idea that black hair/body decisions and politics do not affect many women
• Eliminate the stereotype (assume all users are white)
What is revision? (What strategies are engaged specifically to help the writer achieve the revisions?)
• Quote other linguist/ scholars
• Block quite significant comments during the interview
• Use examples from women of different age, class, family structure, geographic location, educational achievement, ect…
• Develop a metaphor (the “Kink Factor”) to emphasize “culturally symbolic meaning to tensions experienced by African American women when constructing their aesthetic images”
• Provide ideas for future research

DW2b

“In one of the few groundbreaking works on women’s representations on Web pages, Hawisher and Sullivan (1999) found that many women put aside traditional rhetorical modes of politeness, apologetic modesty, and deference for a sassy, in-your-face, self-assertive attitude…” (Knadler 236).
I found this statement in E-Racing difference in E-Space: Black female subjectivity and the Web-based portfolio by Steven Knadler to be very true. Many women posting online are comfortable enough to show sass and self-assertive attitude while appropriating African American Vernacular English. Politeness, modesty, or deference is often disregarded online because polite, modest, and deferent comments don’t generate a response by other bloggers. On a blog on bet.com about the New York Post cartoon incident, Sharonda wrote : “I DONT WANT NO APOLOGY I WANT MONEY AINT NOTHIN GONNA BE RITE TILL OBAMA GETS US PAID WE THE ONES THAT BILT THIS COUNTRY AN WE RUNNIN IT NOW. OBAMA ALL DAY”. Here, Sharonda gets other bloggers fired up as she preaches her opinion of the potential New York Post boycott. Her bold post draws the attention of other bloggers and causes feedback to her post. This feedback is either in agreement or disagreement to her general opinion, but contain no remark or judgment to her sass or AAVE rhetoric. In this post, AAVE is strong with multiple negations, tonal semantics, and zero copula. The use of all capital letters also seems to be common among women wishing to show strong feeling on a subject. On a blog about the Rihanna/Chris Brown dispute, many posts from females spoke out in defense of Rihanna, claiming that she is clearly the victim. Lovergirl feels is appropriate to objects and wants her feelings to be known in her post: “…YOU DO HAVE TO LOOK AT THE WOMEN SIDE. IM A WOMEN MYSELF AND I KNOW THAT I WOULD NOT LET A MAN BEAT ME…SHE NEED TO SHOW SOME PHOTOS OR SOMETHIN…” Like Sharonda, Lovergirl was so bold with her blog postings partly because she was comfortable online to do so. As in the Knadler reading, LaChia was able to find “the ideal community [online] where she no longer has to explain or apologize for her ‘Blackness’ and where others understand her as she understands herself.” (236). Similarly, Sharonda and Lovergirl found a community on controversial bet.com blogs where they won’t be judged. Other bloggers may agree or disagree with what they have said but their morality, character, or intelligence isn’t questioned based on the way they express attitude, write, and type. Women can feel free to voice their opinions in a way that they wish because blogs (especially those where AAVE is actively appropriated) are relatively free of judgment.

AAVE online, DW2a

When first posed with this assignment, my first thought was to go to www.bet.com. I expected a website aiming primarily at a young, hip, black audience would embrace the appropriation of African American Vernacular English and use it frequently. However, the only evidence of AAVE I could find on the main page of bet.com was in headline links. One link read “Mayor Kilpatrick is ballin’ again!” Seeing AAVE in the headline, I was attracted to that link because I anticipated many examples of AAVE in the full article. When I clicked on the link, I found that the full story of Ex-Mayor Kilpatrick was written in Standard English. With the exception of one commenter who urges his “young brothas to get an education”, all of the comments on this article were written in Standard English. I felt like I had to search bet.com for a while until I found good examples of AAVE. The best examples of language appropriation are by bloggers not directly affiliated with BET. While some posts were written in Standard English (and one was written in Spanish), majority of the posts had traces of AAVE. One post about Trick Daddy read, “Dis ya boy Fat Tony…niggas out the hood is ready for change”. This sentence follows the rules of AAVE in three places while in Standard English, “Dis”, the omission of the word “of” between “out” and “the” and the subject/verb agreement problem between “niggas” and “is” is incorrect.
Most of the people attracted to BET are familiar with AAVE but not all of them take advantage of the opportunity to be able to practice AAVE or support black people in BET blogs. Although BET editors doe not use AAVE in any of their main news articles, AAVE is definitely appropriated by BET’s many blogs. BET offers blogs on everything from Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan and the latest genetic oddities to Rihanna’s classy ensemble and 50 Cent’s latest beef with DJ Khaled. A post about Trick Daddy by Lisa Williams read “All I can &will say iz obama made history &trick daddy spoke on it……y yall hating on trick black people stay on the subject &stop being ignorant….ya girl roc city” and assumes that all users on BET are black or that all black users support Trick Daddy. The Don argued "Of all the intelligent black actors, athletes and entertainers who have a perspective on what is at stake now, you had to pick this nappy headed nitwit."