Good writers know how to use language, and sociolinguists know how language is used. Would teachers and students in writing classes benefit from adopting a linguist-like sensitivity to language patterns and attitudes? Is there a way to make technical linguistic knowledge about the details of dialect features immediately useful in a classroom setting? And would such knowledge improve the writing experiences and achievement of children who speak a nonstandard dialect such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE)? With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. John R. Rickford and doctoral candidate Julie Sweetland will investigate the effects of a language arts curriculum designed with the needs of child speakers of African American English in mind. Over the course of eight weeks, upper elementary students (grades 4-6) in ten urban classrooms will be led to identify, discuss, and write about linguistic variation as it is presented in several selections of award-winning children's literature, and will learn to connect those concepts to their own ways of speaking and writing. The heart of the curriculum is a set of seven writing prompts that are fun activities with a hidden purpose-each prompt designed to elicit a specific feature of nonstandard grammar in order to target that feature for instruction. For example, students will write their own versions of Sandra Cisneros' book Hairs/Pelitos. Children's responses will typically include a large number of possessives, a grammatical feature that is realized differently in standard English and African American Vernacular English (e.g. my mother's hair vs. my mother hair). Their writing will thus provide a natural context in which to learn about standard use of apostrophe-s during the revision process. Respect for children's ways of speaking will be evidenced throughout the lessons, as teachers will engage in summer training designed to help them learn to contrast the vernacular with the standard, rather than correct the vernacular to the standard, a subtle shift in instructional stance that previous studies have established as an effective teaching practice. The current research will compare the progress of children taught using the experimental 'contextualized contrastive analysis' method with that of students in control classrooms. Children's progress will be evaluated using multiple measures, including changes in frequencies of stigmatized AAVE features used in writing; rater assessments of overall writing quality; students' ability to articulate their knowledge about the respective features and social connotations of AAVE and Standard English; and students' affective responses to instruction.
The intervention design represents a synthesis and application of principles and findings from a wide range of relevant research: sociolinguistic descriptions of the structure of nonstandard language varieties; theoretical perspectives on language attitudes, language ideology, and the role of affect in language learning; and current pedagogical techniques such as the 'process' approach to teaching writing. In this broad, interdisciplinary approach, the intervention design moves beyond previous efforts by linguists to affect instructional practice. Educators are increasingly recognizing the need to address dialect diversity in instruction but face at least two obstacles in doing so: a dearth of practical, ready-to-use instructional materials, and a shortage of strong evidence that dialect-based methods are effective. This research addresses both concerns, and provides a model for instruction that is adaptable to a variety of teaching contexts. In addition, evidence of the effectiveness of dialect-based instruction would certainly be a valuable addition to a public discourse that often relies on misconceptions and stereotypes, as evidenced by the 1997 Oakland 'Ebonics' controversy. Most important, by taking on the difficult task of translating theory into practice, this project represents a step in the continuing struggle for educational and social equity. The knowledge base of sociolinguistics is the ideal site on which to build an educationally sound, socially just, and culturally sensitive pedagogy that increases marginalized groups' access to the language of educational and economic attainment. This research represents a step in realizing that potential.
