View Single Post
  #32  
Old 07-19-2005, 01:09 AM
B Dids B Dids is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Sea-town!!
Posts: 326
Default Re: California School Requiring Ebonics

It's funny.

When idiots are challenged on [censored] like that, they're always like "I didn't see race, you brought it up, why is this racial" like we're too dumb to see through their arguments.

Ebonics or AAVE (African American vernacular english) is about race, and any discussion that tries to ignore that is just foolish.

If you think that you could say what you said to any black person and try and convince them it wasn't about race, you're [censored] kidding yourself.

Again, the issue isn't teaching "broken english". It's about acknowleding that it exists so that you can work with it.

From wikipedia


[ QUOTE ]
Proponents of various bills across the country, notably a resolution from the Oakland, California school board on December 18, 1996, desired to have Ebonics officially declared a language or dialect. At its last meeting, the lame duck Oakland school board unanimously passed the resolution before stepping down from their positions to the newly elected board, who held different political views. The new board modified the resolution and then effectively dropped it. Had the measure remained in force, it would have affected funding and education related issues.

The Oakland resolution declared that Ebonics was not English, and was not an Indo-European language at all, asserting that the speech of African American children belonged to "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems". This and other assertions, particularly the statement that "African Language Systems are genetically based", contributed to a widespread reaction of incredulity and hostility. Supporters of the resolution later stated that "genetically" was not racism, but a piece of linguistic jargon.

Proponents of Ebonics instruction in public education believe that their proposals have been distorted by political debate and misunderstood by the general public. The belief underlying Ebonics education is that African American students would perform better in school and more easily learn standard American English, if textbooks and teachers acknowledged that AAVE was not a substandard version of standard American English, but a legitimate speech variety with its own grammatical rules and pronunciational norms.

For African American students whose primary language was Ebonics, the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that language, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills." Teachers were encouraged to recognize that the errors in standard American English that their students made were not the result of lack of intelligence or effort, but due instead to the fact that the language which they normally use is grammatically different from SAE. Rather than teaching standard English by proscribing non-standard usage, the idea was to teach standard English to Ebonics speaking students by showing them how to translate expressions from AAVE to standard American English.

[/ QUOTE ]
Reply With Quote