[LittleOldLady]

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OK...you may be able to enlighten me on this issue. Here's my objection to what you just said. Spanish-speaking persons can benefit from learning in an environment that is friendly to the language they already speak. But, Spanish is in no way derivative of English. It is a foreign language in the most literal sense of the word. AAVE, however, is derivative of SAE. So, doesn't it stand to reason that it is easier to transform AAVE to SAE than to transform Spanish into SAE? To me it's as simple as saying, "Don't say 'ain't,' say 'am not.'" If I am wrong, please elaborate.

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What we are talking about is called code-switching, going from one variety of a language to another variety of that language as circumstances dictate. Many of us have the ability to code-switch from a regional or social dialect of English to (so-called) Standard American English (which is of course simply another dialect, but one with prestige) at will. When schools are faced with students who cannot code-switch from, say, AAVE to SAE, they need to come up with a way to help students develop that ability. Some who have researched and written on this subject have advocated that the contrastive methods used to teach English as a second language be adapted to teach SAE as a second dialect (or variety). I suppose some people who have heard of this idea may have mistakenly interpreted it to mean that AAVE is a foreign language, rather than simply a variant of English, one of many.

Mutual intelligibility is the touchstone used to determine whether whether two 'varieties' are different languages or merely different dialects. I, who am not a speaker of AAVE, can nonetheless understand it perfectly well; thus it is a dialect. To say otherwise is simply wrong. Back in the days of the Oakland School District flap over Ebonics, it was even asserted that there was a genetic predisposition for African-Americans to speak Ebonics, a language foreign to English. This was a ludicrous assertion, first, because any human being can learn any language if taught in infancy/childhood (language learning becomes much more difficult after puberty--particularly for monolinguals), and, second, because 'race' is a cultural construct, not a biological/genetic one.

Another example of determing whether a language variety is a separate ('foreign') language or simply a dialect is Scots. A number of Scottish linguists assert that Scots is a separate language, having developed in the kingdom of Scotland from Northumbrian. Since I can understand Scots (whether we are talking about Henryson or Bobby Burns or Trainspotting) and I am not a Scot, I say Scots is a dialect of English.

It has been said that a language is a dialect with an army, a navy, and a flag (see Spanish and Portuguese and Mandarin and Cantonese). Obviously AAVE has none of those things [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

LOL