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January 22, 1997 Senator Arlen Specter Dear Sir: Please allow me to submit the following statement to be read into the
record of the Ebonics panel which will testify before your Subcommittee
on January 23, 1997. Exordium: I am a Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University,
where I have been employed as a faculty member since 1980. My professional
qualifications include an M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1979) in Linguistics from
the University of Pennsylvania. I have been involved in the study of Creole
languages and American English dialects, including African American Vernacular
English [AAVE] or "Ebonics," for over twenty-five years, and
I have taught several courses on these topics at Stanford. I am currently
co-authoring a book on African American English for Cambridge University
Press, and co-editing another on the same subject for Routledge. I am a
member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America,
and in that capacity, wrote the draft of the resolution on Ebonics which
was unanimously approved, with minor amendments, at the Society's business
meeting in Chicago on January 3, 1997. I wish to emphasize that I am an
independent scholar and researcher, committed to the highest standards
of scientific inquiry, and to the pursuit of scientific truth regardless
of the direction in which the evidence may lead. Role of vernacular language varieties in school success. Since
the Oakland School Board passed its original Ebonics resolution on December
18, 1996, I have stepped up my research on the role of vernacular varieties
in school success, considering evidence not only from the United States,
but also from other countries. One perhaps unsurprising finding of this research is that, almost universally,
students who speak non-standard or vernacular varieties of a language tend
to do relatively poorly in school, especially in reading, writing, and
related subjects which require competence in the standard variety. More surprising, however, and of particular relevance to the Oakland
School Board's proposal, is the evidence of several studies that taking
the vernaculars of students into account can facilitate their mastery of
the standard variety, as well as the curriculum-central skills of reading
and writing. I will cite six such studies, beginning with two European
cases and then turning to US cases involving AAVE: 1. Tore Osterberg, in his 1961 book, Bilingualism and the first school language--an educational problem illustrated by results from a Swedish dialect area (Väster-bottens Tryckeri, Umeå), describes an experiment in which an experimental group of dialect speakers (D) in the Piteå district of Sweden was taught to read first in their nonstandard dialect, and then transitioned to standard Swedish, while a parallel control group (R) was taught entirely in standard Swedish. After thirty-five weeks, he found that: the dialect method showed itself superior both when it was a question
of reading quickly and of rapidly assimilating matter which comes fairly
late in the course. The same applied to reading and reading-comprehension.
(p. 135) Instruction in dialect has thus resulted in a good general reading
technique in both dialect and standard language. This technique was better,
that is, quicker and surer, in comparison to R group's. D pupils also understood
better what they read. (p. 136) 2. Tove Bull, in a 1990 article entitled "Teaching school beginners to read and write in the vernacular" (in Tromsø linguistics in the eighties, Novus Press, Oslo), discusses a Norwegian research project conducted between 1980 and 1982 in which ten classes of beginning students, including nearly 200 students each about 7 years old, were taught to read and write either in their Norwegian vernaculars (Dialect group) or in the standard language (Control group). After assessing their progress on several measures, Bull concluded that: With respect to reading and reading abilities the results above show that the vernacular children read significantly faster and better than the control subjects. It seems as if particularly the less bright children were the ones to benefit from this kind of teaching. They made superior progress during the year compared with the poor readers in the control group. (p.78) Bull's proposed explanation for the superior progress of the vernacular
children (ibid.) is that "the principle of vernacularization of the
medium of initial teaching may have made illiterate children more able
to analyze their own speech, thus increasing and improving their metalinguistic
consciousness and phonological maturity, than the principle of traditional
teaching of reading and writing achieved." 3. Ann McCormick Piestrup, in a 1973 study of 208 African American first
grade children in Oakland, California (Black dialect interference and
accommodation of reading instruction in first grade, Monographs of
the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, #4, University of California
at Berkeley) showed first of all the typical relationship in which children
who used more AAVE features also had lower reading scores. What was more
interesting, however, was the relationship between the teacher's teaching
style--the way they responded to their pupil's language--and the children's
success in reading. Piestrup distinguished six different teaching styles,
but I will report only on the two which were correlated with the lowest
and the highest reading success. The least successful teachers were those
in the "Interrupting" group, who "asked children to repeat
words pronounced in dialect many times and interpreted dialect pronunciations
as reading errors" (p. iv). They had a stultifying effect on their
students' reading development, reflected not only in lower reading scores,
but also in the fact that some children "withdrew from participation
in reading, speaking softly and as seldom as possible; others engaged in
ritual insult and other forms of verbal play apart from the teacher"
(ibid.). By contrast, teachers in the "Black Artful" group "used
rhythmic play in instruction and encouraged children to participate by
listening to their responses. They attended to vocabulary differences of
Black children and seemed to prevent structural conflict by teaching children
to listen for standard English sound distinctions." Not only did children
taught by this approach participate enthusiastically in reading classes,
they also showed the highest reading scores. 4. Gary Simpkins and Charlesetta Simpkins, in a 1981 article entitled
"Cross-cultural approach to curriculum development" (in Black
English and the education of Black children and youth, ed. by Geneva
Smitherman, Center for Black Studies, Wayne State University) describe
an experiment involving the Bridge readers which they had created
in 1974 together with Grace Holt. The Bridge readers, which were
published by Houghton Mifflin in 1977, provided reading materials in three
varieties: AAVE, a transitional variety, and Standard English [SE]. The
Bridge materials were field tested over a four-month period with
417 students in 21 classes throughout the United States (Chicago, Illinois;
Macon County, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee, and Phoenix, Arizona). A control
group of 123 students in six classes was taught using "regularly scheduled
remedial reading" techniques. At the end of the four-month period,
students' scores on the Iowa test of Basic Skills indicated that students
taught by the Bridge method showed an average gain of "6.2 months
for four months of instruction, compared to only an average gain of
1.6 months for students in their regular scheduled classroom reading
activities" (p. 238, emphasis in original). It should be noted parenthetically
that the gain of only 1.6 months for four months of instruction which was
evidenced by the control group is consistent with the evidence we see all
over the US that African American inner city children tend to fall further
and further behind mainstream norms with each year that they remain in
school. 5. Hanni Taylor, in a 1989 book entitled Standard English, Black
English, and Bidialectalism (Peter Lang, New York), reported
that she tried to improve the Standard English writing of inner city Aurora
University students from Chicago using two different methods. With an experimental
group of twenty students, she raised students' metalinguistic awareness
of the differences between Ebonics and Standard English through contrastive
analysis, and tailored pattern practice drills. With a control group, also
including twenty students, she did not do this, but simply followed "traditional
English department techniques." After nearly three months of instruction,
the experimental group showed a 59% reduction in the use of Ebonics features
in their SE writing, while the control group, using traditional methods,
showed a slight INCREASE (8.5%) in the use of AAVE features. One of Taylor's
points was that students were often unaware of the precise points on which
AAVE and SE differed; raising their awareness of this difference through
contrastive analysis helped them to limit AAVE intrusions in their SE usage.
6. Doug Cummings, writing in The Atlantic Constitution on January
9, 1997 (p. B1), reported on a program that has been going on for the past
ten years in DeKalb county, Georgia in which fifth and sixth grade students
in eight schools are taught to switch from their "home speech"
to "school speech" at appropriate times and places. The program,
originally emphasized differences between AAVE and SE, but now stresses
bidialectalism more generally, taking into account the international backgrounds
of many students. The program, which is similar to Taylor's, and to the
methods followed in California's "Standard English Proficiency"
program (ongoing in fifteen school districts since 1981), has produced
excellent results. According to Cummins, "The program has won a 'center
of excellence' designation from the National Council for Teachers of English.
Last year, students who had taken the course had improved verbal test scores
at every school. At Cary-Reynolds, their scores rose 5.2 percentage points."
These experimental results lead me on the one hand to support the Oakland
School Board's decision to take the vernacular of their students into account
in teaching them to read and write and to master SE, and on the other to
urge that your Subcommittee continue Title 1 funding for programs like
SEP and the Atlanta program, and even consider increasing it. Although
some commentators have rightfully pointed to the importance of school facilities,
teacher training and other factors which retard the progress of children
in inner city and low income schools, the experimental evidence suggests
that when these significant factors are controlled for, approaches which
take the vernacular dialects of students into account are more likely to
succeed on a large scale than those which do not. Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to your important deliberations.
Should you require further information, please do not hesitate to contact
me, either by email (rickford@csli.stanford.edu) or at the address and
phone number above. Sincerely, John R. Rickford |