With respect to the African-American English controversy, many African-Americans and Whites see this dialect as an impediment to economic success in American society; some call it “broken English”; others claim that it is a language deficit to learning “standard” English; and others see it as slang or a form of African-American slave talk.
On the contrary, there is much substantive evidence that this dialect of English is a complete language. William Labov and other researchers have demonstrated that AAE is a separate but equivalent system as complex and rule governed as “Standard” English. AAE has some alternative rules and conventions for expressing the same syntactic relationships and semantic content. Speakers of AAE know when the rules vary. There is functional usage between style and content in this communication. Examples include playing the dozens (i.e. cappin’ or stingin’) and providing narratives of personal experience. This language has lexical, phonological, and syntactic and semantic patterns that are intertwined with structures in general English. This evidence constitutes that AAE is a complete language whose speakers are capable of logical thinking.
Since “Standard” English is the version of English that is the measure of success in the larger society, it is necessary to have full competence in it as well as AAE. This should be viewed as language expansion not assimilation. This perspective is paramount to successfully teaching students with this dialect. There are a number of strategies to teaching AAE users curriculum in standard English: role playing, response drills—where students not only translate standard English into AAE but also translate AAE into standard English, discussions on when certain dialects are most appropriate, students recording themselves telling a story and playing it back, and various contrastive methodologies which provide practical, natural contexts.
There are a few key points that need to be avoided when teaching these students: first and foremost is teaching that AAE is not inferior or a less intelligent language—variant dialects are different not deficient, teaching AAE users that they really don’t need to master standard English, when showing students correlating phrases in AAE and standard English—be accurate—this causes teachers to know the rules of standard English and AAE, teaching students that they should never use AAE, and teaching students to leave their language (part of their culture) at the door—key to students learning the difference between the two dialects is noticing the phonological distinctions.
