Quote:
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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 it is that black 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 pronunciation norms.
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I know I'm totally horning in on a discussion that doesn't involve me, but I suppose I have a question about this claim (without having read the article either, so I'm going to do that in a bit).
I wouldn't necessarily take issue with whether or not Ebonics qualifies as a structured variety of speech. I realize there are rules for its usage, and that terminology and grammatical structure are not random and arbitrary within it. However, I question why there is a difficulty in learning standard English at all for someone whose oft-used dialect is Ebonics.
As !@#$%! points out (and I'm loosely translating), language has a historical and cultural base that, considering the numerous mitigating factors, can differ drastically from region to region and even subculture to subculture. However, Ebonics is a 'constructed' dialect, a language that's almost built from the ground up without precedent by its users, and evolving much more quickly and dynamically than any other language. It is constantly modified to correlate with the ever-changing sociological trends in society, adopting new words and discarding old ones as quickly and easily as high school slang.
Ebonics is one of the most highly adaptable, and easily adapted to, 'dialects' in existence! There is simply no logical reason why people who default to Ebonics should have any more difficulty than anyone else learning standardized English. If anything, they should be more capable.