John Rickford: African American Vernacular English and the Black/White Achievement Gap in American Schools March 22, 2012

The persistent Black/White achievement gap in Education has been a source of concern for many years. Although many other factors contribute to it, one that has not attracted sufficient attention is the African American Vernacular English [AAVE] spoken by many African American students, and more importantly, the negative responses of teachers and administrators to it. The predominant response of teachers and administrators to AAVE has been that of the ostrich–burying their heads in the sand, and hoping that by ignoring and failing to acknowledge it, the vernacular would quietly disappear, with mastery of mainstream or standard English miraculously replacing it. An alternative response has been that of the elephant–acknowledging the vernacular, but attempting to stamp it out with proscription and vigorous correction. Neither approach has been particularly effective, as shown by data from more than thirty years of research. This talk will discuss in turn the more promising responses that sociolinguists and applied linguists have proposed to the challenges facing vernacular speakers in schools. The primary solutions include: Dialect Awareness, Dialect Readers, Contrastive Analysis, and Linguistically Informed Pedagogy (including individualized and group instruction based on systematic studies of phonemic decoding errors). Although some of these responses invariably bring public misunderstanding and controversy in their wake (recall Oakland’s 1998 Ebonics resolutions), they show promise for narrowing the achievement gap, and are worth serious consideration and implementation.