Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Black English as Ebonics 171nonstandard speakers may not regularly use the more standard variants:there are well-understood differences, in other words, between competenceand performance. Indeed, the basic distinction here had been madeclear at the very time that the ‘deficit’ position was at its strongest. As Ihave already pointed out, Trudgill (1975) observed that working-classchildren could use Bernstein’s ‘elaborated code’ under certain circumstances;and, earlier still, Robinson (1965) had found that the writtengrammar of working-class children was not markedly different from thatof middle-class pupils (see also Rushton & Young, 1975).It is abundantly clear that the context in which language is displayedand recorded is of the greatest significance something that Labov (1969)famously illustrated in his demonstrations that the vaunted ‘nonverbality’of the black child could be made to disappear if interviewand observation situations were made more appropriate. One implicationhere is that the use of BEV among black children varies (Edwards &Giles, 1984). Torrey (1983: 642) thus pointed out that:a teacher in a class of black children who hears BE forms frequentlyshould not conclude that all or even most of the class membersconform to the general description of BE... some individuals useonly one or two BE forms, and others completely standard forms.Furthermore, some who use many BE forms in spontaneous speechare perfectly able to handle SE in reading and other language tests.The black children so profoundly misunderstood by deficit theoristsare, of course, possessors of a vibrant linguistic heritage and a rich oralculture. It is quite remarkable that such obvious markers of anhistorically longstanding tradition were invisible or ignored by‘deficit’ proponents of remedial and compensatory education. WhereBereiter and Engelmann (1966) saw black children as lacking rudimentaryforms of dialogue, unable to recognize single words and viewinglanguage as something dispensable in social life (one wonders, still, howsuch blindness could have occurred), Labov (1969: 33) and his colleaguessaw these same children living in a community ‘bathed in verbalstimulation from morning to night’.A study by Edwards (1999b) illuminates both the continuing difficultiesin teacher’s perceptions of nonstandard speech and something of theoral fluency of black children. Among a rural primary-school populationin Nova Scotia, black children, white Acadian-French children and whitechildren of English-speaking background were studied. Each childprovided three speech samples: a set reading passage, a retold story(i.e. the experimenter tells the child a story, who then retells it a