Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

184 Language Diversity in the Classroom(Baugh, 2000; Scott, 1998). Nowadays, the internet provides the quickestand most up-to-date point of entry into this vast and largely unpleasantworld. I have just typed the words ‘Ebonics humor’ into a Google search,and near the top of the list of some 101,000 ‘hits’ appears the following:‘Ebonics language lesson. Ever wanted to talk like a nigger? Then listenup’. The power of the public media was illustrated in a recent study ofattitudes towards Ebonics (Barnes, 2003). Among a large sample ofuniversity students (roughly evenly divided between black and white,male and female), the author discovered that none was ‘overwhelminglyin agreement about Ebonics as a communicative and teaching tool’(Barnes, 2003: 252). More specifically, she wrote that:it is clear that knowledge about the Oakland School Board resolutiontended to negatively affect the viewpoints of many sample members.Awareness about the controversy reduced positive opinions aboutEbonics and reinforced more negative views... This finding confirmsthe influential role played by the media in shaping public opinion.(Barnes, 2003: 258)Barnes’s results are not quite as straightforward as she presents them, butthey demonstrate, at the least, considerable ambivalence about the statusand possible role of Ebonics. It also seems likely that this ambivalencewas, in many instances, pre-existing, but then became further reinforcedby the popular press in all its forms. And, since that medium wasgenerally negative either downright prejudiced or, in the case of someblack commentators and ‘celebrities’ of one sort or another, cautiousand/or dismayed it is also reasonable to suppose that ambivalencetended to be ‘shaped’ towards the unfavorable end of the attitudinalscale.Notes1. If nothing else, the Oakland affair has surely given the lie to Gertrude Stein’sfamous observation. ‘What was the use’, she said, ‘of my having come fromOakland... there is no there there’ (Stein, 1937: 289).2. As Max Weinreich once observed: ‘a language is a dialect that has an armyand a navy’. And, as Fillmore (2005: 162) points out, ‘deciding whether BBCnewsreaders and Lynchburg, VA radio evangelists speak different dialects ofthe same language or different languages in the same language family is onthe level of deciding whether Greenland is a small continent or a large island’.3. I am reminded here of another connection between Ebonics and Scots. In theformer, there exists a well-known game of verbal fencing called ‘the dozens’;this typically involves an exchange of insults that continues until one of theplayers can make no comeback. (Some have argued that the term derivesfrom the practice of selling deformed or mutilated slaves by the dozen to be