What Happened to Ebonics?
Turmoil in 1980s Oakland Leads to Continued Definitive Conclusions about Language’s Impact on Education in the 2020s
by Matthew Bamberg
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| Photo by Kiana Bosman on Unsplash The Ebonics debate has often been misunderstood. It refers to the dialect of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This type of language is prevalent in the Black community and has also spread into popular culture through lyrics in rap music and similar genres. |
I be workin’
Yes, I be workin’ on this article. This can be defined as: I’ve been working on this article for a while, although not necessarily at this very moment. I begin here because using AAVE helps readers understand the importance of training teachers to use it in our classrooms. Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the point, AAVE is an important dialect and, therefore, should be treated with the utmost respect, especially when dealing with it as a teacher. |
Slavery was Brutal
The history of AAVE in the United States began in the 17th and 18th centuries when slaves were shackled and shipped from Africa, mostly against their will. According to Winford (2015, as cited in Johnson et al., 2023), “African and Caribbean-born slaves communicated through pidginized forms of English as a result of the variations in their native languages.” In the cotton fields, they sang, chanted, hollered, and whispered.
Colonialists brutalized slaves. However, this did not stop them from communicating about their oppression in unique ways. |
Defining Ebonics and AAVE
Ebonics, a term coined in 1973 by Dr. Robert Williams, combined the words ebony and phonics. In the 1970s and 80s, Ebonics and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) were frequently referred to as slang. It was and still is thought of as being infelicitous, the demise of English. Just plain ole bad language. (Here, “bad” in slang can mean “good” these days.) Similarities between AAVE and slang existed, and at one time, some were considered synonymous. It’s not. AAVE was designated a meaningful and rule-governed language system, and the fact that the first language of many African Americans was AAVE, researchers found that schools in the US had systematically failed to integrate a language policy related to African American English learners (AAELs)” (Tryphenia et al., 2018). |
A Seventh Awakening Oakland Style
As a teacher, my first formal introduction to AAVE was when I taught in Oakland, California, in the mid-1980s. Not long after my first year of teaching, I heard the voice of a wise Black woman. The Black woman educator, knowledgeable about linguistic issues, spoke at an in-service training on AAVE/Ebonics. Her speech moved ever so smoothly from an African language into standard American English. In between the two, she spoke the southern phonology, morphology, and syntax of Creole and of the Caribbean Creoles. Black English came next in her speech, followed by standard American English. Phenomenal. A linguistic awareness I never fathomed. The woman's speech confirmed the belief that Ebonics originated from a mix of African languages, creole, and pidgin, which came under the influence of English in the United States before the Civil War. The speech was incredible and changed my mind about using AAVE in the classroom as a springboard for teaching standard English. She also referred to standard English as the “cash language,” emphasizing that if students learn it, they’re likely to make more money in their lifetimes. Need I say more? |
What the Research Says
Yes, as a professor and researcher, a few points from studies illustrate the benefits of using AAVE/Ebonics in the classroom to launch a program for students to acquire and learn standard English from listening to speaking and reading to writing. Explicit teaching of dialect shifting is beneficial for children who speak dialects other than standard English, such as AAVE. Research by Johnson et al. (2017) indicated that Dialect Awareness, a program that teaches dialect shifting, is effective in promoting dialect shifting in students who speak AAVE. Students who received lessons through this program were more likely to use “school English” when expected and had benefits in proximal and distal measures of literacy, including narrative writing, morphosyntactic awareness, and reading comprehension. AAVE had put African American students at a disadvantage to do well academically in school, socially outside of their homes, and professionally in the workforce, along with other non-standard English dialect groups (Knapp, 2015). And first and foremost, any well-educated person knows that this dialect is contained in classic literature, from books like Harper Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird" to Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” |
Try it Yourself
So go ‘head, knock sum sense into dem head of urs. You be better off cepting everone and da language dey speak. Go ahead and translate that into standard language and you’ll have an idea about how ebonics is taught. |
The Big Bang of Segregation Spells Trouble
As a teacher in the Oakland Flats, an area just below the Oakland Hills to the east and Alameda to the west, all hell broke loose when the school I worked at adopted a tracking system. What that means is students were divided up by the first language they spoke. At the school during the 1980s, nearly a dozen languages were spoken, and some students from Asia came from communities where no written language existed (yet they were natural-born artists and could draw gorgeous Laothian landscapes that were hung around the school). The Asian and Spanish tracks offered students instruction in their first language for part of the school day. Black students were often clueless as to what was being said when instruction in classes reverted to Spanish or Mandarin, not to mention standard American English. Black parents became infuriated with the system and wanted a track of their own. At school board meetings, Black parents protested, struggling with school officials to have them create a track of their own where their culture and language were wrapped up in a culturally responsive package, like that which had been done with the Asians and Hispanics. By the late 1980s, the Ebonics crisis was born with a bang. Long before 1996, when the Oakland School Board passed a resolution that Ebonics was a language that needed to be addressed in the classroom as culturally responsive teaching, the education crisis heated up. You see, in 1989, Hanni Taylor studied the effect of contrastive analysis, or illustrating the comparison between AAVE and standard English, as the Oakland schools wanted to do a few years later. Taylor’s experiment found that AAVE students wrote with significantly less AAVE than students who learned to write without translations (Rameriz, 2005). Before I knew it, I was using markers and chart paper divided into two columns, one with a phrase/sentence in AAVE and another with the standard English translation. |
Toothie Ruthie
Meet Toothie Ruthie, a young Black character who speaks AAVE/Ebonics. “Toothy Ruthie” was a book to help all kids (including African Americans) learn to pronounce the “th” sound. After an extended debate over how to teach Ebonics, Toothy Ruthie, a textbook about a little Black girl who spoke AAVE, introduced the idea that standard academic English could be taught through a grammar-translation approach. The idea was to introduce standard English by using a nonstandard variety of English (Ebonics), a time when the term Ebonics became widely used to refer to nonstandard AAVE. Toothie Ruthie demonstrated how students can take their home language, AAVE/Ebonics, and translate it to standard English. For example, Toothie Ruthie is based upon the AAVE pronunciation of /th/. At the end of a word, this is often pronounced /f/ in AAVE. ‘Ruth’ is pronounced Ruf; ‘south’ is pronounced souf. When the preceding sound is a nasal (e.g. n or m) the th is often pronounced as /t/ as in tent for ‘tenth’; mont for ‘month’. What would happen today if teachers adopted a program that reintroduced AAVE or Ebonics to illustrate to all students how nonstandard English is translated into standard English? To be sure, again, there is a loud outcry by many politicians and celebrities who know little about the teaching method. |
Teacher Training in AAVE
Perhaps a better way that would draw less controversy is to train teachers to recognize AAVE interference in reading and writing, as they do now with Spanish interference in the subjects.
Teachers' knowledge of students’ home language and dialect is vital and benefits students when discovering the meanings of words. Washington et al. (2023) provide an example of how teacher awareness of AAVE can benefit students’ decoding and comprehension skills. Well…why not? It’s very similar to what they do with Spanish. Consider that it’s common for a teacher to illustrate the differences between English and Spanish. Consider Casa Blanca (meaning "house white") and White House. In Spanish, the noun comes before the adjective; in English, it does not. Students simply need to be told this as a way to retain it, not to say the noun first and the adjective last in English. Teachers can scaffold a similar tip using AAVE during a vocabulary lesson. When a student whose home language is AAVE encounters the word 'gold' while reading, they are likely to pronounce it /gol/. An AAVE-knowledgeable teacher would recognize that the home dialect causes the student to drop the final consonant of a word, affecting the pronunciation, which, in turn, can affect word meaning. At this point, the teacher realizes they need to teach a lesson that emphasizes the final consonant of affected words. He/she wouldn’t even have to mention that she’s applying AAVE to instruction. When teachers take this action, they’ll likely find that they can model word pronunciation to students, helping them identify the differences between their language and standard English on their own. |
Rule Governed?
AAVE/Ebonics is rule-governed, which makes it different from slang and other nonstandard English. For example, the verb to be stays in the infinitive when it is conjugated with pronouns: I be, you be, he be, and so on. Other words that are considered part of AAVE, such as ax (asked) had been used by white people in the United States some 200 years ago. Finally, the most common form of AAVE drops contractions, so instead of saying she’s going, interlocutors say she going. Positive and negative attitudes toward standard and nonstandard speech are extended to the speakers themselves. Speakers of nonstandard forms are often thought to be uneducated, but increasingly that is not the case, as more people speak both standard and nonstandard English, depending on the speech community in which they are interacting. Standard English is vital for academic and social success. It’s the lay of the land in academia. While dialects — standard and nonstandard — play a role in learning, the former should be modeled and used extensively in the classroom. |
Conclusions and Takeaways
In the past, using Ebonics in the classroom has often been ridiculed by diverse politicians and celebrities, including Maya Angelou and Bill Cosby. “I’m incensed,” Angelou told the Wichita Eagle. “The very idea that African-American language is a language separate and apart is very threatening because it can encourage young men and women not to learn standard English” (“Oakland School Board Approves Black English Program,” 1997). The essence of language is learning about how it’s used and determining its value. How families communicate is valuable to them. A close connection to this language and to standard English, when established, permits young people to appreciate that there are myriad ways to speak. Most languages and dialects deserve mention in the school curriculum, along with the awareness that they can disappear. Recognizing when and where language is appropriately used is essential for all students to learn. Finally, a discussion of the differences between two languages and/or dialects should not be disregarded, as the benefits of language awareness and diversity lead to better-educated students at all grade levels. |
Resources for Educators
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Cited Scholarly References
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