We must teach our students how to match sub-jects and verbs, how to pronounce lawyer, becausethey are the ones without power and, for the mo-ment, they have to use the language of the power-ful to be heard
Quote: Emphasizes that standard English is basically the gatekeeper to being powerful with words and in arguments, and such causes students to learn it and therefore reinforce the gatekeeping.
p. The problem is that every time I pause,I stop the momentum of my thinking. I'm no long-er pursuing content, no longer engaged in tryingto persuade or entertain or clarify. Instead, I'mpulling Warriner's or Mrs. Delaney out of my headand trying to figure out how to say something.
Paraphrase: The author explains how this enforcement of grammar completely interrupts her thinking and prevents herself from engaging in ideas.
Match's Snell & Cushing
Thanks to Mrs. Delaney, I learned early on thatin our society language classifies me
Language used to judge self worth.
Quote: Implies language is directly related to social class and enforces hierarchies.
Everyoneburst into laughter at my pronunciation
Personal experience of language shame. Showed humiliation for not speaking standard English.
Quote: Great example of how the policing of grammar and pronunciation caused early shame and directly harmed her learning.
Students must be taught to hold their ownvoices sacred, to ignore the teachers who havemade them feel that what they've said is wro
...wrong or bad or stupid."
Supports identity and student voice which aligns with the values and arguments of Young.
When more attention is paid to the way some-thing is written or said than to what is said, stu-dents' words and thoughts become devalued.
The value of the presentation of the content is worth more than the content itself. When this is true, this directly harms communication and confidence within the students.
African American Vernacular English shouldrightly be legitimized as a conservative and not incorrect variety of English, one whose coregrammatical difference is its resistance to mainstream change.
Falls directly in line with Young challenging the idea that Standard English is the ONLY "correct form".
Quote: great connecting quote to link the two.
his is becausepeople associate it with linguistic features now denounced as grammatically incorrect, like “doublenegatives” or verbs that don’t agree with their subjects.
Shows WHY AAVE is judged: is directly connected to Standard English enforcement.
Quote: supports idea that there is harmful bias against non-standard English.
Few dialects of English have garnered so much negative attention. From the classroom to thecourtroom, the place of African American Vernacular English is hotly debated.
Main controversy: Made abundantly clear that AAVE is being directly targeted against when teaching Standard English to students.
Quote: can be used to clearly paint how AAVE is socially judged.
Our research shows that many of these stereotypical non-standard features are direct offshoots ofan older stage of English — that of the British who colonized the United States.
Evidence: AAVE actually stems from earlier British English, and there is NOT incorrect.
Quote: Perfect evidence to prove that AAVE has history and structure.
After students at a California high school were recently told to “translate” Black English phrases intostandard English, a community member at a school board hearing said: “The last thing they need —our children — is to be forced to attend class and to be mocked and bullied by students because ofa lesson plan used to highlight African American Vernacular English.”
Directly matches my research argument on how Standard English enforcement is harming students.
My team and I painstakingly analyzed these materials to detect statistically significant speechpatterns, and compared them across different dialects of English. We also assembled nearly 100grammars of English dating as far back as 1577. Such comparisons enable linguists to reconstructlinguistic ancestry; like evolutionary biologists, we seek shared retentions — features that havestayed the same despite changes elsewhere.This revealed that many of the features stereotypically associated with contemporary AfricanAmerican Vernacular English have a robust precedent in the history of the English language.
Evidence: Historical proof that the unique features in AAVE are rule-based and are not "broken"
As a sociolinguist specializing in the structure of the spoken language, my team at the University ofOttawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory has been grappling with this issue for years
Author credibility: can be used in research paper to enforce claims.