Week 8, Post 1: Students Rights vs. SE

 In your blog, first summarize each individual reading in a few bullet points:
What is the genre of the article: Is it a study? A theory piece? A pedagogy piece?  A historical piece?
Who’s the audience for the article?
What points is the author making?  What’s the authors purpose in making these points? 
How might you summarize the article in a few sentences?   

Jenny Cook-Gumperz
* This is a pedagogy and theory piece.

* The audience is college English instructors and researchers on basic composition, especially where students' L1 is not SE.

* The author's intent is to investigate why some students are especially challenged in the transference of spoken language (specifically AAVE) to written language (specifically, academic SE). Her intention is that the reader expand his view of how he defines literacy.

*Through a series of ethnographic interviews centered on a single participant, Wanda, Cooks-Gumperz highlights the complexities of melding one's own culture and dialect with the newly assumed dialect of academic SE.  She finds the potential for AAVE students, attempting to succeed in school, to ignore their own culture, their own voices and to write "what the teacher wants rather than struggle to make her own understandings part of what is expressed on the page" (344).

Signithia Fordham
* This is a pedagogy piece.  By this, I hope to distinguish it from the above pedagogy style in that it's far less scholarly.  In fact, because of the incendiary language, it seems the author has designed her paper to be a sort of political pamphlet.

* The audience is English educators and researchers, including those encompassing secondary and post-secondary; it also addresses a broader audience, including anthropologists, sociologists, linguists and teacher/theorists in ethnic studies.  Considering the political tone of the piece, I believe her audience could well be all Black Americans as well.

* After what appears to be a very limited survey at a single high school in Washington, D.C., the author draws conclusions about all Black Americans, namely that a) AAVE (Ebonics) is the dominant discourse for 80% of all Blacks, b) most Blacks adhere to this and avoid SE, c) this is because of the potential for backlash withing the Black community for those using SE, d) this even at the risk of academic and financial failure, f) even if they are unconscious of their motivations, Blacks withdraw, whenever possible, from connection with SE and White values, g) though she indicates Blacks are unaware of their impetus, nonetheless, she attempts to assign their withdrawal (above) to a mass political movement, which she terms "guerrilla warfare."

*Fordham admonishes educators and researchers that the sidelining of AAVE (Ebonics) by the dominant White culture belittles the power of this dialect as an instrument of "rhetorical resistance that nurtures the liberation of a people and reinforces their Black identity" (12).  She makes an appeal, apparently aimed at her Black audience, to "lease or rent" SE, but never to use it wholesale, especially in the presence of an exclusively Black gathering.

Huntington Lyman & Margo A. Figgins
*This is a pedagogy piece.  Like the above, it's conveyed with little or no evidence from research, but leans on opinions of colleagues who agree; like Fordham's piece (though a bit more restrained), it reads like a tract more than a scholarly paper.

* Like the above article, this one is aimed at scholars, educators all Black Americans and anyone already sympathetic to the students' rights movement.

* The authors a) deny that Standard English exists, b) deny that, if it does, it's wrong to call it better than other dialects, c) that identity is tied up in language, d) that minimizing or ignoring other dialects damages people (no real causal indication how this works), e) that, to inspire students to find their own voices, we need to acknowledge their dialects and its contributions to American culture.

* It's suggested that, in addition to teaching SE -- "how the rich and powerful talk" (41) -- teachers need to recognize dialects, too; the authors offer a handful of practical techniques to do so, largely borrowed from Heath's ethnographic approach from Ways With Words.

Barbara L Speicher & Jessica R. Bielanski

* This is a theory and pedagogy piece, far less inflammatory than the preceding two articles, though heavily political all the same.

* The audience, according to the extensive citations, is educators, theorists and highly educated political sympathizers.

* Speicher and Bielanski bring up four assumptions about SE. These assumptions are: a) Spoken SE and written SE are largely equivalent, b) spoken and written codes are amenable to standardization, c) SE is the language of the workplace and social mobility, d) SE is, or should be, the language of the classroom.  The authors refute the first two assumptions, protest the third as racist and decry the last one for its lack of efficacy.

* Their argument is that, to linguists, all dialects are equal, like Lyman an Figgins, it's impossible to call SE better than other dialects.  That most people, even those who don't use it, think SE is the superior dialect, is most frustrating.  The defeat of the Ebonics movement in Oakland, largely at the hands of powerful Blacks like Jesse Jackson, indicate a bias by the media in failing to publish dissenting opinions by important linguists.