Week 11, Post 1: AAVE Students 1-on-1

Imagine that you're going to work with students who wrote the AAVE draft below. What sort of grammatical/rhetorical issues do you see with the draft?  What How might you work with the student one-on-one on these issues.  How would this work be different from one-on-on work with an ESL student? How would you respect students' right to their own linguistic identity while working with the students?

Grammatical/Rhetorical Issues
#1 Lacks apostrophe to indicate possession.  Drops the s for third-person simple present verbs.  Uses personal pronoun they; needs possessive adjective their.  The -ed suffix is dropped from the past tense of stress out.

#2 Uses simple past went; should use past participle with present perfect: gone.  Uses double negative don't never; needs don't ever.  Otherwise, very few issues.

#3 Lacks s for some plurals (not all).  Lacks apostrophe for possession.  Instead of there are, the student uses It's.  Sometimes drops s for sim. pres. third-person.  Last line is wordy.

#4 This was the most confusing by far.  Drops apost. for possession.  Drops s for plural.  Drops -ed suffix for past part. (a chance to be acknowledge; had been force upon them).  These are easily negotiated by the reader.  But certain sentences are simply convoluted, as if the student, trying to express complex thoughts, hasn't quite got them under control yet.  For example: Then they took action to translating the literature of AAVE.   Forgetting the infinitive issue, I'm confused: is this writer saying that 18th Century Black English literature was translated to AAVE?  Vice versa?  Another example: To be a member of the African American Vernacular English culture our descended from Africa had their native speaking.  It seems the student incorrectly melded two different sentences, one about being a member of the culture, the other about the history of AAVE.  The meaning, though, evades me.  A last example:

Our language is different in many ways, all because of the past history which we have accepted.  I'm confused why this writer adds "which we have accepted."  Is it a problem of word choice?  Does he mean "endured"?  Otherwise, why would he suggest Blacks have essentially "agreed to" mistreatment?

How I'd Work With These Students

Depsite the ample studies we've done on SRTOL, plus my own ongoing research (Engl. 700) on the same subject, I have to say I'm torn on this subject.  On one hand, I feel for these students as they struggle with code switching from AAVE to SE.  I feel for them as I feel rotten for all Blacks, as I feel rotten about being a privileged Whiteboy with loads of encouragement to excel and plenty of exposure to SE, and with few experiences with poverty -- certainly nothing compared with the feeling of doom of many Blacks to the "caste" system of modern America.  

That said, from what I've studied about AAVE, I accept it as a distinct dialect, but not one so drastically different from SE as to preclude the jump from using no apostrophe to actually using one, for example.  Considering merely the obscene amount of TV consumption of American children, Black kids included, it's next to impossible to argue that these kids are unfamiliar with mainstream English: even 99% of the programs on BET use mainstream English, not Ebonics.  If the dialect itself is not the problem, the key issues would appear to lie in ambivalent attitudes of Blacks regarding "acting White" and the sheer lack of funds and good teachers in inner city schools.

All of this is to say that I, too, am ambivalent about Black students' struggles.  On one hand, I'm sad for their background issues.  On the other hand, I have little compassion for people who are self-sabotaging their futures.

To answer the prompt (finally), I would speak to these students with all the compassion I have, careful not to denigrate them, their culture or AAVE; careful to acknowledge them as individuals, careful to laud their work and their ideas, careful, especially, to speak about error correction in terms of "Here's how this would be better in formal writing." and careful NOT to say things like: "You're MISSING x" or "You lack y and z..."

Having taught ESL students for years, I would not feel the need to "walk on eggshells," so to speak, as most ESL students, while self-conscious about their lack of education at times (low-income Latinos), if they've risen to the level of essay writing and error analysis, most likely they have the concomitant confidence to handle positive criticism, at least to a greater degree than the AAVE students we've studied about.