Decoding Grammar

Is there a better way to teach Standard English grammar to students who speak African American English (AAE) or other English varieties?

As I prepare for my second year of teaching in NYC public high schools, I have been pondering this question. Last year, I became quite frustrated with teaching grammar in my regular ELA class. I saw that my students desperately needed to learn Standard English for their upcoming Regents exam, yet I was frustrated with both their resistance and seeming inability to grasp the concepts. My students kept making the same mistakes over and over again, as if they didn’t even realize they were making them. I started noticing the same patterns over and over in many of my student’s writing – particularly problems with subject-verb agreement, plurals, and possession. I would dutifully point these errors out in their papers, and sometimes even mention them in class, to no avail. Many wanted to learn, but it just didn’t seem to come to them the way it did for me, and I couldn’t understand why my corrections didn’t seem to help. In fact, the more I corrected, the more they resisted.

Teaching grammar explicitly has gone out of fashion. No more diagramming sentences, rote memorization, or decontextualized exercises. However, simply correcting student papers, offering support during the writing process, and teaching the occasional mini-lesson (the way I’d been taught to teach in grad school ala Constance Weaver and her book, Teaching Grammar in Context) is clearly not enough or maybe just not the right framework from which to teach my population of students. After all, my students are not going to learn Standard English by osmosis, and it’s unfair to penalize them for what I’m not really teaching.

According to Code-switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms by Rebecca S. Wheeler and Rachel Swords, my students are not chronically making errors in grammar or speaking “lazy” English. Rather, they are following the patterns of their language variety or dialect. What if I taught them from a similar framework as I would teach Standard English to English Language Learners? What if I use their dialect, their existing knowledge, as a "springboard" to Standard English (SE)? Many of my students have been speaking a dialect of English their whole lives, so it’s clearly not the same thing as learning a second language, but there are many parallels. Wheeler and Swords tell us we can expect to see a “grammatical echo” of the first language in the student’s expression of another language or of another dialect (Wheeler and Swords 9). We see grammatical echoes whether the student’s home language is Thai, Spanish, or Hindi; whether their home dialect is South Asian English, South African English, or African American English (AAE). Wheeler and Swords urge us to first, collect observations and data on our students’ home dialects, and then use “contrastive analysis", rather than the traditional “correctionist approach,” which has clearly failed with students of color (Wheeler and Swords 61).

Contrastive analysis teaches students to code-switch from one variety to another, depending on what is appropriate and effective for the situation (Wheeler and Swords 57). They use the example of a student who says, “Mama jeep need gas.” Rather than correct the student’s “error”, a contrastive approach would, in one lesson, look at the differences between the rules of possession according to AAE and the rules according to SE. In a subsequent lesson, students would look at differences in subject-verb agreement. These rules and examples would be listed side by side on a chart that would remain up for students' reference. Sometimes students will be required to write in SE, for example in formal writing, and sometimes students may choose to write in dialect. The idea is that students will be conscious of the choices they are making and understand what situations call for speaking and writing in SE.

Lisa J. Green, who wrote African American English: A Linguistic Introduction, agrees. She also advises teachers to teach grammar explicitly, and that teachers “offer direct instruction in pointing out and teaching the correspondences between AAE and mainstream English” (Green 236). Furthermore, she advises teachers to become familiar with students’ dialect patterns because “teachers who know something about the children’s native linguistic system are less likely to misclassify their grammatical linguistic patterns as mainstream English errors or disorders and are more likely to understand them as differences” (Green 240). Additionally, she asks us to think about literary giants such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison, all of whom exhibit not only a mastery of SE but also of AAE and are able to move between them for a powerful literary effect. Our students can strive for the same mastery of language, but only if we teach them in a way that respects AAE and makes the similarities and differences explicit.

Code-switching is not about getting rid of Standard English. On the contrary, code-switching recognizes the absolute necessity of speaking and writing Standard English in our society. In Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit argues that students benefit from being taught explicitly the rules and “codes of power” of the middle class, including speaking and writing Standard English. She says, “If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring that power easier” (Delpit 25). She goes on to argue that “if such explicitness is not provided to students, what it feels like to people who are old enough to judge is that there are secrets being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach” (Delpit 31). If my students just aren’t learning it the way I’m teaching it, don’t I have an obligation to find a better way? To help them bridge the gaps, so they do understand? Speaking and writing Standard English is so crucial for their success in college and the professional world, so crucial for their access to real power in society, that I consider it one of my primary obligations to find a way to teach it so they will learn. Code-switching, quite simply, seems to be a more effective way to teach Standard English to students of color.

There is more at stake than simple pedagogical debates about the teaching of grammar. It is about our prejudices and our expectations of certain students.

Whether Black or White, a teacher is likely to consider a child speaking African American English as slower, less able, and less intelligent that the child who speaks Standard English. We call this dialect prejudice. Nieto (2000) explains that as teacher expectations are reduced, so the child’s classroom performance diminishes. We have found that as teachers understand more about the integrity of vernacular dialects and the structure and regularity of student language, they step away from dialect prejudice in the classroom. Teachers come to see students as fully intelligent, capable, and worthy. Their expectations for student performance rise, bringing to the classroom a self-fulfilling prophecy for success as their students work to master Standard English. (Wheeler and Swords 14)

It seems clear that teaching grammar through a “correctionist lens”, without acknowledgment that vernacular dialects like African American English have their own rules and grammar, is not only unhelpful and bound to fail, but in fact detrimental to students' school experiences and eventual success. However, respecting students’ cultures and language varieties, building and adding to their knowledge, and providing access to the “codes of power,” is tremendously empowering for students. With this approach, hopefully my students will be better prepared for their bright futures.