Teachers try new approach to address casual speech

Standing on the stage in Marc Dyer’s classroom last month, Larry Crisp was visibly nervous. The 16-year-old Green Run High School junior held his hands behind his back as he spoke about the school’s tardy policy.

“My brother be waking all late,” said Larry, who drives his freshman brother to school. “Sometimes I leave him, but my mom get mad at me.”

After Larry sat down, Dyer asked the class to share constructive criticism.

“He didn’t use correct grammar,” said fellow student Amerá Olds, 17.

Olds said she uses some of the same constructions, such as “we be,” in casual talk. “I try to get myself not to do it. I don’t like the way it sounds.”

Neither does Crisp. He wants to be a professional and knows he needs to speak like one.

Some teachers insist there is only one “right” way to speak. Students who don’t learn to speak that way risk doing poorly on tests and may struggle to find a good job.

But some progressive language experts argue that the varieties of English spoken at home and on the streets are legitimate dialects with their own structure and grammar. Rather than stigmatize students speaking regional or ethnic dialects, these educators insist that informal speech should be acknowledged while at the same time emphasizing the importance of mastering standard English.

This subtle but controversial shift in thinking has stirred nervous debate among schoolteachers and academics who disagree – some strongly – about the place of nonstandard English in the classroom and workplace. In Hampton Roads, the debate centers on what linguists call “African American English.”

More than half the students attending Portsmouth, Norfolk and Suffolk schools are black. Locally and nationally, test scores for that group have been lower than for whites.

Some teachers say these gaps can be closed by explicitly instructing students on the difference between formal and informal language. But others say correcting grammar is sufficient for everyone, and more explicit instruction insults the intelligence of black students.

“Are they saying our children can’t learn?” asks Deloris Haywood, a retired Norfolk educator who is African American. Providing special instruction in standard English isn’t needed, she said.

These clashing perspectives hit on some of the touchiest themes in English education: race, class, culture and what constitutes “proper speech.” While opinions differ about how to deal with informal speech, most educators acknowledge that many students, especially African Americans from poor and urban areas, need help improving their classroom language skills.

Statewide last year, white students outperformed their black peers by 12 percentage points on both English and math Standards of Learning tests and graduated at a rate 17 percentage points higher.

In all five school divisions in South Hampton Roads, black students passed English tests at lower rates than whites. In the divisions with majority black populations, English pass rates were 5 to 9 percentage points lower than those in the two majority white divisions, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.

Will changing perceptions about African American English lead to better test scores, higher graduation rates and, ultimately, better jobs?

“Our school system and the white-collar world of work functions in standard English,” said Rebecca Wheeler, an English professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News. “So if a student does not learn standard English, they are seriously disadvantaged in school performance and all measures of success, such as graduation from high school and admission to college.”

Wheeler is among the academics who encourage the use of new perspectives about language differences to change what’s happening in the classroom.

She and one of her former students, Rachel Swords, have collaborated on several teachers’ guides to “code-switching.” Both are white. Their books offer techniques on switching informal words or phrases to Standard English alternatives.

One technique, for example, shows students the difference between informal speech and the way Standard English dictates. The idea is to do so without admonishing them for speaking incorrectly.

Standard English calls for an “s” to make a plural. That’s not always the case in African American English. For example: “ I have two cat” versus “I have two cats.”

Tareva Lister, a fourth-grade teacher, took a class called “Language Varieties in American Schools” from Wheeler when she was working on a master’s degree from Christopher Newport University. As an African American, she remembers feeling angry and offended at first.

Lister’s frustration faded once she realized Wheeler wasn’t judging African American vernacular or any other dialect. The first-year teacher said she now sees the benefit of using the techniques Wheeler talked about with all students.

“I think it gives them an opportunity to see their vernacular language – which they’ve been told is wrong for so long – in a light that says it’s OK, just not in this setting,” Lister said.

What teachers typically do – correcting grammar in passing – doesn’t work and it hurts feelings, she said.

“If anything sticks with them, it’s not the right way to say it,” Lister said. “It’s that you told them that they were doing it wrong.”

For Swords, an educator in Newport News, the proof is in the test scores. The first year she began incorporating her students’ home speech patterns into classroom instruction, her black third-graders outperformed their white counterparts on math and social studies tests. Students of both races performed about equally in reading and science, she said.

Swords spent the next year teaching second grade and followed those same children to third grade. All of her students passed the math and reading SOL tests that year. Ninety-five percent passed science and social studies.

Still, some of her colleagues express apprehension. If teaching Standard English the way we’ve taught it for years was working, she asks them, why are so many students falling behind?

Bridget Anderson, an English professor at Old Dominion University, said no form of English is superior.

All people speak a dialect. The one a child learns is tied to region, culture and race because language is passed down through families and neighborhoods.

“All dialects are equal linguistically. They all have a grammatical system. They all have a sound system. They all have a lexical system,” Anderson said.

African American English is speech interwoven with black culture and learned at home by many black children, particularly in poor, urban areas. Not all African Americans speak it, and not everyone who speaks it is African American.

Among the biggest chasms between Standard English and the African American dialect is the use of the verb “to be.”

“She be on my team,” is used to mean “she is always on the team.” Those who speak the dialect also typically use “ain’t ” and double-negatives, and they drop verbs that are contractions in Standard English, such as “she my sister” instead of “she’s my sister.”

Some of the same constructions also appear in regional dialects such as Southern English.

Crisp, the Green Run High junior, admits he struggles with the distinctions.

“I’m still working on my grammar,” Crisp said. “I plan to get into a professional field. It’s very important to be able to speak in large crowds.”

Crisp is part of a leadership group for African American males. That’s also why he is taking a public speaking class.

“We noticed our young men do need more practice speaking before an audience and speaking grammatically,” said Principal George Parker, who is also African American and said he benefit ed from a public speaking class in college. He’s asked the members of the Green Run Minority Achievement Committee to take the class.

Recruiters such as Darrell C. Powell Sr, president of Powell Staffing Solutions, said a job applicant is indeed like a book being judged by its cover – with the applicant’s grooming, appearance and manner of speaking as the cover.

Powell, who recruits in Hampton Roads for medical, administrative and technical jobs, said he looks for applicants who even on the telephone “sound like you have a suit on.”

Companies who use human resource firms like Powell’s expect recruiters to provide job candidates who speak well, he said.

“When that (candidate) goes to that company and then they go on the floor, yabba-dabba-dooing and speaking Ebonics, that’s a bad reflection on that human resources person,” Powell said. “There’s nothing that turns you off more than someone who can’t communicate.”

Joseph L. Wiggins, who is African American and director of communications for Portsmouth Schools, said speaking formally has been essential to his success.

“There is an appropriate time and place for everything,” he said. “If I’m around my friends, the boys, my fraternity brothers, yes, I may speak a certain way, but when I’m in the company of a female or what not, I’m being my best .”

“More importantly, I think one of the reasons I have advanced in the educational arena is my knowledge of the King’s English, my ability to write and my knowledge of the rules,” he said.

College student Ternetta Cradle, 20, speaks what she calls “slang” that she picked up as a child in Norfolk’s Park Place and Norview neighborhoods. She learned how to speak Standard English from her mother and from hearing teachers in Norfolk classrooms.

“When I’m handling business, I know how to talk,” said Cradle, who takes orders at a Norfolk ice cream kiosk.

But she wasn’t always so sure how she should speak. While growing up, Cradle said, her stepfather said she talked “white” when she spoke as her teachers did and in the way her mother advised.

But most people who speak what she calls “slang” can switch into Standard English, she said.

“There are some kids who talk like that because they want to,” Cradle said.