The Impact of Linguistic Bias in Education
[Music]
let’s
talk about the impact of linguistic bias
on education we as educators like to
talk about how
linguistic difference or language
difference is a strength
in the classroom but i asked the
question
do we really treat it that way
in the classroom setting when someone
uses a different language or a different
linguistic
difference do we really treat it as a
strength or do we treat it like an error
so i like to talk about african-american
vernacular english
or ave as i like to call it for the
acronym aave
so help me make that stick ah they i
like to call it
when we look at ave though do we really
use that or we talk about that as a
strength
or do we talk about that as a deficit
arguably
ave is the most researched
dialect in america and yet it still is
the least respected
this is my daughter sophia i love this
picture of her
she looks like she’s running for office
she’s in third grade here in this
picture
and she had some experiences with this
in her classroom
as many teachers do many educators do
they’ll put these sentences on the board
and say
fix these sentences these sentences are
wrong can you make them correct
so she had these sentences on her paper
and one of them said mrs johnson be
organizing
the fall festival well sophia being my
daughter
and knowing all about ave quickly
crossed that out
and wrote ave in the margin
raised her hand for the teacher and said
um excuse me there’s nothing wrong with
this sentence
this sentence is written in ave and my
mama said
this is important to black people and
black culture and this is how we talk
and i think you might be racist
that’s what she said now at the exact
same time interestingly enough
i was working as a speech language
pathologist
in an urban education setting
and i was starting to have some of these
same experiences
where educators were referring students
to me
black students who spoke ave
and they kept asking me can you please
evaluate this child
he doesn’t speak right he needs to talk
better you need to fix this he’s now not
writing right you need to fix him
and so i said no this is a dialectal
difference and
as a speech language pathologist i don’t
work on
dialectal differences only disorder this
is not a disorder
the educators kept insisting of course
that it was
and i started to do some research on
this because it became really
fascinating to me
and i learned that black students in
america
are two and a half times more likely to
receive special education services
mostly for learning disabilities
or speech language services or
behavioral disorder
two and a half more times more likely
than white students to receive special
education services i was concerned by
this
so instead of calling these children
disordered
i started educating the staff and i
started
educating families and students if they
were old enough
about dialectal difference as it
compares to mainstream american english
because mainstream american english is
what the school system
deems as correct or normal
even if someone outside of that dialect
speaks a different dialect
so i started educating the staff started
educating students
and families about ave
and i taught them that ave has cultural
significance in black communities
linguists have already shown that
language structure in ave is very
very similar to what you find in west
africa
why is that you might ask right because
when africans were captured
and then trafficked here to america and
enslaved
they didn’t know english they didn’t
speak the language
so they took what they knew about
language superimposed it onto
southern american english and ave was
born so that has now persisted
over the years over the centuries into
what we now call ave
it has its own phonological system it
has its own semantic system
syntax grammar and it’s all consistent
with languages spoken in west africa
so i watch a lot of tv okay i love to
critique
tv and movies it’s one of my favorite
pastimes so i started noticing some of
these nuances
in some of the television shows that are
presented today on on television
and one of them being not all ave
speakers
are black and not all black people speak
ave
i think the the tv show blackish does a
really good job of
exemplifying that and so does shameless
it really does a good job
in helping me explain to other
the students in particular where some of
these nuances come from
you talk like who you’re around
characters in
shameless in particular it’s a white
family living on the south side of
chicago in a predominantly black
neighborhood
so a lot of them speak ave
there’s this one episode within in
shameless where one of the characters is
talking to his black friends and he’s
speaking in ave
and there’s this brilliant translation
at the bottom of the screen in
mainstream american english
to exemplify for those who can’t follow
the conversation
here’s what they’re saying in your
language i thought that was brilliant
so i’ve kind of picked up on that and
i’ve started doing that when i talk to
other people
namely other educators or other families
and students about ave
so let’s do a little bit of that here
right now
so here’s an example i’m going to give
you three rules related to ave because
there’s a bunch of them y’all
but i’m going to give you three today
i’m going to pick on the to be verb
because
many people pick on the to be verb so
i’m going to go ahead and exemplify for
you
how ave has linguistic rules and it has
a system
and it has meaning so in ave
if you in drop the to be verb in a
sentence
it means something is happening right
now so
in the sentence he calling me on my cell
phone
that means my phone is ringing right now
and he’s calling me on my cell phone
right now
so that’s an example two sentences in
the
that mean the exact same thing on your
board in two
different dialects two different
sentences i mean the same thing in two
different dialects here’s another one
when you insert the to be verb in a
sentence in ave
it means something is happening all the
time so if i said he’d be calling me on
my cell phone that means
he calls me on my cell phone all the
time
okay obvi speakers just know that we
know what that means
okay so that’s two different sentences
on your board
one written in navi one written in
mainstream american english but they
mean the exact
same thing here’s the last one
ben if i put ben in a sentence i know
that means for a long
long time so he been calling me on my
cell phone means
that he’s been calling me on my cell
phone for a long time
so i know that as an obvious speaker
these
words have meaning these words have
value so he calling me on my cell phone
he’d be calling me on my cell phone he’d
been calling me on my cell phone
all mean different things okay they do
not mean the same thing
and you can directly translate that into
mainstream american english
it’s no different than any other dialect
guys all dialects have rules
think about the bostonians who drop
their r’s regularly
just an example example for you it’s
completely normal in boston right
i can’t move to boston and say they’re
all speaking wrong
no that’s how they speak you talk like
who you’re around so if they say pack
the cat
we know in chicago we wouldn’t say it
quite that way we’d say park the car
but those two sentences mean the exact
same thing it’s two different dialects
that mean the exact same thing
where you live dictates how you’re going
to talk
you talk like who you’re around that’s
all dialects are so if i have a
community and i was working in a
community
where the families there spoke
exclusively ave it should
be no surprise that the kids are going
to speak ave at school
how do we honor that though i
say to honor it in similar ways i just
showed you where i’m showing those
direct translations
for the sake of the students these are
my parents
and they they taught me how to code
switch
they both have master’s degrees in
education
and they showed me we spoke ave at home
and then when we got out to the to
public we would speak
in mainstream american english that’s
just the way it was done
not everyone has my experience though
you listen to me and you think well
you’re doing it
yeah but not everyone has my experience
i challenge you to consider
that there are students that i served
that were had only access to ave they
didn’t have access to mainstream
american english the way that i did
therefore my relationship with
co-switching is a little different
now that’s me and my husband we
in our family use more of a code meshing
model i speak ave i speak mainstream
american english
my husband’s from texas so he brings in
some southern american english
and we speak all of them at home
we speak all of them i speak them at
work
i’m doing some of it right now so i like
to blend
all of my dialects together because i
have value
and honor for all of these different
dialects
so i encourage others to do the same in
education
find out what language what dialect
your students are speaking and find
value in that as well
you remember my daughter sophia who
experienced
ave as being deemed as wrong in her
classroom and she had strong words about
that
what you don’t know though is that that
teacher
called me she called me from work she
called me at work while i was at work
and she was so at work
to tell me what had just happened
and she said the whole class got an
education on ave
and it’s cultural significance from my
daughter
the teacher said she took pause and
thought i’ve
never thought of it that way i’ve never
thought of ave as anything else
other than wrong now mind you this
teacher happens to be black
like me so she was very excited
to consider this isn’t wrong
it’s just a dialectal difference and she
went to her library there at the school
grabbed some books that were written in
ave
and she read them for the students to
exemplify its own significance as well
and she said to me from here on
out i will do better i will do my best
to make sure that i am differentiating
between
what is a deficit
and what is simply a difference because
they are not
the same thing and that is really all i
ask
because that is a really great place to
start
thank you