Bidialectal African American adolescents’ beliefs about spoken language expectations in English classrooms

Godley, Amanda, & Escher, Allison. (2012). Bidialectal African American adolescents’ beliefs about spoken language expectations in English classrooms. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 55(8), 704-713.


What kind of English should be spoken in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms? I doubt if anyone who teaches ELA believes that it is not important to teach students to use Standard English (SE). At the same time, we know we need to respect students’ home languages. If that home language is African American Vernacular English (AAVE), how do we find a balance between providing students with the language skills they need for academic and career success (and hopefully socioeconomic mobility) and valuing and honoring their linguistic heritages? We want our students to be engaged and to participate actively in classroom activities, and allowing the use of AAVE might promote that. But if we do, are we in essence handicapping our students for their lives outside of school?

Godley and Escher add their data, collected from urban, African-American tenth graders, to the ongoing debate on what kind of English should be spoken in classrooms. The data were collected from students who had just completed a three-day unit on language variations and dialects. The students were asked to write an essay supporting one of two positions: 1) students should be allowed to speak “informally” (i.e., in AAVE) in class, 2) students should be required to speak Standard English (SE) in class. A majority of the students favored allowing AAVE (45%); a smaller group favored SE only (20%), but this group represented the higher achieving students in the class. A fairly large proportion (35%) took the position that both forms of English should be spoken in class. Godley and Escher went on to code the essays for recurring themes, and found four: 1) fear of external judgment (often a reason for using SE), 2) desire for clear communication (often a reason for using AAVE), 3) demonstration of respect for others (e.g., elder relatives were perceived as needing to be addressed in SE), and 4) sense of individual and group identity (NOTE: The four categories are cited directly from pp. 709 of the article, but the parenthetical comments are my insertions).

It is definitely interesting to hear what these students had to say, and I think it is important that the students’ voices were captured on this important issue. The authors express some concern that these young students did not really consider that the status of SE in academic and work settings was unjust or racist, but just accepted it as the way it was. They also are concerned that these tenth graders thought that using AAVE could hurt one’s chances in a job interview, but did not indicate that they thought it would have an effect on actual work performance. While I too was struck by those findings, we do have to remember two things: 1) this was only a three-day unit on such issues, and 2) these are, after all, tenth graders, who may not really have considered these issues before on a deep level, and who may not have the life experience, and certainly don’t have the work experience, to consider all of the ramifications of what form of our language we use, and why it is that way. Some of us have been pondering these issues for many years, and are still baffled by them. They are not simple issues, and a three-day unit will not necessarily be transformative.

For me, one of the most stunning findings of the study was something that was noted almost as an aside. The authors noted that while they had observed teachers complaining among themselves about students’ use of AAVE, those teachers rarely commented on or corrected students’ use of AAVE in the classroom. One might interpret this as an attempt to respect students’ home languages, but how sincere was it? If teachers really believe that students’ language is inferior, but say nothing about that in an effort to remain “politically correct” or avoid conflict, isn’t that a bit hypocritical? Wouldn’t students spot that kind of dissonance between a teacher’s real, honest feelings and her/his behavior in the classroom?

I have long struggled with this issue myself as a literacy educator. I remember one poignant moment years ago that capsulized this dissonance for me. I was teaching a children’s literature course to a group of elementary education candidates, and the group was diverse both in terms of race/ethnicity and in terms of age. We read poems written in AAVE, and one of the older African-American students in the class, a woman in her forties with extensive school experience as a paraprofessional, said that she would NEVER read those poems to the children in her class. Her reason: “That’s the speech of slavery.” She spoke those words in diction that could cut glass, the embodiment of “proper” academic English. Across the room, though, a younger African-American candidate responded vehemently, accusing the older student of disrespecting the way she and her family talked. The white students in the class were silent, nonplussed. They had not considered that there might be disagreements about dialect use even among African Americans. They had always thought of it as issue of black versus white, and it really wasn’t, and isn’t, that simple. I believe the positions taken by both of my students had logical merit, and I tried to discuss that with the group in class that day, but it was an extremely uncomfortable discussion for us. Achieving the balance among all of the elements of the issue—from socioeconomic opportunity, to respect for others’ languages, to the need for clear communication that fits the context we are in, to all the aspects of our individual and group identities, not to mention the aspects of longstanding racism and injustice that underlie any discussion of dialects in the U.S.—is a difficult task. It’s not going to be solved by a short unit on linguistic variation or even by a longer course of study, but it’s important that we keep thinking and talking about this as responsibly and honestly as we can. That will take some courage and some integrity, and it will at times be uncomfortable, but we must try to do so. Saying one thing in the teachers’ lounge and another thing to students is NOT the answer.