The purpose of this thesis is to elucidate the effects of language ideologies on African-American students' feelings of acceptance and identity in the classroom. For African-American students, the use of African American English is valued for its cultural inclusivity yet is shunned for its lack of linguistic capital in educational settings. This creates an antimony which furthers alienates the home dialect, often African-American English (AAE) from the dominant code, Standard American English (SAE). For this study, 18 African-American students, ages 12-13 were interviewed. Respondents were given a mixed response questionnaire administered in an interview format. The responses were then analyzed using basic statistical analysis. Statistical Power to detect effects was very limited due to small sample size. The results suggest that students valued the use of African American English for personal and home settings but did not find it appropriate for use in school when addressing the teacher. Implications suggest that educators should be ardent about developing an ethno-linguistic culture in the classroom. Teachers and administrators should work to affirm students' home language, where language learning begins, and use this linguistic knowledge in order to propel students forward academically.

Studies of African American English (AAE) structure have historically placed significantemphasis on its system of tense and aspect, and have done so for good reason. In the interest of developing a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the variety’s syntactic and semantic features, research on the syntactic constructions and functional grammatical items that distinguish it from other English varieties continues to bring about new insights into the different elements that make up a system of tense and aspect, as well as how these elements interact with other parts of the grammar—not only in AAE but crosslinguistically. One of these elements is the verbal marker <i>BIN</i>, which situates part of an event in the remote past, as shown in (1).<div><br></div><div>(1) Jane <i>BIN</i> saw that movie.</div><div>‘Jane saw that movie a long time ago.’<br></div><div><br></div><div>This paper further investigates both the function of and restrictions on the aspectual marker <i>BIN </i>in African American English (AAE) using acceptability judgment data collected in an online survey of AAE speakers. With this study, I aim to contribute to thetheoretical description of the verbal system of AAE (L. J. Green, 1993) and its system of tense and aspect. The judgment task will identify patterns of acceptability surrounding the following two factors: event type and whether the verb receives progressive or past tense marking. Using a generative-constructivist semantic framework (Ramchand, 2008), I hypothesize that the semantic information represented by the aspectual marker BIN will either allow or disallow certain combinations of event structure and progressiveness, and these restrictions may be demonstrated to be systematic according to the erb classes proposed byRamchand (2008). Additionally, based on the survey data and the approach to the decomposition of event structure regarding Outer and Inner aspect proposed by (Travis, 2010), I will propose that restrictions on <i>BIN </i>and ambiguity between structures containing<i> BIN </i>can be accounted for syntactically based on the configurations of both grammatical and lexical aspect.<br></div><div><br></div>

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on August 28, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Steve Fox, Thom Upton, Susan Shepherd. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-116).

This is a qualitative study that explores the ways in which African American English (AAE) speakers understand and use their own language. The study is based on 10 individual interviews with participants who self-identified as fluent speakers of AAE and Mainstream American English (i.e., Standard English). Participants shared personal examples, stories, and disclosures as a way to expose the meaning and interpretations of AAE in context and to reveal how it functions in their everyday lives. The purpose of this study is to increase awareness and appreciation of AAE and its relationship to the formation and preservation of individual and group identities. The literatures and the interview data reveal that, to think negatively about the way African Americans articulate their thoughts is, in fact, not just dismissing their speech form, but their history, culture, community and ultimately, the way they make sense of and maneuver in the world.

The overarching purpose of both dissertation studies is to contribute to the extant literature base on language assessment in the context of poverty and African American English (AAE) dialect. Language assessment with culturally and linguistically diverse populations, in particular children who speak AAE, has been a longstanding challenge for professionals in the field of speech-language pathology despite the preponderance of scholarly attention this topic has received. The purpose of the first study is to conduct a systematic review of the literature to synthesize the existing literature on AAE from the past approximately three and a half decades, to identify aspects of language and assessment approaches that have been most informative for identifying language impairment in this population. The purpose of the second study is to examine the grammaticality judgments of school-age, AAE-speaking children as a function of their nonmainstream dialect density and language ability. Data for this study came from 273 African American children from low-income backgrounds who were participants in a larger project focused on language and literacy outcomes for children reared in urban areas. the relationship between language ability and dialect density was explored using correlational analysis and the contribution of language ability and dialect density on grammaticality judgments was analyzed using multiple regression. Finally, a multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to investigate the impact of dialect density and language ability on various items that differed in grammatical constructions. Results from both studies are discussed relative to the existing oral language profiles of AAE speakers and the impact of linguistic variation on assessment. Together, these papers contribute to the extant literature by supporting the development of a more comprehensive profile of AAE and increasing the field's understanding of language assessment and language impairment in child AAE speakers.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis began, as I imagine most theses do, as a very formal and very orthodox research paper. While it continues to be this to a measurable extent, it has undergone a metamorphosis. In these pages I discuss the serious challenges faced in schools (as well as the setbacks endured inside their walls) by native-English speaking children of all cultures and creeds, who speak forms of English other than Standard English (hereafter SE) in their homes and with their family and friends. I then contrast these challenges with the stark advantages enjoyed by children who, due likely to their inherited socio-economic class, make regular use of SE inside their residences and with their peers and relations. One non-standard dialect of English found in widespread use by young boys and girls in the United States is African American English (hereafter AAE). Because success in U.S. schools depends heavily on students’ production and comprehension of SE, those youngsters who already employ SE as their principal language are at an immediate educational advantage, one that is, by default, not afforded to children who as a rule speak a dialect/language other than SE, such as AAE. Within these pages you will find an official statement made by the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) Executive Committee that soundly validates African American English as a true, rule-governed linguistic system, and thus a language. I also discuss my view that to devalue a child’s language in school, by not validating it as true, operative speech—“Don’t talk that way, that’s wrong!”—is, in essence, to devalue the whole child. It is an act that will be perceived negatively and reacted to negatively by most children. In addition to these issues, I discuss the prevalence of AAE in American society at large, as well as its prevalent use by non-African American youth.

No description available.

Sports play an important role in the culture of the United States as does language, so the choice to use non-Standard dialects in a nation that privileges the Standard and negatively judges dialectical differences, especially those spoken by mostly people of color, is not undertaken lightly. Because of this privileging of Standard American English, it is assumed that only professional African American athletes are allowed to keep their native dialect if it is African American English (AAE) and still be successful. However, this is complicated by the historical and present increased criticisms women face in both sport and language. To investigate this claim, a quantitative analysis of post-game interviews of five men and five women in the National Basketball Association and Women’s National Basketball Association, respectively, was conducted. The athletes were analyzed to see if they used dental stopping and be-leveling, two features of AAE. Four additional features of AAE were also investigated on an exploratory basis. Inter-gender variance was found among both genders. Across genders, women used the features of AAE studied an average of 30.6 percent less than men, demonstrating a clear gender difference in the usage of AAE. The results of this study illustrate disparities in women and men’s language use that could be a consequence of the inherent and historical sexism women must face in the realms of both sport and language.

<p>Debate about the development of African American English (AAE) dominated sociolinguistic inquiry for the second half of the 20th century and continues to be a subject of investigation. All hypotheses about the development of AAE integrate ideas of shared linguistic features coupled with strong regional influences or founding effects. Most Southern evidence used in the development of these hypotheses, however, is from rural communities or somehow unique enclave communities. The early urban centers of African American life in the South that followed the abolition of slavery and disintegration of plantation life have seldom been investigated with respect to the development of AAE. This study examines precisely those sites looking at AAE in three Southern urban centers during the time of Jim Crow or institutionalized segregation: Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans.</p><p>This analysis is based on a series of tape-recorded oral history interviews that were conducted as part of the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. The Behind the Veil project was launched in 1990 at Duke and the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1997. Each speaker completed a survey regarding her/his life history, education, professional history, and family background. The speakers used for this study were chosen based on age (all born before 1942) and residency status in their respective communities - all speakers are lifelong residents of Birmingham, Memphis, or New Orleans. These criteria and others shape an inclusive corpus of 100 total tape-recorded interviews with 33 from Birmingham, 35 from Memphis, and 32 from New Orleans. </p><p>Quantitative analysis of five core diagnostic structures of AAE (i.e. copula absence, plural -s, pre-vocalic consonant cluster reduction, rhoticity, and 3rd person singular verbal -s) was performed to provide a window for determining the shared and distinct patterns of early, urban AAE development. These data are used for inter-generational analyses, cross-gender analyses, analyses of socioeconomic factors and overall interpretation for each individual site and between different sites. </p><p>These data contribute to the continuing study and scholarship on the historical development of African American English, providing the first multi-community overview of core African American English linguistic variables from the early urban South. The trans-regional similarities of linguistic variables in AAE speakers are often attributed to the influence of early Southern English varieties. These data confirm the early presence of these variables in African American urban centers in the South, but also suggest how language ideologies relate to dialect development.</p> / Dissertation

Children at risk for reading problems also have difficulty perceiving critical differences in speech sounds (Breier et al., 2004; Edwards, Fox, & Rogers, 2003; de- Gelder & Vroomen, 1998). These children rely more heavily on context than the acoustic qualities of sound to facilitate word reading. Dialect use, such as African American English (AAE) may influence literacy development in similar ways. Dialect use has been shown to affect speech sound processing and can even result in spelling errors (Kohler, et al., in press). The purpose of this study is to determine if children who speak AAE process cues indicative of final consonant voicing differently than children who speak a more mainstream dialect of English. Twenty-six typically developing children in grades K-2 who spoke either AAE or a more mainstream American English dialect participated. The speech stimuli consisted of nonsense productions of vowel + plosive consonant. These stimuli were systematically altered by changing the vowel and stop-gap closure duration simultaneously, which resulted in the final consonant changing from a voiced consonant, like “ib”, to a voiceless consonant, like “ip”. Two tasks were developed: a continuum task where the child had to indicate when the stimuli changed in voicing and a same-different task which involved determining if two stimuli were identical in voicing or not. No significant differences between groups were found for dialect use or grade for the same/different task. In the continuum task, chi-square analyses revealed significant differences in response patterns attributable to dialect and grade. In addition, a significant consonant by speaker interaction was found for mean ratings. Correlations between mean continuum rating and phonological awareness composites were not significant. In conclusion, it was evident that children who speak AAE present with differences in their perception of final consonants in VC nonsense syllables. This finding suggests the dialect speakers may be using different cues to make judgments regarding the speech signal, or that the speakers of AAE have a less mature ability to extract fine phonetic detail due to the influence of their dialect (Baran & Seymour, 1979). More research is warranted to determine the exact role that dialect plays.