Education and Language

What Happened to Ebonics?

Turmoil in 1980s Oakland Leads to Continued Definitive Conclusions about Language’s Impact on Education in the 2020s

The Ebonics debate has often been misunderstood. It refers to the dialect of AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This type of language is prevalent in the Black community and has also spread to popular culture via lyrics from rap music and such.

I be workin’

Yes, I be workin’ on this article.

This can be defined as I’ve been doing work for a while on this article, although not necessarily at this very moment.

I begin here because by using AAVE, readers can understand its importance for teachers to be trained in its use in our classrooms.

Before getting into the meat and potatoes of the point, AAVE is an important dialect and, therefore, should be treated with the utmost respect, especially when dealing with it as a teacher.

Slavery was Brutal

The history of AAVE in the United States began in the 17th and 18th centuries when slaves were shackled and shipped from Africa, mostly against their will.

According to Winford (2015, as cited in Johnson et al., 2023), “African and Caribbean-born slaves communicated through pidginized forms of English as a result of the variations in their native languages.”

In the cotton fields, they sang, chanted, hollered, and whispered.

O Lord, O my Lord! O my great Lord keep me from sinking down. — From a slave song (“Slavery in the American South,” n.d.)

Colonialists brutalized slaves. However, this did not stop them from communicating about their oppression in unique ways.

Defining Ebonics and AAVE

Ebonics, a term coined in 1973 by Dr. Robert Williams, combined the words ebony and phonics.

In the 1970s and 80s, Ebonics and AAVE (African American Vernacular English) were frequently referred to as slang. It was and still is thought of as being infelicitous, the demise of English.

Just plain ole bad language. (Here “bad” in slang can mean “good” these days.)

Similarities between AAVE and slang existed, and, at one time, some were thought of as synonymous with each other.

It’s not.

AAVE was designated a meaningful and rule-governed language system, and the fact that the first language of many African Americans was AAVE, researchers found that schools in the US had systematically failed to integrate a language policy related to African American English learners (AAELs)” (Tryphenia, et al., 2018).

A Seventh Awakening Oakland Style

As a teacher, my first formal introduction to AAVE was when I taught in Oakland, California in the mid-1980s.

Not long after my first year of teaching, I heard the voice of a wise Black woman.

The Black woman educator knowledgeable about linguistics issues spoke at an in-service training about AAVE/Ebonics. Her speech moved ever so smoothly to standard American English from an African language.

In between the two, she spoke the southern phonology, morphology, and syntax of Creole and Creoles of the Caribbean.

Black English came next in her speech, followed by standard American English.

Phenomenal.

A linguistics awareness I never fathomed.

Confirmation of the belief that Ebonics came from a mix of African languages, creole, and pidgin, which came under the influence of English in the United States before the Civil War, was established in the woman’s speech.

The speech was incredible and changed my mind about using AAVE in the classroom as a springboard for teaching standard English.

She also referred to standard English as the “cash language,” emphasizing making students aware that if they learn it, they’re likely to make more money in their lifetimes.

Need I say more?

What the Research Says

Yes, as a professor and researcher, a few points from studies illustrate the benefits of using AAVE/Ebonics in the classroom to launch a program for students to acquire and learn standard English from listening to speaking and reading to writing.

Explicit teaching of dialect shifting is beneficial for children who speak dialects other than standard English, such as AAVE.

Research by Johnson et al. (2017) indicated that Dialect Awareness, a program that teaches dialect shifting, is effective in promoting dialect shifting in students who speak AAVE.

Students who received lessons through this program were more likely to use “school English” when expected and had benefits in proximal and distal measures of literacy, including narrative writing, morphosyntactic awareness, and reading comprehension.

AAVE had put African American students at a disadvantage to do well academically in school, socially outside of their homes, and professionally in the workforce, along with other non-standard English dialect groups (Knapp, 2015).

And first and foremost, any well-educated person knows that this dialect is contained in classic literature, from books like “To Kill a Mockingbird to the Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”

Try it Yourself

So go ‘head, knock sum sense into dem head of urs. You be better off cepting everone and da language dey speak.

Go ahead and translate that into standard language and you’ll have an idea about how ebonics is taught.

The Big Bang of Segregation Spells Trouble

As a teacher in the Oakland flats, an area just below the Oakland Hills to the east and Alameda to the west, all hell broke loose when the school I worked at went to a tracking system.

What that means is students were divided up by the first language they spoke. At the school, during the 1980s, nearly a dozen languages had been spoken, and some students from Asia came from communities where no written language existed (yet they were natural-born artists and could draw gorgeous Laothian landscapes that were hung around the school).

The Asian and Spanish tracks of students offered them instruction in their first language for part of the school day.

Black students were often clueless as to what was being said when instruction in classes reverted to Spanish or Mandarin, not to mention standard American English.

Black parents became infuriated with the system and wanted a track of their own.

At school board meetings, Black parents protested, struggling with school officials to have them create a track of their own where their culture and language were wrapped up in a culturally responsive package, like that which had been done with the Asians and Hispanics.

By the late 1980s, the birth of the Ebonics crisis came alive with a bang.

Long before 1996, when the Oakland School Board passed a resolution that Ebonics was a language that needed to be addressed in the classroom as culturally responsive teaching, the education crisis heated up.

You see, in 1989, Hanni Taylor studied the effect of contrastive analysis, or illustrating the comparison between AAVE and standard English, as the Oakland schools wanted to a few years later.

The results of Taylor’s experiment were conclusive that AAVE students wrote with significantly less AAVE as opposed to students who learned to write without translations (Rameriz, 2005).

Before I knew it, I was using markers and chart paper divided into two columns, one with a phrase/sentence in AAVE and another with the standard English translation.

Toothie Ruthie

Meet Toothie Ruthie, a young Black character who speaks AAVE/Ebonics.

“Toothy Ruthie,” a book to help all kids (including African Americans) learn to pronounce the “th” sound.

After an extended debate about how to teach Ebonics, Toothy Ruthie, a textbook about a little Black girl who spoke AAVE, brought forth the concept that standard academic English could be taught using a grammar-translation approach.

The idea was to introduce standard English by using a nonstandard version of the language (Ebonics), a time that the term Ebonics became widely used to refer to nonstandard AAVE.

Toothie Ruthie demonstrated how students can take their home language, AAVE/Ebonics, and translate it to standard English.

For example, Toothie Ruthie is based upon the AAVE pronunciation of /th/. At the end of a word, this is often pronounced /f/ in AAVE.

‘Ruth’ is pronounced Ruf; ‘south’ is pronounced souf. When the preceding sound is a nasal (e.g. n or m) the th is often pronounced as /t/ as in tent for ‘tenth’; mont for ‘month’.

What would happen today if teachers adopted a program where they introduced AAVE or Ebonics again as a way to illustrate to all students how nonstandard English is translated to standard English?

To be sure, again, there is a loud outcry by many politicians and celebrities who know little about the teaching method.

Teacher Training in AAVE

Perhaps a better way that would draw less controversy is to train teachers to recognize AAVE interference in reading and writing, as they do now with Spanish interference in the subjects.

“The contrasts between a child’s oral dialect and the academic language of print become a barrier to mastering reading, writing, and spelling if teachers are not:

(1) aware of the dialect and how it impacts reading instruction and

(2) knowledgeable about how to leverage students’ existing language strengths to scaffold and support learning” (Washington et al., 2023).

Teacher knowledge of students’ home language and dialect is vital and benefits students when discovering the meanings of words.

Washington, et al. (2023) provide an example of how teacher awareness of AAVE can benefit students’ decoding and comprehension skills.

Well…why not. It’s very similar to what they do with Spanish. Consider that it’s common for a teacher to illustrate the differences between English and Spanish.

Consider casa blanca (meaning house white) and white house. In Spanish, the noun comes before the adjective; in English, it does not. Students simply need to be told this as a way of retaining not saying the noun first and the adjective last in English.

Teachers can scaffold a similar tip using AAVE during a vocabulary lesson. When a student whose home language is AAVE comes across the word gold when reading, she/he is likely to pronounce it /gol/.

An AAVE-knowledgeable teacher would recognize the home dialect causes the student to drop the final consonant of a word, affecting the pronunciation, which, in turn, can affect word meaning.

At this point, the teacher discovers that he/she needs to teach a lesson that emphasizes the final consonant of affected words. He/she wouldn’t even have to mention that she’s applying AAVE to instruction.

When teachers take this action, they’ll soon be likely to find that they can model the pronunciation of words to students so they may find the differences between their language and standard English on their own.

Rule Governed?

AAVE/Ebonics is rule-governed, which makes it different from slang and other nonstandard English. For example, the verb to be stays in the infinitive when it is conjugated with pronouns: I be, you be, he be, and so on.

Other words that are considered part of AAVE, such as ax (asked) had been used by white people in the United States some 200 years ago.

Finally, the most common form of AAVE drops contractions, so instead of saying she’s going, interlocutors say she going.

Positive and negative attitudes toward standard and nonstandard speech are extended to the speakers themselves. Speakers of nonstandard forms are thought to be uneducated, but increasingly that is not the case as more people speak both standard and nonstandard English, depending upon the speech community in which they are interacting.

Standard English is vital for academic and social success. It’s the lay of the land in academia. While dialects — standard and nonstandard — play a role in learning, it is the former that should be modeled and used extensively in the classroom.

Conclusions and Takeaways

In the past, using Ebonics in the classroom has often been ridiculed by diverse politicians and celebrities, including Maya Angelou and Bill Cosby. “I’m incensed,” Angelou told the Wichita Eagle. “The very idea that African-American language is a language separate and apart is very threatening because it can encourage young men and women not to learn standard English” (“Oakland School Board Approves Black English Program,” 1997).

The essence of language is learning about how it’s used and determining its value. How families communicate is valuable to them. A close connection to this language and standard English, when established, permits young people to appreciate that there are a myriad of ways to speak.

Most languages and dialects deserve mention in the school curriculum, along with the awareness that they can disappear. The recognition of when and where language is appropriately used is essential for all students to learn.

Finally, a discussion about the differences between two languages and/or dialects should not be disregarded, as the benefits of language awareness and diversity make for better-educated students at all grade levels.

Here are some helpful resources educators can use to understand the impact and implications of Ebonics.

Project 21 Press Release: Black Activists Denounce Move Toward Ebonics in California Schools; San… A pilot program injecting controversial “Ebonics” slang into the curriculum of two San Bernardino, California public…nationalcenter.org

Education News: Could Ebonics Help Black Students in the Classroom? | Essence Education News: Could Ebonics Help Black Students in the Classroom?www.essence.com

Embracing Ebonics and Teaching Standard English This 31-year veteran of Oakland classrooms explains the effects of the Standard English Proficiency program, which…rethinkingschools.org

Cited Scholarly References

Johnson, K. P., Graves, S. L., Jr., Jones, M. A., Jr., Phillips, S., & Jacobs, M. (2023). Understanding African American Vernacular English and Reading Achievement: Implications for the Science of Reading. School Psychology, 38(1), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000516

Knapp, M. H. (2015). African American Vernacular English In the classroom: The attitudes and ideologies of urban educators toward AAVE. Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 964. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/964

Oakland School Board approves black English program and sparks nationwide debate. (1997). Jet, 91(8), 12.

Tryphenia, B. Peele-Eady & Michèle L.Foster (2018). The more things change, the more they stay the same: African-American English, language policy, and African-American learners. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 31:8, 652–666, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2018.1478155

Ramirez, D. J., Wiley, T., de Klerk, G., Lee, E., & Wright, W. E. (2005). Ebonics : The Urban Education Debate: Vol. 2nd ed. Multilingual Matters

Slavery in the American South. (n.d.). https://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/slavery-in-the-american-south

Washington, J. A., Lee-James, R., & Stanford, C. B. (2023). Teaching Phonemic and Phonological Awareness to Children Who Speak African American English. Reading Teacher, 76(6), 765–774. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2200

Thank you for reading my story.

Matthew Bamberg is an interdisciplinary educator with years of experience working with diverse students of all ages.