Will Cunningham
Annotated Bibliography: Students’ Right to Their Own Language
The topic I chose to research is worthy of further study because it is at once a continuation of a long standing humanitarian conversation as well as a matter of practical concern. According to St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing, even classrooms that at first appear homogenous in makeup will demonstrate a multiplicity of racial, social, and religious diversity. Because these are topics often obliquely addressed in a classroom, understanding how to nurture a comfortable relationship between idea and language for students just entering the college level is important. What the debate surrounding NCTE’s resolution on students’ right to their own language has shown is that allowing, justifying, and encouraging regional or home dialectics to persist in a classroom both reaffirms a student’s ideas while also allowing them to more comfortably approach the often intimidating discourse code of college English. This scholarship allows us as teachers to approach our students with more understanding, to impact them in ways that would heretofore be inaccessible. An awareness of certain dialects and their impact on certain learning modules is closely related. Students are able to think critically without concern for local issues – but are then able to translate (or code switch) those critical thoughts into standard English. This field should continue to be studied because we all encounter diversity in our classrooms – and all struggle with how to best address it.
Baron, Dennis. “Non-Standard English, Composition, and the Academic Establishment.” College English. NCTE. Vol. 37, No 2. 1975.
It should first be noted that this article emerged a year following the affirmation of home language by the NCTE. This piece succinctly highlights the perceived problems and difficulties of integrating the home language into the collegiate classroom in the 1970’s. Baron approaches the issue by considering the nuanced relationship between writing linguistic codes and non-standard dialects. While Baron notes “Black English” as the ethnic code that is most prescient to American Academic English, he focuses mainly on the theoretical relationship between spoken and written codes. He encourages the composition teacher to “focus on the student’s attention on the intelligibility requirements of the written code, rather than to attack the student’s use of language. The arbitrary standards of correctness must be ignored, the relative means of effectiveness must be stressed, the student must develop a self confident attitude toward his language” (182). This piece is a useful point of departure for this subject (following the NCTE affirmation) because I think it precludes the direction most race-related composition pedagogies have followed – that of affirming awareness of global issues while using dialectic language to arrive at an understanding of standardized English.
Hill, Dara. “Code Switching Pedagogies and African American Student Voices: Acceptance and Resistance.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. International Reading Association. Vol. 53, No. 2. October 2009. Pp. 120-131.
The general thrust of this article is that a student’s home language is strongly linked to a student’s personal identity. Hill corresponded with a suburban high school English teacher who recently experienced an influx of African American students into his classroom. Instead of resisting AAVE, Mr. Lehrer documented his classroom approach to fostering a sense of approval fro vernacular English. Lehrer encouraged the use of home language in poetry, informal responses to literature, and a personal journal. Simultaneously, Lehrer enforced a strict “error free” final draft for all students along with formal responses and standardized writing assessments. Hill concludes that Lehrer’s “experiment” not only gave students access to the dominant discourse of academic language, but also allowed them to address many larger issues by an informal use of their home language. While this piece might prove immediately useful to high school teachers in an urban setting, I think the practices of Lehrer are equally as viable for freshman composition courses, if not more. His efforts in the classroom provide not just a sustainable model for practically addressing the situation, but Hill is able to situate the case study into praxis by highlighting the underlying theory at work in his classroom.
Jackson, Austin and Geneva Smitherman. “’Black People tend to talk eubonics’: Race and Curricular Diversity in Higher Education.” Strategies for Teach First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane Roen…[et al.] NCTE. Illinois: Urbana. 2002.
This article is directed specifically towards TA’s from a minority background – and while specifically racialized, this article is probably applicable to all types of social minorities who might face difficulties in the classroom. The article begins with the assertion that many European American students bring with them to the classroom race-related stereotypes – and those often surface if and when they have an African American teacher. The article cites three examples of incidents that African American TA’s faced in a classroom environment where white students took issue with the teaching of AAVE as a part of a literature-based composition course. While the author’s primary intention of this article does not seem to be to pass along a fix-all solution, the issue is left largely unresolved. The final sentence, “It is an issue that universities, eager to flaunt their commitment to diversity, need to be about the business of addressing,” while true, is more a gateway for further discussion than solidified resolutions.
Kinloch, Valerie. “Revisiting the Promise of Students’ Right to their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies.” CCCC (2005): 83-113.
This article is perhaps the most practically useful article in this bibliography. While Kinloch certainly does not ignore the theoretical paradigms and political implications to NCTE’s resolution, she manages to focus on the practicality of adopting this resolution in a classroom. Her article is divided into four subgroups. She first revisits the historical significance of NCTE’s resolution. This overview highlights the major critical texts, as well as outlining the overall discussion, of the resolution. She then offers several “vignettes” from the classroom. These portraits of the resolution at work demonstrate the various ways in which students engage the pedagogical practices supported by the resolution. She then offers strategies in the classroom that affirm composition teachers can employ to holistically embrace this resolution. Finally, she proposes more theoretical ways in which teachers can “affirm and support the expressive rights of students” (85). The third section, where Kinloch offers strategies for transforming your class (notably not strategies to incorporate – to incorporate is not the goal, the goal is to transform the classroom worldview), is perhaps the most useful for new composition teachers. She gives seven specific “instances” where STROL was made evident and discussed the ways in which she had nurtured that culture in her own classroom. This article would be a great jumpstart to anyone interested in reading more about the subject, or someone want a solid, practical application of the pedagogical theory.
Kynard, Carmen. “’I Want to Be African’: In search of a Black Radical Tradition/African-American-vernacularized Paradigm for ‘Students’ Rights to Their Own Language,’ Critical Literacy, and ‘Class Politics.’” College English. Vol. 69, No. 4. March 2007.
Kynard attempts to revisit the rhetoric specific to the Black Power movement in the 1960’s and early 70’s in order to rebuild a theoretical framework for AAVE. Kynard presents a detailed theoretical history of the influence of the Black Power movement on language in order to “present a more dynamic, multidimensional and complex process for how class, culture, African origins, race, and black activism/radicalism were framed.” And with this framework in place, Kynard embarks on a remarkably close reading of Parks’s Class Politics, in which he uses class struggle to enforce a new framework for issues of AAVE in the classroom. Kynard’s resolution, though, takes an unexpected (though not unneeded) turn towards combating forms of institutionalized racism through an AAVE critical pedagogy. While Kynards conclusion is rhetorically effective, it offers little in the way of practical application.
Mahiri, Jabari. “Street Scripts: African American Youth Writing About Crime and Violence.” What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Loves of Urban Youth. Ed. Colin Lankshear, Michele KNobel, Chris Gugum, Michael Peters. Peter Lang Publishing: New York. 2004.
Mahiri’s definition of “Street Scripts” comes from an encounter he had with urban, African American high schoolers who wrote provocative texts from “personal perspectives on crime and violence that counterpose the way these youth are portrayed in politics and the media.” Mahiri argues that one has to engage these texts from the perspective of their home environment, and calls attention to the fact that they are “scripts:” an actual, realized medium that these children use to formulate and appropriate expression. His goal, by treating these scripts as authentic forms of expression, is to change their message. Mahiri then goes on to document specific students and their engagement with these scripts. Mahiri asserts that while their scripts push the bounds of socially acceptable subject matter and academic form, they challenge “some of the socially constructed obstacles to cultural difference that use literacy as well as other institutionalized mechanisms to regulate access to societal resources.” Ultimately, Mahiri concludes that these scripts – while both disturbing and concerning – “teach us that the struggle to save this generation of youth is synonymous with the struggle to save ourselves.” This piece might be particularly useful for teachers who constantly engage students in an urban setting. But having encountered urban students in the freshman classroom before who have come from stigmatized backgrounds, this article is equally useful for composition teachers who encounter racialized violence in the freshman composition course.
NCTE. “Resolution on the Student’s Right to Their Own Language.” NCTE Annual Business Meeting. New Orleans, LA. 1974. http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/righttoownlanguage
This short resolution – which reads as a manifesto – is the point of departure for the formal academic discussion of the place of the home language in the classroom. The resolution was formed out of concern for the tendency of the American academic culture to ostracize nonstandard dialects from academic language. The goal of the resolution was to affirm the place of the home language in the classroom by establishing the idea that academic language and home language are not mutually exclusive constructs. This position was reaffirmed in 2003 by encouraging all teachers to familiarize themselves with the original resolution.
Smith, Allen. “No One Has a Right to Their Own Language.” College Composition and Communication. Vol. 27, No. 2. May 1976.
Smith’s article is a clear and immediate rebuttal to the NCTE’s resolution for a student’s right to their own language. This is important for a study in this field, for it was not the only academic outcry to the resolution and offers a sounding board for the major development of the pedagogy to interact with. Smith argues that writing is not a form of self expression and that if students are taught upon their arrival in the freshman class that every piece of writing has an audience, then certain voices are only appropriate for that audience. Smith centers his argument around socio-economics – that if students are going to college to get better jobs than their parents then they need to learn the language that will allow them access to the gatekeepers of those jobs. He argues that “Students do not have a right to their own language; they only have a right to learn a language which will produce the proper effects on whatever audience they may speak or write to. There is no correct standard of American English (beyond a certain number of completely negative rules), but there are certain techniques of tightness, clarity, precision, specificity, and logic which can be borrowed from the best surviving examples of the past and which may on occasion work in something the student is writing for a test audience in his classroom.”
Smithernam, Geneva and Victor Villanueva. “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC.” Language Diversity in the Classroom. Urbana, Il: NCTE, 2003.
This book chapter, as one might guess by the title, situates the CCCC’s historical role and development in controversies surrounding students’ right to their own language as well as highlighting the advocacy of the CCCC’s in the development of pedagogical practices. The article chronicles the development from its earliest inception, an article by Donal Lloyd on the presence of various dialects in an English classroom, to the current issues surrounding the theory (current for 2003) with the controversy surrounding California’s “English Only” movement. The article, though, maintains a healthy balance between historical perspective and overviews of key theoretical advancements. For example, while the article addresses the historical development of the growing awareness of other dialects in the classroom other than AAVE in the 1990’s, the article also succinctly cites the theoretical paradigms that were adopted at the 1998 CCCC convention to broaden then definitions surrounding “home languages.” Much like the rest of the articles from the last decade, though, this article’s ending is very open-ended. The article calls for a vague continuation of these practices while lauding itself as the progenitor and keeper of the student’s right to his or her own language.
Young, Vershawn. "Nah, We Straight: An Argument Against Code-Switching" JAC 29.1-2 (2010): 49-76.
Young makes his objective clear – to argue against the academic definition and treatment of code switching. He (importantly) delineates this from Spanglish or Black Standard English that is sometimes lumped together with code-switching. Young is particularly interested in the switching of languages, or the linguistic translation of AAVE to standard academic language. Young, instead, argues for codemeshing, or “blending dos idiomas or copping enough standard English to really make yo’ AAE be Da Bomb.” Young begins by contextualizing the historical and discursive theories behind code switching. He very seamlessly relates the conversation back to Du Boisian “Double consciousness” and the problems that arise from seeing oneself as both black and American. Young argues that double consciousness is still propagated in the classroom – and that this standard perpetuates racist formulas of education. Young then argues that the 1974 NCTE “The Students’ Right to Their Own Language” further propagates the “bias against the working-class, women, and the ongoing racism against the language habits of blacks and other non-white peoples.” Young calls for code meshing as the solution for a – at best – marginally acceptable pedagogical practice in code switching. He argues that code meshing allows students to become more effective communicators by doing what “we all do best, what comes naturally: blending, merging, meshing dialects.”
Annotated Bibliography: Students’ Right to Their Own Language
The topic I chose to research is worthy of further study because it is at once a continuation of a long standing humanitarian conversation as well as a matter of practical concern. According to St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing, even classrooms that at first appear homogenous in makeup will demonstrate a multiplicity of racial, social, and religious diversity. Because these are topics often obliquely addressed in a classroom, understanding how to nurture a comfortable relationship between idea and language for students just entering the college level is important. What the debate surrounding NCTE’s resolution on students’ right to their own language has shown is that allowing, justifying, and encouraging regional or home dialectics to persist in a classroom both reaffirms a student’s ideas while also allowing them to more comfortably approach the often intimidating discourse code of college English. This scholarship allows us as teachers to approach our students with more understanding, to impact them in ways that would heretofore be inaccessible. An awareness of certain dialects and their impact on certain learning modules is closely related. Students are able to think critically without concern for local issues – but are then able to translate (or code switch) those critical thoughts into standard English. This field should continue to be studied because we all encounter diversity in our classrooms – and all struggle with how to best address it.
Baron, Dennis. “Non-Standard English, Composition, and the Academic Establishment.” College English. NCTE. Vol. 37, No 2. 1975.
It should first be noted that this article emerged a year following the affirmation of home language by the NCTE. This piece succinctly highlights the perceived problems and difficulties of integrating the home language into the collegiate classroom in the 1970’s. Baron approaches the issue by considering the nuanced relationship between writing linguistic codes and non-standard dialects. While Baron notes “Black English” as the ethnic code that is most prescient to American Academic English, he focuses mainly on the theoretical relationship between spoken and written codes. He encourages the composition teacher to “focus on the student’s attention on the intelligibility requirements of the written code, rather than to attack the student’s use of language. The arbitrary standards of correctness must be ignored, the relative means of effectiveness must be stressed, the student must develop a self confident attitude toward his language” (182). This piece is a useful point of departure for this subject (following the NCTE affirmation) because I think it precludes the direction most race-related composition pedagogies have followed – that of affirming awareness of global issues while using dialectic language to arrive at an understanding of standardized English.
Hill, Dara. “Code Switching Pedagogies and African American Student Voices: Acceptance and Resistance.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. International Reading Association. Vol. 53, No. 2. October 2009. Pp. 120-131.
The general thrust of this article is that a student’s home language is strongly linked to a student’s personal identity. Hill corresponded with a suburban high school English teacher who recently experienced an influx of African American students into his classroom. Instead of resisting AAVE, Mr. Lehrer documented his classroom approach to fostering a sense of approval fro vernacular English. Lehrer encouraged the use of home language in poetry, informal responses to literature, and a personal journal. Simultaneously, Lehrer enforced a strict “error free” final draft for all students along with formal responses and standardized writing assessments. Hill concludes that Lehrer’s “experiment” not only gave students access to the dominant discourse of academic language, but also allowed them to address many larger issues by an informal use of their home language. While this piece might prove immediately useful to high school teachers in an urban setting, I think the practices of Lehrer are equally as viable for freshman composition courses, if not more. His efforts in the classroom provide not just a sustainable model for practically addressing the situation, but Hill is able to situate the case study into praxis by highlighting the underlying theory at work in his classroom.
Jackson, Austin and Geneva Smitherman. “’Black People tend to talk eubonics’: Race and Curricular Diversity in Higher Education.” Strategies for Teach First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane Roen…[et al.] NCTE. Illinois: Urbana. 2002.
This article is directed specifically towards TA’s from a minority background – and while specifically racialized, this article is probably applicable to all types of social minorities who might face difficulties in the classroom. The article begins with the assertion that many European American students bring with them to the classroom race-related stereotypes – and those often surface if and when they have an African American teacher. The article cites three examples of incidents that African American TA’s faced in a classroom environment where white students took issue with the teaching of AAVE as a part of a literature-based composition course. While the author’s primary intention of this article does not seem to be to pass along a fix-all solution, the issue is left largely unresolved. The final sentence, “It is an issue that universities, eager to flaunt their commitment to diversity, need to be about the business of addressing,” while true, is more a gateway for further discussion than solidified resolutions.
Kinloch, Valerie. “Revisiting the Promise of Students’ Right to their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies.” CCCC (2005): 83-113.
This article is perhaps the most practically useful article in this bibliography. While Kinloch certainly does not ignore the theoretical paradigms and political implications to NCTE’s resolution, she manages to focus on the practicality of adopting this resolution in a classroom. Her article is divided into four subgroups. She first revisits the historical significance of NCTE’s resolution. This overview highlights the major critical texts, as well as outlining the overall discussion, of the resolution. She then offers several “vignettes” from the classroom. These portraits of the resolution at work demonstrate the various ways in which students engage the pedagogical practices supported by the resolution. She then offers strategies in the classroom that affirm composition teachers can employ to holistically embrace this resolution. Finally, she proposes more theoretical ways in which teachers can “affirm and support the expressive rights of students” (85). The third section, where Kinloch offers strategies for transforming your class (notably not strategies to incorporate – to incorporate is not the goal, the goal is to transform the classroom worldview), is perhaps the most useful for new composition teachers. She gives seven specific “instances” where STROL was made evident and discussed the ways in which she had nurtured that culture in her own classroom. This article would be a great jumpstart to anyone interested in reading more about the subject, or someone want a solid, practical application of the pedagogical theory.
Kynard, Carmen. “’I Want to Be African’: In search of a Black Radical Tradition/African-American-vernacularized Paradigm for ‘Students’ Rights to Their Own Language,’ Critical Literacy, and ‘Class Politics.’” College English. Vol. 69, No. 4. March 2007.
Kynard attempts to revisit the rhetoric specific to the Black Power movement in the 1960’s and early 70’s in order to rebuild a theoretical framework for AAVE. Kynard presents a detailed theoretical history of the influence of the Black Power movement on language in order to “present a more dynamic, multidimensional and complex process for how class, culture, African origins, race, and black activism/radicalism were framed.” And with this framework in place, Kynard embarks on a remarkably close reading of Parks’s Class Politics, in which he uses class struggle to enforce a new framework for issues of AAVE in the classroom. Kynard’s resolution, though, takes an unexpected (though not unneeded) turn towards combating forms of institutionalized racism through an AAVE critical pedagogy. While Kynards conclusion is rhetorically effective, it offers little in the way of practical application.
Mahiri, Jabari. “Street Scripts: African American Youth Writing About Crime and Violence.” What They Don’t Learn in School: Literacy in the Loves of Urban Youth. Ed. Colin Lankshear, Michele KNobel, Chris Gugum, Michael Peters. Peter Lang Publishing: New York. 2004.
Mahiri’s definition of “Street Scripts” comes from an encounter he had with urban, African American high schoolers who wrote provocative texts from “personal perspectives on crime and violence that counterpose the way these youth are portrayed in politics and the media.” Mahiri argues that one has to engage these texts from the perspective of their home environment, and calls attention to the fact that they are “scripts:” an actual, realized medium that these children use to formulate and appropriate expression. His goal, by treating these scripts as authentic forms of expression, is to change their message. Mahiri then goes on to document specific students and their engagement with these scripts. Mahiri asserts that while their scripts push the bounds of socially acceptable subject matter and academic form, they challenge “some of the socially constructed obstacles to cultural difference that use literacy as well as other institutionalized mechanisms to regulate access to societal resources.” Ultimately, Mahiri concludes that these scripts – while both disturbing and concerning – “teach us that the struggle to save this generation of youth is synonymous with the struggle to save ourselves.” This piece might be particularly useful for teachers who constantly engage students in an urban setting. But having encountered urban students in the freshman classroom before who have come from stigmatized backgrounds, this article is equally useful for composition teachers who encounter racialized violence in the freshman composition course.
NCTE. “Resolution on the Student’s Right to Their Own Language.” NCTE Annual Business Meeting. New Orleans, LA. 1974. http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/righttoownlanguage
This short resolution – which reads as a manifesto – is the point of departure for the formal academic discussion of the place of the home language in the classroom. The resolution was formed out of concern for the tendency of the American academic culture to ostracize nonstandard dialects from academic language. The goal of the resolution was to affirm the place of the home language in the classroom by establishing the idea that academic language and home language are not mutually exclusive constructs. This position was reaffirmed in 2003 by encouraging all teachers to familiarize themselves with the original resolution.
Smith, Allen. “No One Has a Right to Their Own Language.” College Composition and Communication. Vol. 27, No. 2. May 1976.
Smith’s article is a clear and immediate rebuttal to the NCTE’s resolution for a student’s right to their own language. This is important for a study in this field, for it was not the only academic outcry to the resolution and offers a sounding board for the major development of the pedagogy to interact with. Smith argues that writing is not a form of self expression and that if students are taught upon their arrival in the freshman class that every piece of writing has an audience, then certain voices are only appropriate for that audience. Smith centers his argument around socio-economics – that if students are going to college to get better jobs than their parents then they need to learn the language that will allow them access to the gatekeepers of those jobs. He argues that “Students do not have a right to their own language; they only have a right to learn a language which will produce the proper effects on whatever audience they may speak or write to. There is no correct standard of American English (beyond a certain number of completely negative rules), but there are certain techniques of tightness, clarity, precision, specificity, and logic which can be borrowed from the best surviving examples of the past and which may on occasion work in something the student is writing for a test audience in his classroom.”
Smithernam, Geneva and Victor Villanueva. “The Historical Struggle for Language Rights in CCCC.” Language Diversity in the Classroom. Urbana, Il: NCTE, 2003.
This book chapter, as one might guess by the title, situates the CCCC’s historical role and development in controversies surrounding students’ right to their own language as well as highlighting the advocacy of the CCCC’s in the development of pedagogical practices. The article chronicles the development from its earliest inception, an article by Donal Lloyd on the presence of various dialects in an English classroom, to the current issues surrounding the theory (current for 2003) with the controversy surrounding California’s “English Only” movement. The article, though, maintains a healthy balance between historical perspective and overviews of key theoretical advancements. For example, while the article addresses the historical development of the growing awareness of other dialects in the classroom other than AAVE in the 1990’s, the article also succinctly cites the theoretical paradigms that were adopted at the 1998 CCCC convention to broaden then definitions surrounding “home languages.” Much like the rest of the articles from the last decade, though, this article’s ending is very open-ended. The article calls for a vague continuation of these practices while lauding itself as the progenitor and keeper of the student’s right to his or her own language.
Young, Vershawn. "Nah, We Straight: An Argument Against Code-Switching" JAC 29.1-2 (2010): 49-76.
Young makes his objective clear – to argue against the academic definition and treatment of code switching. He (importantly) delineates this from Spanglish or Black Standard English that is sometimes lumped together with code-switching. Young is particularly interested in the switching of languages, or the linguistic translation of AAVE to standard academic language. Young, instead, argues for codemeshing, or “blending dos idiomas or copping enough standard English to really make yo’ AAE be Da Bomb.” Young begins by contextualizing the historical and discursive theories behind code switching. He very seamlessly relates the conversation back to Du Boisian “Double consciousness” and the problems that arise from seeing oneself as both black and American. Young argues that double consciousness is still propagated in the classroom – and that this standard perpetuates racist formulas of education. Young then argues that the 1974 NCTE “The Students’ Right to Their Own Language” further propagates the “bias against the working-class, women, and the ongoing racism against the language habits of blacks and other non-white peoples.” Young calls for code meshing as the solution for a – at best – marginally acceptable pedagogical practice in code switching. He argues that code meshing allows students to become more effective communicators by doing what “we all do best, what comes naturally: blending, merging, meshing dialects.”