Chapter five of The Skin That We Speak focuses on the stereotypes we place on people who sound different than we do. Language is a funny thing because within each language there are several dialects and each person within each dialect thinks they speak the “right” way. This is in our human nature. We have this thing called power that takes over us and we feel as though we HAVE to be right, even if we are wrong. We make other dialects feel inferior to because we are right.
What makes this situation even funnier is that Standard American English had to come from a dialect right? Whose dialect, and why that one? Who decided their dialect of the language was correct and proper? Maybe this is why AAVE is not acceptable in the classroom and looked down upon in business standards. But, why? Why can’t we accept it just as we have Cajun French in the classrooms in Louisiana?
What if we peal back these stereotypes? Would we all speak all dialects? How would our society function? What would be our “proper” language/dialect? Would AAVE be the Standard English? Or better yet, would Standard English even exist? What would we strive to teach in the classroom?
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ReplyDeleteLisa Delpit’s chapter “No Kinda Sense” is about the relation of her daughters ability to code-switch to how we can help our students feel comfortable in their learning environments by showing them that they can achieve. Lisa talks about how difficult it is for African Americans to succeed in the classroom when they don’t have anyone to follow. African Americans in the classrooms today are at the forefront of African American success. But these students need comfort and reassurance from their teachers that they can succeed and they are smart too. They need for their teachers to accept them and not look over them. As future teachers we should learn to incorporate African American culture into our lesson plans so that African Americans are interested in what they are learning. They don’t want to feel like we are overlooking them. We need to spend more time on the history and influence that African Americans have created. We need to incorporate more than just Rosa Parks and Martin Luther during Black History Month. Every month we should talk about the influence of African slaves who made a difference and proved themselves very intelligent, like Philis Wheatley, a famous poet who was a slave.
ReplyDeleteI said before in a previous response that I thought that one day all languages might jell together and make one universal language, but this chapter got me thinking that what if the opposite were to happen? The reason that AAE is considered okay to be spoken today is that we all understand it. But what if language went in the other direction and we got further and further from being able to understand each other? The reason that Standard English is enforced and noted as the Standard English is so that we will always have some sort of common ground. We have talked in class about the fact that no one speaks in perfect Standard English. The reason we have it is much like the reason everything scientific used to have to be translated to Latin, so that everyone around the world could understand it and use it for their own purposes.