AAVE student attitudes

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AAVE student attitudes

Copied from John Rickford
Creole-List 4/29/98
I know of several references to studies of lg attitudes to AAVE--Lisa Green and I will discuss them in the chapter on "Attitudes to AAVE" chapter in our African American English and its Contexts book which is scheduled for publication by Cambridge U Press next year--but only one of them deals with high school students' attitudes. There is more on the attitudes of university students and teachers and community people. There is also lots of related material on lg attitudes in creole speaking communities, but that would take us too far afield.

In chronological order, the studies include:

Orlando TAYLOR 1973, "Teachers' attitudes toward Black and non-standard English as measured by the language attitude scale." In Roger W. Shuy and Ralph W. Fasold, eds. Language attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects, 174-201. Washington, DC: Georgetown U Press.
Mary Rhodes HOOVER 1978. "Community Attitudes toward Black English." Language in Society 7:65-87.
June JORDAN. 1985. "Nobody mean more to me than you and the future life of William Jordan." In On Call: Political Essays, 123-139. [Despite its enigmatic title. this deals with the negative reactions of univ students-presumably at UC Berkeley--to the "Black English" in The Color Purple, and how Jordan and the class confronted the issue head on. J's rules/guidelines for Black English (pp. 130-132) are not all reliable or accurate or valid, but her exposition of the class discussion of whether the students should use AAVE or SE to write the media to protest the killing of the brother of one of the students by police is one of the most powerful contributions to the study of lg attitudes I've read.]
Signithia FORDHAM and John U. OGBU. 1986. "Black students' school success: Coping with the "burden of 'Acting White'." The Urban Review 18.3:176--206. [Deals with language in passing, as part of a larger discussion of oppositional social identities and cultural frames of reference among African American high school students. You might want to follow up with more recent, separate work--books, articles--by both authors, including Fordham's recent book, Blacked Out.]
Barbara L. SPEICHER and Seane M. McMAHON. 1992. "Some African American perspectives on Black English Vernacular." Language in Society 21:383-407.
John R. RICKFORD 1992. "Grammatical variation and divergence in Vernacular Black English." In Marinel Gerritsen and Dieter Stein, eds. INternal and External Factors in Syntactic Change, 175-200. Berlin and New York, Mouton. [Attitudes of Af Am teenagers to AAVE are covered briefly--pp 190-191--but they are interesting, because they are all positive to AAVE and negative to SE, as reported by Fordham and Ogbu 1986, and in contrast to the oldest Af Am generation.]
John R. RICKFORD and Angela E. RICKFORD 1995. "Dialect readers revisited." Linguistics and Education 7.2: 107-128. [Includes, reports of attitudes of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students and their teachers to AAVE, especially in "Bridge" reader narratives.]

Note that this list does not include the reactions/opinions of individual linguists or writers about AAVE unless these are supported by studies or reports of the attitudes of AAVE students or teachers--again, that would take us too far afield. --John R.