Dialect Diversity in America by William Labov

Author:William Labov [Labov, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reference
ISBN: 9780813933269
Google: vrCKA3TDDrMC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 15863988
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2012-01-15T02:45:40+00:00

I screamed, “Tamara! I just killed a ghost!” Tamara came up. “That's no ghost. That's a wasps’ nest.” I said, “It's not wasps! It's a ghost's nest.” Tamara said, “It isn't a ghost. It's a wasps’ nest. There were wasps down here last spring. And they stung me too!”

Here a political issue in teaching reading comes to the fore. Do we halt the reading program to develop new skills in pronunciation, or do we focus on recognizing the meanings of the words? The approach taken in Portals recognizes that different teachers will come down on either side of the question. The teacher's edition includes for each graphic novel a letter on professional development addressed to teachers written and signed by me. The page on “Ghosts in the Basement” calls attention to the fact that this passage deals with the most difficult combinations of three consonants, at the beginnings and ends of words, ghost's nests and wasps’ nests. For many speakers of English, the -sts, -sps, and -sks combinations are a formidable obstacle. Even with much effort, tests is pronounced as tesses, or testes, or simply tesss, with a long s. This applies to speakers of Appalachian English as well as speakers of AAVE, and many speakers of mainstream dialects besides. It is up to the teachers to decide how much emphasis they want to place on pronunciation and how much on reading. They may take the route, “Learn to say it, and then to read it.” Or decide, “Learn to read it, and practice your pronunciation some other time.”

Teaching the Possessive to Speakers of AAVE

A crucial question asked in our research was whether there was a correlation between reading errors and the students’ use of AAVE features in speech. Table 2 shows that there is such a correlation—not large, but a significant one. The pre-test and post-test figures are taken from our RX test, a measure of the child's knowledge of sound-to-letter correspondences in decoding a standard reading of 555 words. Before instruction, there are significant correlations between the absence of verbal /s/, absence of possessive /s/, and absence of copula /s/ and the mean error rate on the RX test. After 24 to 40 hours of instruction, only the correlation with the copula remains.

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