Talking Appalachian, page 15
How much of this disadvantage can be attributed to dialect prejudice is hard to prove. In 2010 the student population of the two school divisions involved in this study were 95 and 97 percent Caucasian, and the majority of those students were the third, fourth, and fifth generations to be born and raised in central Appalachia. These students speak varieties of Appalachian English that include grammatical, phonological, and lexical features that would be considered incorrect on formal assessments; however, white vernacular speakers are not tracked in formal assessments because they are not considered a subgroup.22
SOL tests are written in SAE, which is considered the dialect of power in the United States. Consider, for example, a central Appalachian student who speaks a dialect variety of Appalachian English and frequently uses the nonstandard reflexive pronoun hisself or theirself in place of the standard himself and themselves with peers, who accept his usage as part of his identity, culture, and community. If that student uses those words on a formal writing assignment, however, an SOL prompt scorer reading for a student’s control of writing within the parameters of formal English could interpret such features of Appalachian English as a “lack of control of either the Written Expression or the Grammar/Usage/Mechanics domain.”23 (The reality may be that the student did not take the time to code-switch to more formal usage or that he used a more authentic voice for purposes of dialogue or expression.)
Another problem that arises for the vernacular dialect speaker is a multiple-choice test that lists answers in both SAE and a vernacular dialect. The following is a question from the spring 2009 Virginia SOL Grade 5 Writing Test, pertaining to the sentence “The model did not look like no sailboat I had ever seen”:
In sentence 11, did not look like no should be written:
F. did look like no
G. did not look like none
H. did not look like any
J. as it is
In some varieties of Appalachian English, the use of multiple negative markers—or “the marking of negative meaning at more than one point in the sentence”24—is a distinguishing dialect feature. Therefore, answers H and J would both seem right to the vernacular speaker. Without the skill of contrastive analysis—the ability to contrast the informal or vernacular pattern to that of SAE—the student would have to make a counterintuitive decision to mark H as the correct answer.
When secondary school teacher (and AWP research team member) Grace Bradshaw was told by her students that their method of choosing the right answer was to go with what “sounds right,” she explained to them why such a method could backfire: “Some people overcorrect their usage by saying things like ‘It happened to Marvin and I.’ In this case, the use of nominative case for the object of a preposition may sound ‘proper’ but it isn’t. Choosing the opposite of what ‘sounds right’ can be problematical.”25
When specific vernacular dialect patterns emerge frequently in student speech and writing, they can cause problems for students both in class and on SOL tests. Students’ disdain for writing and their frustration at being taught the “rules” of SAE can make English instruction even more challenging. Older students in particular have a difficult time accepting any perceived criticism of their dialects because they have a history of marked-up papers; consequently, any desire to write may be diminished by the time they reach high school or college. Anecdotally, we know that teachers, in turn, feel resentment about what they perceive as students’ “laziness” toward grammar instruction. This cycle of resentment can have far-reaching adverse effects for both students and teachers, and it reinforces ill-informed ideologies about vernacular dialects and the people who speak them. The AWP researchers thus sought to answer this question: Does the use of contrastive analysis as a method for teaching code switching improve students’ awareness of different grammar patterns and their test scores?
At the beginning of the academic year, the research team administered pretests (released versions of the SOL writing test) at the middle and high school levels to identify baseline scores. Team members also assigned and collected student writings from a variety of different literacy tasks, which they coded for the most common vernacular dialectal patterns; these patterns would then be addressed using contrastive analysis. A total of 110 students at the middle school level and 74 students at the secondary level participated in the study.
The team members then designed lessons for teaching code switching that were appropriate for their grade levels, their schedules (the time allotted for each class), and, most important, the vernacular dialect patterns present in their classes. Although the instruction had to be individualized for each class, the teachers uniformly created classrooms where changing the language of instruction was key to student awareness and shifting attitudes about language. This meant no longer using judgments such as “correct/incorrect,” “bad/good,” “wrong/right,” or “proper/ improper” to pit SAE against the students’ home dialects. It also meant creating age-appropriate terminology that students would understand as they entered into discussions about their dialects and reconceptualized writing and speech that had previously been marked as wrong by authority figures, such as formal versus informal or school versus home.
The research team drew on Wheeler and Swords’s contrastive analysis chart as a foundation for the many activities used over two semesters.26 The chart simply identifies a pattern and divides that pattern into informal and formal categories. The following example shows how this applies to forming the past tense of the irregular verb blow:
Informal
Formal
The wind blowed so hard house shook.
The wind blew so hard the the house shook.
Students are then asked to describe the patterns they see at work in these sentences as the starting point for a discussion of grammar rules. A student might write something like this:
Informal
Formal
The present-tense blow is used with -ed added (blowed).
The simple past tense of blow is created by changing the o to e (blew).
By using their own words to describe these patterns, the students move from what they intuitively know about language to an understanding of language variation and how it works in different settings and with different audiences.
The teacher-researchers also used classroom boards, cartoons with dialogue bubbles, games, videos, songs, and poetry to teach mini-lessons for each pattern they covered. Lizbeth Phillips designed an innovative “language monitor” booklet for her students, turning them into field researchers and participant-observers of language. The students were asked to observe and record a minimum of fifty informal patterns in their booklets, which they would then bring to the classroom for code switching:
Students carried their monitor booklets from class to class, and they listened closely for casual language they could record and convert to formal language. Word got around fast that you could catch certain teachers during lectures, hear patterns at lunch tables and on buses, and even catch a few each day by listening to the office on the public address system. They discovered that plenty of casual language was used in the local WalMart . . . , especially in the electronics or hunting departments or the checkout lanes. A group of basketball players started keeping their books on the bench because they heard plenty of casual language when grown-ups got upset enough to talk loudly or yell from the bleachers. By keeping the language monitor booklets, students began to differentiate between formal and casual language during classroom discussions.27
At the high school level, Grace Bradshaw’s students compared prose and poetry originally written in vernacular dialects with “standardized” versions, which prompted discussions about why dialects are important in building strong fictional characters. Students wrote personal narratives and journal entries in their vernacular dialects and then code-switched to SAE for formal essays and letters.28
The team encouraged students to discuss dialects and attitudes about them as part of the contrastive analysis instruction, realizing that it is important for students to understand the social implications of language. Bradshaw noted that teaching contrastive analysis can be “a bit of a prickly issue” because students are acutely aware of the stigma associated with their vernacular dialects, and any “perceived criticism . . . can inhibit their desire to express themselves in writing.”29
Results
Posttest scores revealed dramatic results after just one semester of teaching contrastive analysis. At the middle school level, the scores of students who were taught using the contrastive analysis method were compared with those of a control group taught using traditional or correctionist methods. The contrastive analysis group showed a 72 percent increase in posttest scores, compared with a 9 percent increase in the control group.30 At the secondary level, students showed an average 26 percent increase in test scores after two semesters of contrastive analysis instruction. These gains suggest that changing the language of instruction, as well as using methods that pair vernacular grammar patterns with those of SAE, is beneficial to central Appalachian students in terms of their performance on formal assessments.
The research team also concluded that teaching contrastive analysis changes the classroom environment for the better. Their students, according to Phillips, were “more confident, more productive and more engaged in their writing.”31 While it is never too late to teach code switching, they noted that raising awareness about code switching should begin in primary school, when language acquisition is well under way. Citing Donald Graves and Nancy Atwell, Peter Elbow notes that research has shown that children can be taught to write before they can read, and they become literate much more quickly and comfortably when they start by writing in their idiosyncratic dialects; even their “relationship to reading improves.”32
I would add that enlightening students about their linguistic histories is equally important; it teaches them why their dialects may be worth preserving.33 Most students are unaware of the artifacts in their speech patterns or why they use them. This kind of knowledge is a weapon against linguistic prejudice, a battle sword for their encounters with the words “bad grammar.”
The term code switching and the practice of teaching it are not without flaws or critics, and understandably so. The practice of changing one’s dialect to accommodate that of the so-called power structure may create an internal struggle of sorts, meaning that the act of code switching does not occur without cost to the speaker. In part II, Silas House tells the story of his parents learning to “pass” as they shifted from their eastern Kentucky dialect to better assimilate into the community of Flint, Michigan, where they moved in the 1950s. Many of the other authors in part II share hurtful experiences in which they were ridiculed yet chose to keep their authentic spoken dialects. The pedagogical practice described in this essay may invite varieties of Appalachian English into the classroom, but depending on the language of instruction, students may still perceive a marked separation and implied power difference between Appalachian English and SAE—a hierarchical difference in which SAE still reigns. Certainly, the high-stakes tests students must ultimately take reinforce this ideology.
Some researchers urge instructors to rethink this kind of separation in favor of a rhetorical strategy they call “code meshing,” in which vernacular and formal dialects “mesh” to create a “multilingual text,” giving vernacular and formal discourse equal space, even in high-stakes writing.34 Authors such as bell hooks and Geneva Smitherman, for example, successfully mesh black English and SAE in “high stakes scholarly writing for representation of voice.”35 In this way, students’ home dialects are given their rightful places alongside SAE.
In my own experience, my love of teaching writing returned once I began to learn more about sociolinguistics and its place in writing pedagogy. Enjoying writing is one thing, but teaching it is another, particularly for Appalachian students who may have had painful experiences related to the stigma associated with their speech patterns. A classroom that invites and encourages linguistic diversity can make a difference for the instructor, the student, and the community as a whole. Learning the why behind our dialects is the first step in respecting them all and the voiceplaces from which they originated. There is room enough for every voice on a piece of paper.
Notes
1. Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords, Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006), 57.
2. Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Dialects and Education: Issues and Answers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989).
3. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Andrea Fishman, Amish Literacy: What and How It Means (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1988); Amy D. Clark, “We Are Our Mothers’ Words: The Vernacular Literacy Practices of Three Generations of Central Appalachian Women” (PhD diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2005); Katherine Kelleher Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
4. Wolfram and Christian, Dialects and Education, 70.
5. Elaine Richardson, African-American Literacies (London: Routledge, 2003).
6. Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).
7. Anita Puckett, “Let the Girls Do the Spelling and Dan Will Do the Shooting: Literacy, Labor, and Identity in a Rural Appalachian Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 65 (1992): 138.
8. Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132.
9. Clark, “We Are Our Mothers’ Words”; Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia.
10. Clark, “We Are Our Mothers’ Words,” 176.
11. Lizbeth Phillips, “Helping Early Adolescents Identify Southern Appalachian Dialect Code-Switching Traits in Casual and Formal Writing” (unpublished manuscript, 2010).
12. Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords, “Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom,” Language Arts 81 (2004): 470–80; Androula Yiakoumetti, “Choice of Classroom Language in Bidialectal Communities: To Include or Exclude the Dialect?” Cambridge Journal of Education 37, no. 53 (2007): 51–66.
13. Wheeler and Swords, “Codeswitching: Tools of Language,” 472.
14. Yiakoumetti, “Choice of Classroom Language,” 54.
15. This research team included Grace Bradshaw, Elaine Childress, Amy Clark, Cynthia Newlon, and Lizbeth Phillips.
16. Conference on College Composition and Communication, “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” last modified August 29, 2006, http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf.
17. Wheeler and Swords, “Codeswitching: Tools of Language,” 471.
18. Michelle Croutteau, “Honoring Dialect and Culture: Pathways to Student Success on High-Stakes Writing Assessments,” English Journal 96, no. 4 (2007): 27–32.
19. Wheeler and Swords, “Codeswitching: Tools of Language.”
20. Yiakoumetti, “Choice of Classroom Language.”
21. The National Writing Project, founded by Jim Gray in 1973, funds hundreds of programs like the AWP across the United States. For more information, go to www.writingproject.org. The AWP was founded by Amy Clark in 2001 at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
22. Croutteau, “Honoring Dialect,” 27–32.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schillings-Estes, American English, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 379–80.
25. Grace Bradshaw, “Code-Switching Instruction Report” (unpublished document, May 2010).
26. Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords, Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2006), 86–87.
27. Phillips, “Helping Early Adolescents.”
28. Bradshaw, “Code-Switching Instruction Report.”
29. Ibid.
30. The control group and the contrastive analysis (CA) group were taught by different instructors; however, they were tested using the same instrument, and writing from both groups was coded by the same instructor. The average pretest score for the CA group (N = 70) was 11.46 (number of errors), compared with 3.23 for the posttest score. The average scores for the control group (N = 23) were 7.54 for the pretest and 6.85 for the posttest.
31. Phillips, “Helping Early Adolescents.”
32. Peter Elbow, “Inviting the Mother Tongue: Beyond ‘Mistakes,’ ‘Bad English,’ and ‘Wrong Language,’” Journal of Advanced Composition 192, no. 2 (1999): 385.
33. Michael Montgomery’s essay in this volume is a good resource for teachers who want to use a sociolinguistic approach to teaching writing; they can begin by incorporating their Appalachian students’ linguistic histories into the curriculum.
34. S. Michael-Luna and A. S. Canagarajah, “Multilingual Academic Literacies: Pedagogical Foundations for Code Meshing in Primary and Higher Education,” Journal of Applied Linguistics 4, no. 1 (2007): 55–77.
35. Ibid., 72–73.
Silence, Voice, and Identity among Appalachian College Women
Katherine Sohn
Like the contributors whose stories of language prejudice appear in part II of this volume, the nontraditional students from eastern Kentucky who took my composition classes in the early 1990s experienced discrimination on the basis of their gender and their dialect, and this figured strongly in their identities. These women were the subject of my doctoral study, for which I interviewed eight graduates of Preston College in Preston County, Kentucky (the names of both the college and the county are pseudonyms), to discover the effects of acquiring academic literacy and current literacy practices. From the eight, I chose three women for follow-up interviews and participant observation. These women taught me how coming to college helped them rise above cultural constraints to complete their degrees and take positions of responsibility in their communities. Ultimately, they disproved the adage that “whistlin’ women and crowin’ hens, always come to no good ends.”
