Smitherman Article-African American English

Chapter 10 of Talkin the Talk is titled:African American Student Writers in the NAEP 1969-88/89. There are two Research Report articles within chapter 1o. Both are based on the NAEP's study of 17 year old African American student's writing .

The first is titled: Black English: Diverging or Converging (1992).

Lablov announced in mid 80's that black English was diverging from standard English. This came to be called the Divergence Hypothesis--that Black EnglishVenacular is on a separate course than white venacular. The purpose of Smitherman's research was to find out if Black English venacular in writing is also diverging.
Smitherman used the NAEP data: 2,764 essays written by 17 year olds in 1969, 1979, 1984, 1988/89 and analyzed and coded it for "linguistic variables comprising Black English."

Early findings (from 69-79):

• That the quantity of BEV was "generally low" in all years. (This matches the result of other researchers that have also found speech patterns are only "minimally"produced in writing.)

• Black English declined in the narrative essays from 1969-1979.
• Black English increased in1979 descriptive essays in some features(ex. irregular verbs)
  
• Copula patterns remained the same over the ten years.

Later Findings (84-88)

• supported convergence! clear decline in 4 variables( copula, EDmorpheme, S morphene, it-expletive)
  
• sum of all variables declined as well.
• Imaginative essay had less BE than the informative essays in 1979. This posed the question about whether or not the more familiar the the writing form, the less BE used. 1988 data conflicted with this conclusion.
  
• The more BEV the lower the rater score in 1969-79..but in 84 and 89 they were able to avoid this wit the switch to primary trait scoring. BEV did not affect the rater score.

My thoughts: I agree that these are healthy findings. It shows that oral dialects/culture can be respected yet people realize the importance of using "school" English when it is required/necessary. That is true of any type of slang. There is a time to use informal language and a time to use formal English.

The Blacker the Berry, The Sweeter the Juice (1994)

Chaplin found that cultural vocabulary, conversational tone and BEV were used more often by black students--this is support for a black discourse style of writing that Smitherman also explores.

Smitherman and his team created a list of 10 traits characteristic of black discourse. They coded 867 essays for these traits to come up with a discourse score. The team compared the discourse score to NAEP score to find the correlation (if any) between the discourse and the NAEP rating score.

Early Findings (69-79):

• No decline in field dependency.
• No correlation between BEV syntax and field dependency.
• No correlation between rater score and field dependency

Later Findings (84-88)

• The greater the African American discourse style--the better the score--regardless of the amount BEV.
• The less the African American discourse score, the lower the NAEP rating.

My thoughts:
This is so interesting. When I first read the ten characteristics of African American discourse, I was struck by how powerful they were so it is not a shock that the more of these characteristics used, the better the writing score. The attributes are: rhythmic, reference to color, race, ethnicity, use of proverbs, aphorisms, biblical verse, sermonic tone, direct conversational tone, cultural reference, ehnolinguistic idioms, verbal inventiveness, cultural values, field dependency. Definitely "strenghths to capitalize on." I also like how Smitherman reminds us that not until our students create the most powerful essay possible should we worry about editing for BEV...that is so true. Just as we edit for other mechanics...