LANGUAGE AND THE NEGRO CHILD
Thomson, Peggy Bebie
Language and the Negro Child by PEGGIE BEBIE THOMSON For two years a controversial exploration of "a Negro language"— through a study of the dialect of poor Negro children from seven to fourteen...
...The recorder picked up comments like: "Ev'ry mornin' when I git up, dey a'ready be gone to school...
...No one," says Stewart, "uses the word chick who doesn't know the word 'girl.' It is the grammatical patterns, which are out of the child's awareness, which make for the real problems in education...
...He started to change things ("She asked Alfred if . . ." "The teacher gave...
...Freeman—eleven, Negro and poor—hesitated, blundered, and complained that he didn't hear...
...He thinks he doesn't have a family to tell about...
...Stewart is particularly interested in the form of it spoken by the child, for the youngster uses constructions learned from playmates which his elders, from exposure to middle-class influences, have dropped or forgotten...
...And, "He a police dog...
...Spotting such differences is simple ("How do you pronounce 'time...
...To convince fellow linguists, who are skeptical if not hostile, Stewart has collected hundreds of geographical and historical attestations...
...Next, using non-standard translations devised by Stewart, the teacher gave Freeman the first turn...
...The Stewart approach, if not program, remains very much alive, and it may well provide a breakthrough in education for the ghetto child...
...A child needs a sense of identity before he can stand up tall and speak out," Mrs...
...Almost all are native Washingtonians and Negroes...
...A boy who said, "Dey caught de ol' man 'cause he go round tellin lies," would be asked by the linguist, "Could you say 'went' . . . 'cause he went...
...No drill will give it...
...It is no wonder, when in fact many tests purporting to measure cognitive ability or language development are simply measuring how well he speaks standard English...
...In an 1830's journal from Georgia, a slave's request for soap is recorded as "[if] Missis only give we, we be so clean forever...
...The Language Arts teachers, who work in twenty-five of the city's poverty-area elementary schools, all speak fine standard English...
...To school themselves in "smallboy dialect"—the language of Washington's poor, Negro school children—this group of linguists listened to children talking at bus stops, in drug stores, on playgrounds...
...From there it would be relatively easy to develop teaching materials hitting at speech patterns where the greatest interference with standard English occurred...
...They are outgoing types with presence and flair...
...Or a mother and six children...
...However, the Urban Language Study concept of a separate Negro language has been controversial from the start...
...HEW's Office of Education is keenly interested...
...Kornhauser's teachers have welcomed the opportunities which the Urban Language Study drills, developed in 1966, gave them to speak about the informal and formal languages with their children, to pinpoint the differences and deal with them effectively...
...The originator of the Urban Language Study is William A. Stewart, a linguist who is convinced that a Negro language exists...
...He has found similar dialect forms, dating back more than a century* in use by children in cities all across the North and along the West Coast, where waves of Negroes migrated after World War II from the inland, rural South...
...To him it seems far more reasonable that the Negro child is hampered by a linguistic mismatch than that he simply makes many times the random mistakes of his middle-class white schoolmates...
...He needs to know, 'Who am 1?' He needs to know 'a family* can be an old man and a little boy...
...He scores badly, too, on tests in which white children excel...
...For all the affirmative response from Washington teachers, Stewart's toughest task has remained the problem of winning approval from professional colleagues...
...Teacher give him a note 'bout a school meetin' and he 'posed give it to his muvva to read...
...And it is his misfortune to be new to school and to new skills like reading just at the point when his language is PEGGIE BEBIE THOMSON is a free lance writer who has closely followed developments of the Urban Language Study program...
...Stewart chose Joey L. Dillard, a specialist in Caribbean linguistics, as director of the Urban Language Study...
...And there is no great problem involved in teaching the child new "school" versions of the words he knows...
...Even if true, so what...
...To underline the point, a colleague of Stewart gave a sentence repetition task to two boys, similar to one in the Stanford-Benet tests...
...These migrants were sharecroppers or laborers, and most of them, according to Stewart, descended from field slaves, who lacked the house servants' daily contact with white speakers and were forced—because their owners separated them from members of their own tribes—to speak a kind of pidgin English among themselves...
...Teachers in Kornhau-ser's program, which began in 1961, also with Ford funds, were agreed from the start that the child needs acceptance, warm and open, of his home language...
...The Negro child's grammar—his whole verb system, for example—is so different from standard English that he comes to his reading lessons almost as handicapped as if his home language were German...
...Then he said he didn't hear...
...For mobility and success in the mainstream culture he needs to learn it well...
...furthest from standard English...
...Language and the Negro Child by PEGGIE BEBIE THOMSON For two years a controversial exploration of "a Negro language"— through a study of the dialect of poor Negro children from seven to fourteen in Washington, D.C.—has developed some promising insights into ways of helping black youngsters to speak and read the standard English of their middle-class white schoolmates and hence to learn and function on a better level of communication...
...One class which was exposed to Obese Louise, the indefinite article drill (dialect uses only a instead of an), was heard chanting spontaneously out on the blacktop, "She ate an apple, an orange, an apricot, an oatmeal cookie, an ice cream bar, and an Almond Joy...
...He speaks the language in its least diluted form...
...They brought ghetto Negro children to the offices at the Center for Applied Linguistics to act as "informants...
...Language Arts teachers do not want to use drills exclusively but regard them as good reinforcements of their work...
...In the case of the Negro child practically everyone assumes he is just speaking English in a careless manner...
...The Negro dialect is similar enough to standard English so that the child understands when his teacher talks to him...
...Whether you measure simply by numbers of words or by the complexity of ideas, this child speaks on a par with the middle-class white child...
...The scholar who hoped to tap a lode by asking his informant what he didn't like about school was disappointed, linguistically, to get the answer, "Goin...
...With neighborhood cooperation, they set up an elaborate taping system in a house located in a slum area...
...Dillard devoted his first months to drafting proposals which brought in $450,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and $68,000 from the National Institute of Mental Health...
...Stewart has maintained that if a separate language exists, it should be possible to chart it—to write its "grammar...
...As she read her standard English sentences, Mike, an eight-year-old white middle-class boy, repeated each one after her—fluently and without a flaw...
...but, "He jist tired right now...
...However, before this occurred, its pioneering quest had prompted significant support from practical teachers in Washington's ghetto schools...
...Mike, on the other hand, hesitated...
...Being different does not necessarily mean being inferior...
...At least both teacher and student know that the German child's language is foreign...
...An earlier article of hers on this subject appeared in Potomac, the magazine supplement of The Washington Post...
...Now Dillard has been replaced by a new director...
...He needs all the help he can get...
...He needs exposure to the new language in stories, poems, and plays, in structured situations and drills...
...And he has possibly even more cause to be baffled...
...No one argues that the Negro child does not need to learn standard English...
...He growlin...
...Hill emphasizes...
...Not every office conversation was so successful...
...The boy's reply: "No, 'cause he do it alia time...
...The point is that he must start with the language system he has...
...They have nothing to do with grades or with day-long classroom discipline...
...Currently, the Urban Language Study, a pilot program of the Center for Applied Linguistics, is stymied because of a recent drastic change of focus -—to include white dialects—which has left even its financial sponsors confused...
...Tracy Hill, a teacher with a muscular fingersnap like a firecracker, teaches at Scott Montgomery, around the corner from where she was born...
...She ask Alfred did he want to go to the movies...
...In 1965 the Ford Foundation provided $125,000 to explore Stewart's concept...
...On a later page, a temporary illness is recorded without the be—"She jist sick for a little while...
...This dialectologist requires that massive statistical evidence be collected before committing the project to the position that a consistent kind of Negro dialect exists, and he is now engaged in the study of white dialects...
...There, of course, both the instructions and the sentences are given in standard English...
...This language is closer to Liberian pidgin or to Jamaican Creole than it is to the British dialects from which standard American English (and some non-standard white dialects, as well) descended...
...They just meet with class after class in half-hour sessions, winning children to speak in a language which just about everyone else assumes is their mother tongue...
...A Washington child today makes this same distinction: "My uncle be tired all the time...
...Do you say 'frying pan,' 'skillet,' or 'spider...
...The slaves picked up the pidgin in Africa or in staging areas in the Caribbean before being shipped to this country...
...Stewart has left the study and is gathering data on his own to support the contention that urban Negro language-learning difficulties are much the same across the nation...
...Slang, because it is something over which its users have conscious control, is not important either...
...Otherwise he thinks a family has to be the mother-father-sister-brother-baby in his reader...
...And Louis H. Korn-hauser, who heads a special local Language Arts Program devoted to children's oral language, offers a testing ground in classrooms already congenial to the two-languages idea...
...Other drills concentrate on verbs, particularly forms of "to be" and endings required by person and tense changes, and on double negatives...
...Some middle-class Negro teachers, at least initially, were hostile...
...The children have responded well...
...Some drills work on pronouns, to compensate for dialect patterns like "he—instead of his—hair" or "he eyes" and on plurals (dialect puts an "s" on bottles but may drop it on "six bottle...
...He needs encouragement to speak out—and a taste of success...
...From the start both men ruled out pronunciation and vocabulary as areas of primary interest...
...But the burden of translating and then re-translating before he replies makes him slow...
...The idea of an ethnic difference violates the American dream of togetherness," Stewart says...
...From" higher levels of the school system Stewart has had strong support...
...Charlotte Brooks, the knowledgeable head of English in the District of Columbia schools, is striving to get all the pertinent instruction and materials she can for her teachers...
...He recited after her fluently: "Where Mary bruvva goin' wif a raggedy umbrella an' a old raincoat...
...This contact language then became the native tongue of their descendants and the language under study today...
...They tell us father is a surly brute who doesn't talk to his children...
...Armchair sociologists," says Dillard, "try to tell us the Negro child is nonverbal...
...It just isn't so...
...It was Kornhauser who first urged Stewart to undertake his preparation of a grammar...
...If they said they had not "heard" the various speech patterns, Stewart told them to go back to the classroom and use their ears...
Vol. 32 • February 1968 • No. 2
