Humanities Homework Help

Monash University Significance of Language and Dialect Diversity Discussion

 

My 2nd short paper was about Ebonics in the classroom. It was interesting looking into different resources regarding Ebonics. Simply it is a combination of ebony and phonic which refers to the Black American English. The main argument about it was whether to identify it as an independent language (The School Board of Oakland claims) for the BA here in the US or consider it just a bad English, slave language, slang AA and so many ugly titles! There was a huge argument in America in 1996,97 and 98 until the linguistic society kind of solved this issue when they announced that AAVE is rule-governed and they explained some of these rules, you can refer back to Fromkin et al (2013) and the internet is full of resources too regarding Ebonics. They’ve mentioned the importance of Language and Dialect diversity to be recognised by the educators. As EFL/ESL educators or tutors, it is our responsibility to help our Ss increase their awareness of a certain language and its different dialects. We cannot tell them for example that he playing is a wrong sentence! Simply because he playing is an AAVE. So instead, we need to explain the reason/s why it can be considered correct. Think about it!