The skin that we speak : thoughts on language and culture in the classroom

Title:

Author:

Delpit, Lisa D.

ISBN:

9781595583505

Publication Information:

New York : New Press, 2008.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 229 pages ; 21 cm

General Note:

"Originally published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2002"--Title page verso

Source of cataloging data: WCP

Abstract:

"At a time when children are written off in our schools because they do not speak formal English, and when the class- and race-biased language used to describe those children determines their fate, The Skin That We Speakoffers a cutting-edge look at crucial educational issues

Now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Delpit revisiting the politics of language instruction for students of color, The Skin That We Speaktakes the discussion of language in the classroom beyond the highly charged war of idioms - in which "English only" really means standard English only - and presents today's teachers and parents with a thoughtful exploration of the varieties of English we speak and the layers of politics, power, and identity that those forms carry

With groundbreaking work from Herbert Kohl, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Victoria Purcell-Gates, and Lisa Delpit herself, the book also includes classics by Geneva Smitherman and Asa Hilliard III. Hot-button topics range from Ebonics to the creation of a national public policy on making English the official language of our classrooms.

Contents:

Ovuh Dyuh / Ebonics : a case history / No kinda sense / Trilingualism / Some basic sociolinguistic concepts / Language, culture, and the assessment of African American children / I ain't writin' nuttin' : permissions to fail and demands to succeed in urban classrooms / " ... as soon as she opened her mouth!" : issues of language, literacy, and power / Topsy-turvies : teacher talk and student talk / Toward a national public policy on language / The clash of "common senses" : two African American women become teachers / "We don't talk right. You ask him." / Appendix : Linguistic Society of America resolution on the Oakland "ebonics" issue.

Subject Term:

Native language and education.

English language -- Study and teaching.

English language -- Dialects -- Social aspects.

Multicultural education.

Language policy.

Added Author:

Delpit, Lisa D.

Dowdy, Joanne Kilgour.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Aurora Downtown	Book	LC201.5 .S55 2008	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

In this powerful book, bestselling author and MacArthur "genius" Lisa Delpit joins with other education experts to unpack the complex relationship between language and power in the classroom

In what Black Issues Book Review calls "an essential text," leading education scholars illuminate the crucial role of language in the learning process, uncovering the biases and stereotypes associated with the varieties and dialects of English we speak. With diverse perspectives on topics such as the need for linguistically differentiated instruction, code switching, and the role of personal identity in the classroom, The Skin That We Speak is a vital look at crucial educational issues.

Edited by bestselling author and MacArthur fellow Lisa Delpit and education professor Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, the book includes an extended new piece by Delpit herself, as well as groundbreaking work by Herbert Kohl, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Victoria Purcell-Gates, and classic texts by Geneva Smitherman and Asa Hilliard.

When children are written off in our schools because they do not speak formal English, and when the class- and race-biased language used to describe those children determines their fate, everyone loses. The Skin That We Speak is a much-needed analysis of the ways that classrooms can accommodate everyone, to the benefit of students, educators, and society.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

These 13 essays by teachers offer firsthand perspectives on the provocative issue of dialects in the classroom a controversy sparked by the notorious ebonics debates of the 1990s. Delpit (Other People's Children) and Dowdy, education professors at Georgia State University, have gathered both new and previously published pieces by distinguished educators like Herbert Kohl, Jules Henry and Victoria Purcell-Gates. The collection opens with personal essays by two teachers Dowdy, schooled in Trinidad, and Ernie Smith, from South Central Los Angeles who describe their own struggles to come to terms with the formal language of school and the nonvalidated language of home. Other essays move into the classroom, looking at how different teachers address questions of dialect and how students experience their instruction. The classrooms described range from kindergarten to high school to teacher training. While most of the essays focus on African-American language, there's also a piece by Michael Stubbs on students with working-class English or Scottish vernaculars in the U.K. and an article by Purcell-Gates that follows a poor white Appalachian boy in the public school system. Although these lucid, accessible pieces speak most directly to teachers and would-be teachers (including specific suggestions for instruction), the issues are broad enough to attract more general readers, especially parents concerned about questions of power and control in public schools. (Mar. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This collection of essays by educators and linguists examines attitudes about speech that assign social hierarchy based on language. Dowdy, a Trinidadian, recalls the "colonized speaker" using the Queen's English to negotiate success while channeling real emotions through the native tongue, and Delpit explores the easy use of "code switching" among black youth speaking standard English and Ebonics as the occasion dictates. Among the other essayists, Geneva Smitherman advocates a national language policy urging teachers to respect the language spoken by their students; Asa Hilliard recounts the troubling history of prejudicial stereotyping of black Americans' speech; a British linguist explores the definition of standard and nonstandard English and the connections between dialects, accents, and social class in England; another linguist explores how the language of marginalized lower-income groups, including Appalachian whites, affects the educational treatment and expectations of teachers and school administrators. The book is aimed at helping educators learn to make use of cultural differences apparent in language to educate children, but its content guarantees broader appeal. --Vanessa Bush

Library Journal Review

When Delpit's 11-year-old daughter transferred from a small private school as its only African American female to a predominantly African American public-charter school, she switched dramatically from Standard to African American English. For her part, Dowdy was forced by her mother to imitate British English while growing up in Trinidad. Using these experiences as context, MacArthur award winner Delpit (Other People's Children; Ctr. for the Study of Adult Literacy; Georgia State Univ.) and Dowdy (Georgia State Univ., Atlanta) have gathered a series of essays exploring the link between language and identity and between language and cultural conflict. The essays written by Herbert Kohl, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Asa Hilliard, and Victoria Purcell-Gates, to name a few differ dramatically in approach and opinion, so it is hard to say what case they present regarding the use of Ebonics (or African American English) in schools. They are also divergent in quality; some include superficial comments that would not stand up under scrutiny, while others are better developed and include more cohesive remarks. Finally, the lack of references for most of the reminiscences and the absence of works beyond 1997 in the two-page selected reference list may limit the audience. Libraries that already own the more coherent and convincing Voices from the Language Classroom (edited by Kathleen M. Bailey & David Nunan) and Ian Tudor's The Dynamics of the Language Classroom both from Cambridge may skip this title, as it contributes little to this important debate. Leroy Hommerding, Fort Myers Beach P.L. Dist., FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Excerpts

Introduction LISA DELPIT In a study conducted in 1974 to assess the development of attitudes in preschool children toward "Black English" (BE)and "Standard English" (SE), Marilyn Rosenthal, the researcher, painted two identical cardboard boxes with similarly drawn faces. Two tapes had previously been made by the same bi-dialectal African American speaker, one in African American language (as distinguished by vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation)and one in American Standard English. A tape player with one of the tapes was put into each box, out of the children's view. Each box was described as a "head" and each relayed the same messages. The voice in each box introduced itself to the children and indicated that it had a present for the child. Later, each box also asked the children if they would give the speaker their crayons. The children were then asked a number of questions, including these: Which "head," Steve [Standard English] or Kenneth [Black English], would you like to get the present from? Whom do you like better? Whom would you like to play with? Whom would you give your crayons to? Over 70 percent of the time, both African American and European American three- to five-year-olds categorized the BE speaker as African American and the SE speaker as white. Further, most of them wanted the present from the SE speaker because he "had nicer presents." The majority of the children of both ethnicities believed that the BE speaker, Kenneth, "needed" the crayons more, with one European American boy, aged five and a half, saying that he would give his crayons to Kenneth "cause he don't have nothing" and one four-year-old European American girl indicating that she was afraid of Kenneth (Rosenthal, p.62). The findings are fascinating. They indicate, according to the researcher, that very young children have developed attitudes toward African American language and assumptions about its speakers that closely parallel adult American views: Interestingly, the African American and white children reflected differences in their personal preferences towards the representative speakers of the two language forms, with the white children preferring the SE speaker and the African American children preferring the BE speaker. Furthermore, there were expressions of learned stereotyped images associated with both speakers. Many of these were pejorative toward the BE speaker--identifying him as talking silly, being unintelligible, being harmful, having nothing, and not having drawing ability. . . . The SE speaker was stereotyped as being more gentle, looking better, having better drawing ability, and being the symbol of success (the last idea was expressed by Population B [African American]). It should not be surprising that these attitudes carry over into school. In another study done in the 1970s, student teachers were asked to assess eight hypothetical schoolchildren on the scales of intelligence, being a good student, being privileged, enthusiastic, self-confident, and gentle [Giles & Powesland, 1975:3, cited in R. A. Hudson, Sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, 1980]. The eight hypothetical students were each defined by three types of information: a photograph, a tape-recorded sample of speech, and a sample of school work (consisting of an essay and a drawing). Each piece of information was based on a real child, but the pieces were recombined to give equal numbers of occasions in which each type of information would be judged positively and negatively. Hudson (1980)describes the study results: The question to be answered by this experiment was: what would happen if information from one source gave a favourable impression but that from another source gave an unfavourable one? The very clear answer was that information from the speech sample always [emphasis added] took priority over that from the photograph or the school-work: a favourable impression on the speech sample overrode unfavourable impressions from the other sources, and conversely. (p. 208) As Michael Stubbs contends (in chapter 5), if school considers someone's language inadequate, they'll probably fail. Our language embraces us long before we are defined by any other medium of identity. In our mother's womb we hear and feel the sounds, the rhythms, the cadences of our "mother tongue." We learn to associate contentment with certain qualities of voice and physical disequilibrium with others. Our home language is as viscerally tied to our beings as existence itself--as the sweet sounds of love accompany our first milk, as our father's pride permeates our bones and flesh when he shows us off to his friends, as a gentle lullaby or soft murmurs signal release into restful sleep. It is no wonder that our first language becomes intimately connected to our identity. Just as our skin provides us with a means to negotiate our interactions with the world--both in how we perceive our surroundings and in how those around us perceive us--our language plays an equally pivotal role in determining who we are: it is The Skin That We Speak. For better or worse, in our stratified society our appearance can serve to create an expectation of success or failure, of brilliance or stupidity, of power or impotence. Those whose skin color or hair texture or facial features do not place them within the dominant phenotype are often viewed as "lesser than." But our language "skin" provides an even more precise mechanism for determining status. The omission of an "s," an unusual inflection, or a nasalized word ending can indicate to listeners exactly where in the social hierarchy a speaker should be assigned. Victoria Purcell-Gates sums it up in the title of her chapter, ". . . As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth!" The purpose of this 2002 collection is to explore the links between language and identity, between language and political hierarchy, and between language and cultural conflict. Most of the articles in this collection make reference to African American language (also called Black English, Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English), which is, without question, one of the most vigorously debated linguistic codes in our nation's history. As early as 1884, J. Harrison attempted to detail in a fifty-sevenpage treatise that the language of "Negroes" was an oddity that only vaguely resembled language at all. This volume also concerns itself primarily with language and education. This issue of language use in school is particularly volatile. The commencement of formal education is usually one of the first settings in a person's life when their language may be judged as right or wrong; when assumptions may be made about their intelligence, family life, future potential, or moral fiber every time a sentence is uttered. African American language has had a particularly stormy relationship with the educational power structure. Schools often see themselves, and are seen by the larger society, as the arbiters of what is proper, correct, and decent. African American language forms have been considered none of the above. Thus, there have been continual moves to eliminate its presence in classrooms, and raging debates whenever it appears that there might be some move to suggest otherwise. The most recent flare-up, the so-called "Ebonics Debate," took the country by storm during 1996 and 1997. The Oakland School District put forth a proposal that named the language form spoken by many of its African American students "Ebonics." It not only provided a moniker, but the proposal also declared Ebonics a distinct language, not a dialect or substandard form of English. Further, it recommended that teachers be trained in the elements of Ebonics and steeped in aspects of African American culture. Such training, they argued, would enable teachers to create instruction for African American students that would allow them not only to excel in learning standard English, but to excel in all school subjects. This result had already been achieved on a small scale using the program the board advocated, the "Standard English Proficiency Program." Despite the school board's good intentions, the country went on a rampage, with reporter after reporter declaring that Oakland was planning to teach Black slang and ghetto language to its schoolchildren. Several of the essays in this volume refer to the debate, and more details of the battle are described in chapter 3, No Kinda Sense. Also included, as an appendix, is the formal response of the Linguistic Society of America on the Oakland Ebonics debate. However, this was not the first time African American language and the education establishment engaged in a very awkward, painful, and public dance. After the riots of the 1960s the general public became aware that African American children were failing in schools in large numbers. African American leaders and, later, President Johnson's "War on Poverty" demanded solutions. Educational scholars, casting about for blame, speculated about the cause of the problem and hit upon the idea that the children's inferior language was the cause of their learning problem. With little or no empirical research to back the claims, what amounted to rumors were circulated through articles, essays, and speeches indicating that African American children had a miniscule vocabulary, were nonverbal, had no substantive communicative exchanges with their parents, and were crushed by the noise and confusion in their homes. The Head Start Program, in large part, was initiated to mitigate the "culturally and linguistically deprived" homes of poor African American children. Linguists, mostly white, began to study the question. The language was mapped and its unique grammatical features, phonology, and semantics were identified. In contrast to the educators, most linguists concluded that there was nothing inherently inferior about the language of African Americans, but that problems might arise when the language of school and the language of home met. Some African American scholars began to take issue with the work of the white linguists, suggesting that, at best, they were unable to really understand Black language because the language did not exist apart from the culture and they had insufficient access to the culture. It was during this period that the term "Ebonics" (black phonics, i.e., black sounds)was coined by Professor Robert Williams in the early 1970s, when he convened a meeting of African American scholars to study the question from a culturally specific perspective. He proposed that the white linguists were wrong to consider African American language to be a dialect of English, since the linguistic code really had its roots in West African languages. As the controversy continued, accusations of opportunism, self-aggrandizement, and being in league with the government's attempts to keep African Americans disenfranchised eventually led many white linguists to seek other areas of study (Shuy in Farr- Whiteman). The next major public explosion concerning African American language and the schools was in 1979, when, in what came to be known as "the King case," parents from the Green Road Housing Project in Detroit sued the school system for not educating their children, specifically for failing to teach them to read. The judge in the case, Judge Joiner, eventually dismissed all of the plaintiffs' claims except one, forcing the lawsuit to be tried only on 1703(f), which reads in part: "No state shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, by . . . the failure to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation by its students in its instructional programs." The judge eventually ruled in the plaintiffs' favor, and declared that the teachers and the school system had not taken into account the children's language in their instruction, and thus had failed to teach them appropriately. He ruled that the school board had not previously, but now should (1)"help the teachers understand the problem"; (2)"help provide them with knowledge about the children's use of a 'black English' language system"; and (3)"suggest ways and means of using that knowledge in teaching the students to read." The plaintiffs' lawyers did not think the solution, without any accountability or classroom intervention, went far enough. The public, however, went wild. The media once more peppered the airways and newspapers with suggestions that the judge was equating Black slang and improper English with a true language. In the Ebonics debate of 1996, in the War on Poverty reports and counter reports of the 1960s and early 1970s, and in the furor surrounding the King case in the early 1980s, the public discussions and publicized scholarly research ended rather suddenly, and with no resolution. Still today African American children fail, and still there is much smoke and little light around the linguistic issues that might affect that failure. Two major professional organizations of English educators have been discussing the educational costs of language discrimination for more than twenty-five years, passing Students' Right to Their Own Language in 1974 and the National Language Policy in 1988. A survey taken in 2000 by the NCTE & CCCC, however, showed that fully one-third of the membership had no knowledge of the positions the organizations had taken. During each of the peaks of public interest in African American language and education, scholars have pointed out, but with little public attention, that it may not be the children's language that causes educational problems, but the educational bureaucracy's response to the language. These scholars looked more to attitudes held about the language. They posited that the country's perception of African Americans was such that, given the history of racism in the United States, it attached inferiority to all things black. Excerpted from The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.