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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 10 page paper discusses Black English Vernacular (BVE) – also called African American English Vernacular (AAVE), Black English and/or Ebonics, and argues that it is a real construct, but the debate continues over whether or not it is a language or a dialect. Bibliography lists 10 sources.
Page Count:
10 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVBEVRel.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
got rolling in December, 1996, when the Oakland (California) Unified School District declared that Ebonics (BEV) was "the primary language of the African-American students in Oaklands schools," and that it
was a language, not a "dialect of English" (Baron 5). Furthermore, the School Board advised that Oaklands students "be taught in ways that would maintain Ebonics as well as introduce
them to Standard English" (Baron 5). A firestorm exploded. The controversy around BEV (also called Ebonics, AAVE and/or Black English) seems to center on the fact that many whites
interpret it to be a "lazy" way of speaking; they also believe that an African-American speaking BEV is intellectually inferior. That is, they are tying this type of speech directly
to intelligence, and deciding that people who talk like this are not as bright as those who use standard English. One source helps to explain why they think like this;
in taking the "linguistic approach" to the study of BEV, Oubr? says this approach is "predicated on the idea that African-American students who speak traditional Black dialects of the English
language are less apt to do well in school because the generally cannot comprehend standard English in terms of its deeper meanings (Oubr?). This idea, she says, is not hypothetical;
the grammar and syntax peculiar to Black English Vernacular have been known for several decades (Oubr?). In addition, "cognitive anthropologists and psychologists have noted the ways in which many Black
Americans ... use words and phrases of the English language," and the ways in which their usage "both reflects and reinforces somewhat different cognitive constructions of the world than those
associated with standard English" (Oubr?). Unfortunately she does not go on to say if there is some sort of direct correlation between the use of BEV and academic achievement, or
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