African American Vernacular English discourse in writing:

Is it really worth knowing?

Elaine B. Richardson

Fri. 9-10:40 C

This paper is a condensed report of a study which explores the degree to which linguistic/cultural difference influences textual interpretation. One characteristic of good writing is detailed and elaborated prose. The speech of the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) communities must be considered when facilitating such students' transition to elaborated written prose because shared knowledge and language conventions are components of all successful communication strategies in AAVE. Teachers who are alert to the speaking styles of AAVE students will be able to value, identify, and clarify AAVE discourse patterns as they surface in their writing, and thereby help students to code-switch rhetorically. Two fundamental characteristics of AAVE that have been identified by linguists are indirection and signifying (These two features are closely related. However, although all signifying displays indirection, all indirection is not signifying. Terms will be fully defined). The student examples of signifying or indirection were gleaned from a beginning writing course at a major midwestern university. The following hypotheses guided the study:

a) Instructors/writing tutors with more training in linguistic/cultural diversity would be adept at detecting that a Black linguistic/cultural convention was operating when signifying is employed and that they would extrapolate meaning(s) closer to that which the student intended by the signifying/indirect structure.

b) Instructors/writing tutors with less experience with linguistic/cultural diversity would extract the most literal meaning from a signifying/indirect structure and therefore misunderstand.

To investigate the degree to which AAVE discourse was understood in student texts, the researcher examined instructors/writing tutors responses to questions designed to elicit their interpretations of students' texts. By learning to identify signifying/indirect structures, English educators will learn to help AAVE speakers expand their meaning so that it can be shared with a larger audience.