Educators Seek to Bridge Language Gap for Blacks

San Diego educators are debating whether special programs need to be set up for black students who come to school speaking a nonstandard English that most researchers now recognize as a separate oral language with its own rules of grammar and structure.

Administrators describe the discussions so far as lively. But there is no consensus over whether special training in American standard English for blacks would help shrink the gap in language achievement that puts blacks as a group below Asians, Caucasians and Latinos, when measured on standardized tests.

The impetus for the debate comes from new San Diego Unified School District Trustee Shirley Weber, who has argued in several board workshops that the current curriculum does not give enough emphasis to helping black children bridge the gap between their home language and standard English.

Model Program in L.A.

At a regular board meeting last week, Weber, pointing to special language courses for Asian and Latino immigrants, asked why similar efforts for blacks do not exist, as in the Los Angeles district. That district’s Proficiency in English Program (PEP) is the nation’s largest educational effort established specifically for black students who are considered culturally and linguistically different from the American norm. Weber also pushed for her view over the weekend at the Assn. for Black Educators conference in San Diego.

“Too often, the African-American is treated simply as an underachieving white, with no reference to any special ethnicity or culture that we came to America with,” Weber said in an earlier interview. “It’s hard for a lot of intellectuals to accept that we had a culture that included a separate oral language. So, while we assume that all other peoples come here with language and culture and we make all sorts of accommodations for them, we don’t do any of that for the African.”

Although most educators accept the existence of black English, or Ebonics, as a legitimate oral language, there is far less acknowledgement by black or white educators that programs like PEP are the answer for many of the district’s 19,000 black students.

“I don’t feel that the Los Angeles method, which singles out black children for a special type of treatment such as pattern drills, is necessarily the way we in San Diego want to go,” said Jesse Perry, language arts administrator for the district. “And I feel it is unprofessional to tie (reading and language) test scores to an inability to speak standard English, since there are many other factors involved with (lack) of achievement of poor children.”

Perry and Weber got involved in a lively conversation during the meeting last week after Weber asked why the district made no mention of black language programs in a report on new reading texts.

District Supt. Tom Payzant intervened to say that, although he has much to learn on the subject before approaching trustees with recommendations this spring, “I already know enough to be aware of philosophical differences.”

“Should ESL (English as a second language) instruction be specifically geared for black students who do not speak standard English, and if so, do you do in it class or in a pull-out situation?” Payzant said. “I’m not sure of my position yet . . . although language acquisition is a focal point for all learning, I’m uncertain whether it is the controlling factor.”

Developed by Slaves

The acceptance of black English as a separate oral language results from years of research by linguists, who now commonly believe it arose from a common West African “pidgin” that slaves developed to overcome the differences in their tribal languages and communicate with one another and their English-speaking slave masters.

It is the predominant language among many urban blacks today and is used at least some of the time by an estimated 80% of blacks--not in business or professional settings but informally at home and among friends.

Examples of black English phrasing include, “The boy, he be goin’ to school.” “She cain’t play till she do her homework.” “I ate my toas, den I run to school.” “He have a book. “

Most students have a combination of black language and standard English structures in varying degrees, according to Orlando Taylor, dean of the Communication Department at Howard University and an authority on Ebonics. Some are able to make the transition to standard English, for oral and written communication, much easier than others, Taylor said.

“But I think it is fair to say that black children nationwide are often victimized by the failure of schools to teach them the language required for education and for career escalation and that schools all too often engender negative self concepts about the black student’s home life,” Taylor said.

Taylor was a consultant to San Diego educators in 1978 as part of a court-ordered integration program that required an oral language program to help black students.

That program, which Perry has overseen, sensitized teachers to the existence of black English so that they would not treat it as “bad English,” to be eradicated as a student learned the standard dialect. Rather, the district asked teachers to build upon the home language by showing students how it differs from standard English and why they should understand both. For example, the program, still part of district procedures, suggests that teachers pair speakers of standard and black English for practice.

“It is absolutely true that the attitudes of teachers play a critical role, particularly with programs designed to teach language skills,” Taylor said.

But Weber and Los Angeles PEP advocates say that teachers need detailed strategies, like those used in ESL programs. Positive attitudes by teachers toward black English, they say, is not sufficient for a successful transition program.

‘Need the Medicine’

“We know the diagnosis, but we need the medicine, and I call ours structured practice,” said Thelma Duncan, PEP administrator in Los Angeles. “We go through all sorts of practice activities with oral repetition, such as saying, ‘He is playing, he is jumping, he is running, and we have students ask questions to each other and use complete sentences.

“We write words on the board, because many times the students cannot hear the difference because there are close similarities between the two languages . . . and the oral skills coincide with the printed symbol, and that is the reason why so many have difficulty with reading, spelling and writing, because young people write the way they speak.”

Duncan said the students are told that there is a home language and the standard English “because the reality is that standard English is the cash language of this society.” Students are selected for the special classes through testing and teacher observations.

Taylor, who also was a consultant for the Los Angeles program, declined to speak to the relative merits of the Los Angeles effort compared to that of San Diego.

“I would say, however, that, based upon my experience, in addition to having positive attitudes and high expectations for students, teachers also need a specific set of materials that give them direction in teaching the language,” Taylor said. “That also brings a better sense of self to the student, who sees that his or her English has grown out of a historical and cultural context” and is not a slang or dialect resulting from what Weber said were previous theories labeled as “laziness or thick tongues.”

Program’s Effectiveness

Kermeen Fristrom, director of the basic education department for San Diego schools, conceded that the district’s court-ordered program has been far less effective than he would have hoped when it was established 10 years ago.

“We are looking closely at the Los Angeles program and it has many things that are very good,” Fristrom said. “At the same time, I have yet to see very much evidence that an ESL student, or whoever, improves his or her ability to handle English by filling in work sheets on pronoun references or by doing other grammatical exercises.”

Fristrom said new state guidelines for teaching reading and language emphasize the integration of oral language instruction with reading and writing. “The human mind integrates language even if the schools have not,” he said. “And I think the move toward (integration) will emphasize the powerful effect of modeling, either from the teacher or from peers or from parents and the community as well.”

Fristrom said that, whatever changes are proposed for the existing language instruction, the entire program needs to have greater attention. An evaluation issued this month on the district’s first-grade reading instruction said the majority of teachers surveyed complained about a lack of time to devote greater attention to students--many of them black--needing special help.

“We do need to vary the percentages and spend more time on oral language,” Fristrom said. “At the very least, we need more emphasis and concentration, regardless of a change in strategy.”

Weber promises to push for specifics, saying that “whatever we are doing now is not working, and whether you have one semester or two semesters of some bridging courses, something needs to be done. . . . Saving one out of 20 kids as we do now is not good enough.”