Fostering Linguistic Habits of Mind: Engaging Teachers’ Knowledge and Attitudes Toward African American Vernacular English

Abstract

AbstractThis article outlines one linguistically based approach – contrastive analysis and code‐switching – for teachers of students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE). I discuss obstacles to bringing these linguistic insights and strategies to teachers in training and in the classroom. Across four scenarios from a teacher education program and from middle school classrooms, I describe (i) a grammatical construction or a linguistic insight covered in classes or professional development sessions with pre‐service and in‐service teachers and (ii) teachers’ work products (e.g. code‐switching charts) implementing their new knowledge. Analyzing the mismatch between (i) and (ii), I unpack teachers’ knowledge and ways of thinking about grammar, AAVE and Standard American English (SAE). This analysis reveals that teachers’ dominant language ideology and prior lack of training in the structure of English stand as limiting factors in the classroom, constraining their ability to implement a linguistically informed approach to stigmatized dialects, and constraining the linguist’s ability to communicate core linguistic principles. Finally, I show how this analysis led to adapting the core graphic organizer, the code‐switching chart, and to increasing the specificity of grammatical explanations to help teachers take steps toward building a linguistically informed language arts classroom.