Teaching Reading Strategically to Black Academic Underachievers

Paul C Mocombe

doi:10.22158/sshsr.v1n1p1

Abstract

In response to the academic achievement gap of black American students’ vis-à-vis whites and Asians, Paul C. Mocombe developed his Mocombeian Strategy and Reading Room Curriculum, which posit a comprehensive mentoring program of educated black professionals and the restructuring of the linguistic structure of black American inner-city students via phonetic and language arts instructions, as the solutions to resolving the gap. The two approaches are based on Mocombe’s hypothesis that the academic underachievement of black American students, vis-à-vis their white and Asian counterparts, on standardized tests is grounded in what he refers to as “a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function.” This work explores the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical relationships between Mocombe’s “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function hypothesis,” The Mocombeian Strategy, and Reading Room Curriculum (published as Mocombe’s Reading Room Series).

Highlights

The black-white test score gap is an empirical problematic that dates back to the 1940s
Mocombe suggests, because young black Americans grow up knowing and speaking a distinct linguistic system (BEV/American English Vernacular (AAEV)) with its own syntax, lexicon, phonetics, semantics, etc., generative grammar or syntactical structure in Chomskyian terms, which is distinct from the generative grammar of Standard English (SE), when African American or black American students enter school, teachers should attempt to restructure their linguistic structure from BEV/AAEV to SE, by teaching them reading via phonics and language arts, the rules/syntax of Standard English, and using reading passages as practice so as to demonstrate their mastery of the new language system
Mocombe’s Reading Room Curriculum offers an analytical phonetic approach to teaching black American students reading, over a whole language approach, in order to teach them the generative grammar of a new language, Standard English, and match their linguistic structure with that of the Standard English utilized on Standardized tests to assess their academic abilities

Summary

Teaching Reading Strategically to Black Academic

Mocombe1* 1 The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc., West Virginia State University, West Virginia, USA * Paul C. The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc., West Virginia State University, West Virginia, USA.

Introduction

Findings

Discussion and Conclusion