Black English, Diverging Or Converging?: The View From The National Assessment Of Educational Progress  

Oleh:

Smitherman, Geneva

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language and Education (Full Text) vol. 6 no. 1 (1992), page 47-61.
Fulltext: Vol. 06, no 1, p 47-61.pdf (893.57KB)

Isi artikel

Writing by seventeen-year-old African American students in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is analysed for the frequency and distribution of Black English Vernacular (BEV) and the co-variance of BEV with rater scores. NAEP is a Federally-funded decennial programme, mandated by the US Congress and initiated in 1969, which assesses national, representative groups of elementary and secondary school students in ten subject areas. NAEP's writing tasks are assessed by trained teacher-raters, using numerical scales. This study involves 2,764 essays beginning with NAEP's inception, and concluding with the most recent assessment in 1988/89. BEV is examined from the vantage point of William Labov's mid-1980s Divergence Hypothesis. The study proposes that in the past 20 years, BEV has converged with, not diverged from, Edited American/Standard English, as reflected in this demographically representative group of Black students. Analysis of the correlation between rater scores and BEV indicates that, unlike the 1969 and 1979 NAEP results, 1988/89 Black student writers were not penalised for BEV in primary trait scoring. The study suggests that over the past generation, educational efforts to sensitise teachers to BEV have been successful.

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