TOEFL to the test: are monodialectal AAL-speakers similar to ESL students?  

Oleh:

Pandey, Anjali

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: World Englishes (Full Text) vol. 19 no. 1 (2000), page 89-106.
Fulltext: WE_19-01_2000_Pandey_02.pdf (163.01KB)

Isi artikel

In this paper, I draw attention to the validity of the Oakland School Board's resolution on Ebonics, and to the value of ESL-based approaches to the teaching of `Standard American English' to speakers of other dialects of American English. I do so by demonstrating the validity of comparisons made between monodialectal speakers of African-American Language (AAL)/`Ebonics' and low-level ESL students, and by illustrating the bidialectalism-instilling potential of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Use of this proficiency test puts the spotlight on a much-neglected area, namely, the bidialectal or dialect-specific nature of listening comprehension for pre-college and first-year students raised in the inner city. The findings of two longitudinal studies are cited to demonstrate that, for many Ebonics-speakers, SAE is much like a second language. The students' performance on the TOEFL, particularly on the listening comprehension and grammar sections, suggests that both comprehension and production of `Standard English' can be problematic for transitional students whose first language is AAL. The pedagogical implications of this finding are carefully explored.

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