It ain't only Rock & Roll, it's Jazz too

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:

  The Irish are not on the Black side
> of a cultural divide in America. Regional dialects,
> such as those spoken in truck stops in Ohio and
Indiana are not the same thing as Black Talk. Recent
immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Korea,
> Afghanistan, etc., working in Bodegas, were not
brought to this country in chains. Isn't there an
obvious difference here? Of course there is. 
> 
> This may all be generally true, if embellished in
> the details, but it has nothing remotely to do with
> prescriptive grammar. 

Oh yes it has. Prescriptive grammar is taught.  When
the focus is not prescriptive grammar, but cultural
discourse (in this case African American cultural
discourse) and when students are taught some basic
linguistics and some language history, and when they
are taught that there language is not stupid,
inferior, a degenrative form of the ideal model of
standard english, and they are encouraged to tap into
the rich traditions of their culture and history, and
when strategies for incorporating  Black literature
and oral tradition, students produce powerful,
meaningful, beautiful, lengthy, and highly rated (when
standards and  prescriptive grammar are not
emphasized) essays and creative work. This pedagogy is
not some progressive educator's dream, it has been a
reality in schools because of the hard faught and won
cases in the courts, because of the empowerment that
the 1960s opened the door to, because scholars and
educators recognized that prescription doesn't work.  
 

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online
http://webhosting.yahoo.com