Letters: Should Code-Switching Be Taught in Schools?
The Code-Switcher
In The Atlantic’s April issue, William Brennan wrote about Julie Washington, a speech pathologist who believes that helping kids switch seamlessly between dialects is a key to their success.
I read “The Code-Switcher” in the April issue of The Atlantic with horror. What was described as African-American English was in fact poor grammar. As an African American with undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and Literature, I desperately want African American children to learn standard American English and proper grammar and syntax. These are essential tools for success in the workplace and required for professional and personal mobility. Having our teachers encourage children to speak with poor grammar relegates them to the permanent underclass, which is not where I would like to see future generations of African Americans. While I respect the professor who extols the virtues of respecting the language of another culture, the African-American English described in the article is not a language.
Rachel Oliver
San Diego, Calif.
As welcome as any positive article on the education of African American children is, William Brennan’s falls short. The issue of The “reigning theory” of why speaking AAE “stymies kids” goes far beyond the pronunciation of words or the “cognitive load” of handling two dialects in school. For one thing, AAE grammar and conversational styles also differ from those of standard English in important ways. But the fundamental factor is racial prejudice. Deep-seated prejudice against AAE produces the silencing effect Ann McCormick Piestrup described in 1973. Now, it is common in socioeconomically-stratified societies for dialects that vary from the dialect of power to be disparaged. But racial prejudice runs so deep in America that condemnation of AAE is nearly universal and very powerful, a fact undergirded by the rejection of the dialect by educated African Americans themselves, and by the flaming controversy over the Oakland teachers’ 1996 proposal.
