ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS RESOURCES

APPROACHING DIALECT

* Planning Points

Approximate Time Needed:15-20 minutes first day, 30 minutes for follow-up day(s)

Lesson Objectives:

• Students will demonstrate understanding of dialect
• Students will note examples of dialect they encounter within and outside of class
• Students will discuss and analyze dialects for authenticity
• Students will use examples of authentic dialect in a character sketch.

Materials Needed: Excerpt from Who can tell my story by Jacqueline Woodson (see attached)

Description
Students are creating a character sketch about a person who has had a positive influence on their lives. As one method to reveal aspects of that person, students will incorporate appropriate dialect into their compositions. Have students create a chart about the language they use with the friends, their families, and their teachers, principals, and/or supervisors. If they need help generating ideas, suggest specific sentences or scenarios (You like what… is wearing. What do you say? … asks how you are doing. How do you respond?) You might also want to share your own informal language with the students, perhaps even words that were popular among your friends when you were in school.

Read the Woodson passage. Discuss issues that she raises. Do students agree with her interpretation of "standard English"? Have students ever felt that their language has been portrayed stereotypically or not authentically? What do they think about the authors, singers, actors, etc. who use inauthentic dialect? Have students keep a dialect log for a week (longer if you wish). Ask them to record language they see or hear that appears to be "non-Standard." Have them note the words used and the context of the dialect. After they have completed their logs, have them share their notes in small groups and discuss which examples appeared authentic to them and why the director/author/speaker etc. might have used the dialect. Students should draft the dialect portion of their character sketches and peer respond to the portraits created by the use of that dialect.

* Teacher's Notes

From Who can tell my story. (African Americans in literature and as authors) Jacqueline Woodson. The Horn Book Magazine,Jan-Feb 1998 v74 n1 p34(5)

We speak a different language in my grandmother's house. When the family is alone together or with close friends, our language flows into a southern dialect essenced with my younger brother's (and sometimes my own) hip-hop of-the-moment idioms--what was once good became fresh and is now the bomb. What was once great was then hype and now phat and so on. My younger brother and I listen to music that plays with language, that pushes against grammatical and linguistic walls. We speak this language to those who understand and then we come home and this language gets blended into the language that is spoken in my grandmother's house. What is spoken in her house is the language of a long time ago, before we were shipped off to college, before my exposure to Chaucer and James and the Brontes. It is not the stereotypical "I be, you be" that has made its derogatory way into others' perception of `black dialect.' And it is more complex and less frustrating than the whole ebonics argument, although the seed of the argument is truly the essence of our language. It tells its own story, our language does, and woven through it are all the places we've been, all that we've seen, experiences held close, good and bad. You don't have to be a part of my family to understand what my grandmother means when she turns a phrase in a way that makes some friends knit their eyebrows and glance at me for help. You just need to have been a part of the experience.

A friend once asked if it was hard to speak "standard" English. I had never thought of standard English as that. I had always thought of it as the language spoken on the outside, the language one used to procure scholarships, employment, promotions. Like putting on a nice suit--one that you feel good in in the outside world but wouldn't choose for a lazy Sunday afternoon. Having majored in English with a concentration in British Literature and Middle English, I have come to love all aspects of the English language--have come to love sitting down with the writings of James and Pound as much as I love sitting down to Sunday dinner at my grandmother's house. Each event is buttered thick with experience and language. But at my grandmother's house, her experiences and the memories have filtered through her to us and by extension become our own. James's Portrait of a Lady doesn't do this. Nor does Pound's version of The Seafarer. But if I take the beauty of these works and filter my own experience through them, I can create something that is mine. And by this means, through the different, complicated elements of language and experience, through being and reading and listening and re-creating, I have come to understand the world around me--and myself as a writer.

Jacqueline Woodson is the author of several books for young readers including I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This and The House You Pass on the Way. Her forthcoming novel, If You Come Softly, will be published by Putnam in the fall of 1998.

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