Godley, Carpenter, Werner, (2006). "I'll Speak Proper Slang"

Subtitle: "Language ideologies in a daily editing activity"

These researchers did a year long study of Werner's three 10th grade classrooms to study the effects of certain grammar instruction on students whose primary dialect was African American English. Daily Language Practice (DLP) was the main activity, where Werner would have students come up to the board and correct the grammar of a bad sentence. There were no significant improvements in the students' grammar by the end of the year.

This study brings up some amazing issues about language, power, and identity. It criticized tests that assume Standard English to be instrinsically better than stigmatized dialects (a term they chose). The raise issues proposed by the likes of Gee and Lisa Delpit about the power structures behind language and how school Discourse may contradict some of the ideas behind their primary dialects.

Ultimately, the researchers argue that there must be a way to teach nonmainstream students Standard English grammar without devaluing their primary dialects. They found that students were entirely capable of speaking both their home dialects and SE, but, I think, not well educated about why to learn the rules of SE. English in not monolithic, as they tell us, and the notion that it is and that SE is more "correct" than other dialects is harmful to students, not only grammatically but socially and politically as well. SE is surely important to master for the situations where it is preferred-- school, work, media, etc. But it is no more grammatically consistent than AAE. And when you put down a person's language, you put down the person and their culture.

The authors argue for methods of grammar instruction that contextualize grammar, rather than forcing students to memorized the rules of SE dialect. They too bring up Bakhtin and his idea of a dialogic classroom where students would learn language through conversations with teachers, learning that grammar is more a set of rhetorical choices than a list of rights and wrongs; this they feel would empower students whose primary discourses are stigmatized dialects, and it would help them learn the rules of SE more effectively and without forcing them to renounce their home dialects. Word.