The African American Vernacular English: description and sociolinguistics implications

Abstract

The aim of this study is to address issues related to the African American Vernacular English and its sociolinguistics implications. What we problematize here is the situation found in many public schools' classrooms from the United States of America, in which teachers have to deal with different ethnic groups and with speakers of other first languages rather than English. Most of these teachers feel disorientated about how to deal with such linguistic multiplicity. Our focus is on the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) variety. Studies carried out since the 1970s, mostly the ones led by Labov (2008), are still discussed nowadays because the situation of the AAVE seem to cause divergences among the scholars who research this subject. The main issue pointed out here is how to reconcile the AAVE variant and the teaching of standard/cultured English Language in schools. In Brazil, we find a similar situation when we refer to the speakers of the rural variant and the teaching and learning of standard/cultured Portuguese (BORTONI-RICARDO, 2011). Besides the socio-historic-cultural aspects regarding the teaching and learning of English to the North American African descendants, we also present the syntactic aspects, which cause the biggest divergences between standard/cultured English and the African American Vernacular English variant. American official documents as the "Bilingual Education Act" (1968) and institutions like the "National Council of Teachers of English" (2008) are in accordance with researchers like Labov (1979-2008) and Pullum (1999) whom reaffirm the need to make teacher aware of the sociolinguistic issues involved and the need to respect and accept the non-standards variants inside the classroom.