What's in a word? Apparently enough to cause a national uproar when the word is ebonics. In December, the Oakland School Board passed a resolution recognizing ebonics (black English) as a language. The decision stirred a vituperative and often confused national debate. "It's saying in the most racist way that black kids are stupid and they can't learn English," said Jim Boulet, executive director of the national organization English First. Jesse Jackson attacked the plan as "borderlining on disgrace," then changed his mind after a visit to Oakland, where he proclaimed, "We're going to turn this moment of crisis into opportunity."
But, according to Mary Hoover, opportunity has always been the object of the ebonics program. A reading consultant to the school board, Hoover says that when teachers respect the children's language or dialect, they can better help them translate that speech into standard English. Hoover was hired by the board to devise a reading and writing curriculum to parallel the verbal work in class. She spoke to senior editor Raymond Hardie on campus in January, when the issue was still bouncing between politicians, pundits and the public.
Stanford: How did you come to be hired by the Oakland school board?
Hoover: Early last year, I spoke at the Standard English Proficiency Program conference in Oakland. It's designed to teach ebonics speakers the characteristics of their language, to help them make the bridge to standard English. The Oakland administrators heard my workshop, and they had already decided to bring in a literacy person who was familiar with ebonics. I happened to fit that bill, so they brought me in as a consultant this year.
Stanford: What do you mean by "a literacy person?"
Hoover: I consult on the teaching of reading. I work with teachers on the use of phonics in reading and advise on the curriculum. If you walk into an Oakland school, you'll hear two unusual things. The first is the oral teaching of standard grammar through ebonics. The next is the phonics approach to reading. That is the literacy part, the program I work on. Students who are bilingual or bidialectal particularly benefit from this approach.
Stanford: What is ebonics? Is it a dialect or a language?
Hoover: Ebonics is black English. The name is made up of the words ebony and phonics. Ebonics has a West African base with English vocabulary superimposed on top. If you ask an African- American student what she does every day after school, she might reply: "Well, I be going to the store." That means that she goes habitually. It's based on the grammar of West African languages. As to whether it's a language or a dialect, one of my favorite quotes is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The definition of a language is political. Ernie Smith, former professor of linguistics at Fullerton says, "If ebonics is not a language, then neither is English." That's because English has a Germanic base in terms of the grammar, with vocabularies from French and a number of other places superimposed on top. Smith makes the point that if ebonics is nonstandard English, then English is nonstandard German. But if English is a language, then so is ebonics.
Stanford: Has Oakland sanctioned teaching ebonics?
Hoover: The students already know ebonics, so we don't have to teach them. African-American children comprise 53 percent of students in Oakland and 73 percent in special education. We have to help them learn the kind of English needed to go to college. We're teaching the teachers what the language is, and how they should teach the students who speak it.
Stanford: Has this been tried elsewhere?
Hoover: We did 10 years of Stanford-based research in East Palo Alto and we found that when teachers understand that the children are speaking another language, students' reading scores improve. I was a research assistant on Professor Robert Politzer's project at Stanford. He was one of the few people who taught courses in linguistics and in education. My dissertation was a study of parent and community attitudes toward ebonics. They liked ebonics, they did not want to eliminate it, but they also wanted the students to learn standard English. As one parent said, "I want my child to learn to speak whatever kind of language got you to Stanford." Down in Los Angeles, where they have a similar program, they often call it cash English because English is the language of commerce.
Stanford: Why did the board decide to change the wording of their resolution?
Hoover: They've obviously been under a lot of pressure, but they only changed two things. They had described ebonics as "genetically based"--they had used it in the sense of "having origins in," but it was so controversial that they finally eliminated the word just to still all the debate. The second thing they clarified was that they were only using ebonics as a bridge to standard English.
Stanford: What's it like to be in the center of a political firestorm?
Hoover: I'm delirious. I think it's absolutely wonderful, because you actually see people change. Two things are coming together in Oakland that I never thought I'd see legitimized--ebonics and phonics. I've been thrown off panels and left out of anthologies, and I've just never thought I'd live to see it come back.
Stanford: Why do you think that this issue has inflamed so many people?
Hoover: Well, I think racism has a little bit to do with it. It was the same reaction to Afrocentricity, which simply was saying, "Let's look at African contributions to civilization, and let's look at them as first among equals." It's the same kind of thing with ebonics. It's an exotic-sounding word, and it was made up by a group of African Americans. Some middle-class blacks are ashamed of the word, because they haven't looked at the African characteristics of the language, and they've just accepted society's definition of it as a broken-down dialect of English. But I have research here that shows what I'm doing works in teaching African-American kids. I have a 30-year track record. I would be the last person to advocate experimenting. There's been enough experimentation.
