The Intersection of the Phonologies of Standard American English and African American Vernacular English as Seen Through Orthography
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2012
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
This thesis addresses the orthography of young African American Vernacular English
speakers. The subjects are first grade students at a charter school in Philadelphia, and the study
examines the relationship between the students' orthography and orthographic errors, the
teacher's models of orthography and the spelling strategies she provides, and the varieties of
English spoken by the teacher and the students as they relate to students' pronunciations of
specific words and their spelling attempts. This will build on research on literacy in early
elementary students (Terry et al. (2010)) that compares students across many schools,
socioeconomic statuses, and risk factors and allow for a more in-depth account of students from
a relatively homogenous school where more factors can be controlled for. The students involved
are all African American and speakers of African American Vernacular English, and the school
has a high population of students with low socioeconomic status. Consideration of the cultural
issues inherent in teaching a language minority in the dominant language led to discussion of the
Oakland Ebonics Controversy and the Ann Arbor Decision.
To conduct the research, I listened to students as they participated in normal discussions
with their peers and their teacher, and transcribed salient words and phrases into IP A. I also
documented writing samples and examined the types of errors that were made for patterns related
to African American Vernacular English phonology, as defined by Labov (1972), Sligh &
Conners (2003), and Wyatt (2001). I conducted a sociolinguistic interview with the teacher to
determine her accent, and a content interview to learn more about her approach to spelling and
AA VE. I expected that the spelling of both vowels and consonants would be influenced primarily by the students' speech, and secondarily by the teacher's speech and the spelling
strategies available. I found that there was a large gap between the best and worst spellers, and
that familiarity with English spelling patterns enabled some students to write clearly with
phonetically-motivated errors, while many students had such variation in how they represented
each vowel sound that most vowel data was inconclusive. Consonant data was more consistent,
with a key finding that students could spell consonant clusters and syllables with multiple
consonants as long as they had access to a pronunciation where all of the necessary phonemes
existed. I found unusual invented spellings that represented a stronger phonemic awareness in the
stressed syllable than the unstressed syllable of disyllabic words, such as <on crism I am gon to
duw nufin!> for 'on Christmas I am going to do nothing!' and <we dite> for 'we didn't'. This
research follows from Treiman et aI's (1993) work on the relationship between stress patterns
and phonemic awareness, but also addresses issues of rule-based spelling in a typical classroom
environment, unlike Sligh & Conners (2003)