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Unpublished Paper
Why Deny Speakers of African American Language a Choice Most of Us Offer Other Students?
(2008)
  • Peter Elbow, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Abstract

Mainstream teachers commonly invite mainstream students to freewrite and use very informal language for early and mid drafts of important academic essays--and hold off surface editing till the end. This amounts to inviting mainstream students to do lots of writing in their spoken vernacular--and to wait till the end to edit into a clearly different dialect: edited ("correct standard") written English. This essay argues the same approach for speakers of African American Language--and addresses objections.

Publication Date
2008
Citation Information
Peter Elbow. "Why Deny Speakers of African American Language a Choice Most of Us Offer Other Students?" (2008)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/peter_elbow/21/