Backward mimicry and forward influence in prosodic contour choice in standard American English

The term Englishes refers to the many different varieties of the English, and represents both standardized and nonstandardized forms. Nonstandardized Englishes is used to refer to Englishes that do not adhere to what has been determined to be Standard English within a given context, such that they are referred to as dialects, Creoles, or New Englishes (e.g., African American English). Standardized Englishes is used to refer to the counterparts of the nonstandardized Englishes that have been typically adopted for use in literacy classrooms (e.g., Standard American English). The field of literacy has addressed nonstandardized Englishes by either focusing on the nonstandardized varieties in isolation from standardized Englishes or by advancing literacy instruction in mainstream classrooms that emphasizes dialect-English speakers’ mastery of standardized Englishes. This approach reflects standard monolingual English ideology and traditional notions of the English language. Operating based on standard monolingual English perspectives implicitly reinforces the view that standardized Englishes and their users are privileged and that speakers of nonstandardized Englishes and their users are inferior. In addition, adhering to traditional notions of English based on their geographical and nation-based use, as opposed to their function based on school, offline, or online contexts regardless of geography, reinforces the concept of the English language as a system and fails to emphasize its communicative and contextual purposes as demanded by our postmodern era of globalization, transnationalism, and internationalization. A translingual approach to Englishes can serve as an alternative to current ways of thinking about literacy instruction because it addresses the needs of both standardized and nonstandardized English-speaking populations. Literacy instruction reframed based on this approach is critical for students’ successful interaction across linguistic and cultural boundaries in the context of the 21st century.

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Texts, white lies and a videotape: white teachers teaching African American literature

Journal for Multicultural Education ◽

10.1108/jme-02-2020-0013 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 14 (3/4) ◽

pp. 239-253

Author(s):

Lisa Marie Westbrooks

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

African American Literature ◽

American English ◽

White Teachers ◽

Content Type ◽

Standard American English ◽

English Classrooms ◽

Teacher Researcher ◽

White Gaze

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a Woman of Color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. I concur with previous researchers on this topic, but from a fresh perspective that traditional educational spaces support racial-socio and linguistic hierarchies by avoiding authentic racial, social and cultural ways of knowing, thus allowing reproduction and perpetuating academic and social inequities targeted toward multilingual learners. Furthermore, I suggest that teachers must acquaint themselves with communities of color to become affective and effective to specifically facilitate multilingual classrooms. Design/methodology/approach This is an autoethnographic inquiry. It examines instances of culturally inexperienced white teachers teaching African American literature to middle school and high school multilingual learners. In adjacent, I share my personal memories and emotions of my experience as an African American, a woman of color, teacher-peer, teacher-researcher, student and a colonized standard American English speaker, situated in English classrooms as white teachers teach African American literature from a white gaze. Findings Undoubtedly, the white gaze influences marginalized persons. It does not merely attack who we be. It counter forms (e.g. influences) the views and ideas of the world around us. Gonzales (2015), shares in her autoethnography how educational practices are unjustly resistant to diversity. The racial-socio hierarchy uses every means necessary to deprive ethnicity (language, practices and beliefs). I did not verbally resist discrimination. Subsequently, some people of color may be guilty of having a slave gaze. I am very cautious and reluctant to use the term slave gaze. Nevertheless, I describe this as the opposite of having a white gaze. Slave gaze is someone who is colonized, dominated, submissive and feels unequal to whites and describes persons of color who have been conditioned to believe that whites are privileged and there is not much that we can do about it. I think this one way that Gonzales’ (2015); definition of double colonization can be extended, the racial-socio hierarchy in education forces marginalized persons to “redefine their identities within the dictates of yet another racial ideology” (p. 50). Undoubtedly, in re-identifying self-inflicts a counter-response to developing a substandard identity. Yet, I am certainly not the only person of color that is wary of challenging whiteness. Dismantling the master’s house will take more time. As white supremacist’s perceptions are embedded deep in the heart of education. Banishing false linguistic, cultural and racial ideologies equate to a mere few bricks of the master’s house. However, with non-traditional methods (e.g. getting to know the community in which the students live), renewed hearts and minds educators (together as a human race) can deconstruct and rebuild an education system fit for all learners. Originality/value This piece is an autoethnography of my experiences as a teacher teaching in multilingual classrooms. These are my original experiences and opinions.

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Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000916000349 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 44 (4) ◽

pp. 968-994 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

SUSAN GEFFEN ◽

TOBEN H. MINTZ

Keyword(s):

Word Order ◽

American English ◽

Standard American English ◽

Prosodic Cues ◽

Syntax Acquisition ◽

Syntactic Information ◽

English Speaking ◽

Syntactic Properties ◽

Maternal Speech

AbstractIn many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother–infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, butwh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives fromwh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.

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Affirmative Cue Words in Task-Oriented Dialogue

Computational Linguistics ◽

10.1162/coli_a_00083 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 38 (1) ◽

pp. 1-39 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Agustín Gravano ◽

Julia Hirschberg ◽

Štefan Beňuš

Keyword(s):

Computational Methods ◽

Predictive Power ◽

American English ◽

Contextual Information ◽

Spoken Language ◽

Dialogue Systems ◽

Spoken Dialogue Systems ◽

Standard American English ◽

Task Oriented ◽

Cue Words

We present a series of studies of affirmative cue words—a family of cue words such as “okay” or “alright” that speakers use frequently in conversation. These words pose a challenge for spoken dialogue systems because of their ambiguity: They may be used for agreeing with what the interlocutor has said, indicating continued attention, or for cueing the start of a new topic, among other meanings. We describe differences in the acoustic/prosodic realization of such functions in a corpus of spontaneous, task-oriented dialogues in Standard American English. These results are important both for interpretation and for production in spoken language applications. We also assess the predictive power of computational methods for the automatic disambiguation of these words. We find that contextual information and final intonation figure as the most salient cues to automatic disambiguation.

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A regional analysis of contraction rate in written Standard American English

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics ◽

10.1075/ijcl.16.4.04gri ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 16 (4) ◽

pp. 514-546 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Jack Grieve

Keyword(s):

Statistical Approach ◽

American English ◽

Regional Analysis ◽

Linguistic Variation ◽

Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis ◽

Contraction Rate ◽

Autocorrelation Analysis ◽

Letters To The Editor ◽

Regional Patterns ◽

Standard American English

The goal of this study is to determine if various measures of contraction rate are regionally patterned in written Standard American English. In order to answer this question, this study employs a corpus-based approach to data collection and a statistical approach to data analysis. Based on a spatial autocorrelation analysis of the values of eleven measures of contraction across a 25 million word corpus of letters to the editor representing the language of 200 cities from across the contiguous United States, two primary regional patterns were identified: easterners tend to produce relatively few standard contractions (not contraction, verb contraction) compared to westerners, and northeasterners tend to produce relatively few non-standard contractions (to contraction, non-standard not contraction) compared to southeasterners. These findings demonstrate that regional linguistic variation exists in written Standard American English and that regional linguistic variation is more common than is generally assumed.

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