Antonice's DW3a

The use of AAVE/AAL is appropriated in many different ways. Some feel that it is a language as well as some feel it is just a dialect. So far I was able to read “Expository Writing Patterns of African American Students” by Arnetha Ball. In her research she shows how though most African American students use AAVE outside of the classroom, they bring a lot of variety to a classroom because of their AAVE, but tend to get penalized for it. She used an example of a young girl who was given an assignment from her 5-grade teacher. She wrote a story about an evil shoe, but because she used the word “ain’t” her grade was drastically dropped to a B- instead of an A that she deserved. She said it took her 3 years to get over what had happened and write creatively again. These are what most students who use African American Vernacular English consistently go through and possibly why black students are sometimes discouraged to write. As well as it is able to discourage, it also encourages some students to take up the Standard English form and master it, while still maintaining their AAVE. This is called code switching which is discussed in previous papers. Ball seems to express the support of code-switching in a classroom. Students shouldn’t feel scared to write in a way that is comfortable to them. To briefly summarize she agrees with code-switching and feel it should be more accepted in a classroom environment. I feel this does have some sort of scholarship because she makes valid points with real examples of students and their experiences of using their AAVE. She also has cited sources of other linguistic scholars such as Geneva Smitherman, whom I have researched previously that help support her feeling of AAVE. I feel that this does make an effective argument because I am asked to develop an argument on whether composition studies effectively discuss the usage of AAVE as a language and if the discussion of it has changed over time. This will be a good example of how it is viewed and used at a specific time. Ball published this in 1996 so I will be able to use it as a past view, and hopefully I will find a more recent view of AAVE being used in composition studies.