Public discourse about language and education: An analysis of newspaper opinion writing on the Ebonics controversy

Public debate on the appropriate role of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), or Ebonics, in education is often hampered by highly reductive public perceptions of this nonstandard language variety. This fact was demonstrated by the controversy following the December 1996 resolution on Ebonics issued by the Oakland Unified School Board (OUSB). In this study, a corpus of 98 newspaper opinion articles was analyzed to explicate the nature of public conceptions of AAVE/Ebonics and the ways in which these conceptions interacted with other common rhetorical moves as writers took positions of support for, opposition to, or neutrality on the OUSB resolution.; The corpus consisted of four parts: editorials appearing in major newspapers (23); op-eds by non African Americans appearing in major newspapers (19); op-eds by African Americans appearing in major newspapers (32); and editorials and op-eds appearing in African-American newspapers (24). A corpus-wide analysis of all 98 articles identified positions taken on the OUSB resolution and analyzed both indirect and direct characterizations of AA AAVE/Ebonics in each sub-corpus. Positions on the OUSB resolution were predominately negative, with 70.4% of all articles and 77% of articles in major newspapers taking a negative position. While lexical labels for Standard American English (SAE) were generally positive or neutral, lexical labels for AAVE/Ebonics were generally neutral or negative. Additionally, negative direct characterizations of AAVE/Ebonics correlated strongly with negative positions on the OUSB resolution, and even those articles that recognized the linguistic validity of AAVE/Ebonics often used pejorative language to describe it.; A textual analysis of eight representative articles (two from each sub-corpus) found that (1) negative characterizations of AAVE/Ebonics and (2) a focus on the minor premises of the OUSB resolution (e.g., the adoption of the term Ebonics, the status of this language variety as a separate language or not) correlated with writers failing to fully consider the major premise of the OUSB resolution: the pedagogical potential of using AAVE/Ebonics in the classroom in order to develop more effectively students' skills in using SAE.