Spoken Language
Gilyard asserts that Blacks are bidialectal. For instance, for Gilyard “Black English was developing as the dominant tongue while Standard English, though quite significant, was not wielded as handily” (31). Black learn, then, how to code with, which is “a strategy by which the skillful speaker uses his knowledge of how language choices are interpreted in his community to structure the interaction so as to maximum outcomes favorable to himself” (31). Importantly, “each case of shifting or mixing [dialects] happens as the child is experiencing conflicting social demands” (32). In order to meet the social demands then, children gain “an awareness o the social relevance of dialect” and switch dialects as the different social demands present themselves.
Gilyard also emphasizes the benefit of a pluralism view of language. “Pluralists insist that the language of Blacks be left alone [in school] since it is as good as any other. While it is true, these critics assert, that Black English speakers suffer setbacks in the society at large, such setbacks are due to who they are [i.e. what they look like] - not what they speak…To the pluralist the critical work involving language education is to develop a school system (and of course a society) in which language differences fail to have deleterious consequences for those whose language has been traditionally frowned upon” (72-3). He states that “the eradication of one tongue is not a prerequisite to the learning of a second” (160). An eradicationist pedagogy “helps create failing students, provides an inadequate support system for scholarship students, and may promote within the latter group negative self-concepts” (161).
Reading
In the debate about whether children learn to read globally (reading for meaning) or whether they learn through phonics (the code approach), Gilyard believes that students learn to read globally. With that in mind, he makes the following claims:
- “Making sense, of course, is the single most important thing about reading, for it is the urge that motivates us to reading in the first place” (34)
- “Efficient readers do not decode to sound” (34)
- “one cannot read one word at a time and read for sense. This is due…to the physical limitations of short-term memory” (35)
- “the most fluent readers are the ones who require the least visual information” (35)
- “meaningful language is transparent; we look through words for the meaning beyond” (35)
- “All this is not to say that phonics is irrelevant. It is one strategy for figuring out text and, as a child assembles a repertoire of strategies, there is some place for it. The essential point, however, is that a child is searching for sense and at no point should that search be hindered by dogmatic instruction” (37)
Pedagogy
Gilyard argues that, rather than maintaining an eradicationist view – which tries to remove anything but Standard English from a student’s speech and does not value students’ home experiences, we should “allow…more of the children’s street experiences, particularly their language, to have legitimate functions in the classroom. Such experiences could be a starting point for crucial and truly enriching discussions, as opposed to superficial teacher-dominated ones, of relationships among language, knowledge, culture, identity, politics – in brief, many of the connections Black children often ponder” (115). Also, he explains that “mastery of the standard dialect [does] not in and of itself lead to outstanding formal academic progress” (159). Instead, “there must be an insistence that educators understand and indicate by their actions the importance of cultural and linguistic pluralism in educational settings” (163).
Key Words
- Transactional model: “humans are viewed as continually negotiating with an evolving environment…From this perspective, behavior is neither the exclusive acting out of inner drives, not is it shaped solely by external forces. One has personal traits and a belief system that set one’s expectations and guide one’s actions. The results of these actions in turn modify that belief system. The modified belief system governs further action and so on” (13).