3 AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH
The dialect of English spoken by members of the African diaspora and descendents from the slave trade in North America has many names: African American English, African American Vernacular English, Black English, Ebonics (Baugh, 2000: 2), Spoken Soul (Rickford and Rickford, 2000), New World Black English (Rickford, 1999: 175), African American Standard English when discussing middle class Black English (Spears, 2009: 3), and many others. For the remainder of this dissertation, I will refer to the dialect as African American English (AAE) for simplification.

AAE is used both by descendents of slaves brought to North America during the slave trade and immigrants to the United States from the larger African diaspora. …show more content…
Tarone (1972: 3) claimed that AAE has a wider pitch range, both level and rising final pitch contours compared to SAE, falling final contours in yes/no questions as opposed to the rising contours in SAE, and the marking of conditional clauses with intonation rather than the word if. Three years later, Loman (1975) added that AAE has a higher number of primary stresses, marked shift between higher and lower pitches, and the use of frequent falsetto. These prosodic features are so important, that without using any core phonetic or grammatical features of AAE, a person can be speaking it; this can, among other things, signal an allegiance to the African American community without alerting the Anglo Americans listening (Lippi-Green, 2012: 185-186). Prominent African American figures such as Barack Obama take advantage of these features in their speech, firstly to demonstrate alliances with the African American community, and secondly to take advantage of rhetorical devices in AAE that are absent in SAE (Alim and Smitherman, …show more content…
It is often expected that students who are from lower socioeconomic neighbourhoods are also African American, which is in turn associated with poor performance in schools. Studies have shown that teachers do not expect as much from their African American students (CITE), so will not challenge them as much (CITE), or are more likely to report them to the administrative offices for behaviour problems (CITE). This is particularly true of students who use AAE. By contrast, the use of SAE is associated with positive personality characteristics (CITE), success, and higher intelligence (CITE). Parents and adults in the African American community often express concern that if a child does not learn to speak the standard, they are less likely to get the economic benefits associated with SAE. Teachers often have negative attitudes towards students who speak AAE (Rickford, 1999: 283). In fact, 40% of teachers in a survey by Taylor (1973: 183) did not believe that AAE has structure or usefulness. Their opinions and knowledge about AAE will greatly affect treatment of students speaking it. Rickford (1999: 305) reported that third-graders in a primarily African American neighbourhood scored in the 16th percentile statewide in the reading component of a statewide assessment test; by sixth grade, they had declined even further, only performing at the third percentile. By contrast, their white counterparts