‘It’s just how we articulate the Blackness in us’: African American teachers, Black students, and African American Language

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the role of African American Language (AAL) and *Standardized American English (*SAE) in Black/African American same-race teacher-student relationships. The teachers in this study (1) used AAL as a valuable tool for building rapport and trust with their students; (2) were aware of their positions as linguistic role models; and (3) encouraged AAL-speaking students to use *SAE due to concerns about racial and linguistic profiling. Results suggest that because AAL-speaking African American teachers understand the United States to be a racially stratified society, they encourage their students to use *SAE with intentions of helping students advance socially and economically. This study illuminates why African American teachers use their shared language proficiency with their same-race students.

KEYWORDS:

• African American Language
• AAL
• language ideologies
• language attitudes
• teacher-student relationships
• same-race

Acknowledgment

Many people have contributed to the development of this article and I am grateful to each person who advised my research, helped me develop an outline, read a draft, or offered constructive critique. Specifically, I would like to thank my qualifying paper committee, Drs. Arnetha Ball, Adam Banks, and Guadalupe Valdés, for guiding this idea in its infancy and vigorously encouraging me to be brave and submit for publication. I extend appreciation to Dr. Sam Wineburg for his structured writing course dedicated to demystifying the journey to publishing, Dr. Jonathan Rosa for his care with helping me move past a large writing block to refine my argument, and Dr. Anne Charity-Hudley for her close-reading and edits of my text. Finally, I offer deep thanks to my colleagues, friends, and family, Daisy Greene, Sandra Habtamu, Alexander Feliciano Mejía, CoCo Massengale, Dr. Melissa Mesinas, and Dr. Amber Jolley-Tagoe, for their incredible, insightful, and continuous feedback given at many different stages of this work.

Disclosure statement

I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Notes

1. In instances where I am specifically speaking about people who are the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the United States, I exclusively use the term African American. In instances where I am speaking of Black people writ large, inclusive of African Americans, I use the term Black.

2. I follow the lead of Lippi-Green (2012) by adding an asterisk to *SAE (54).

3. The names of all information that might lead to the identification of teachers interviewed have been changed to a pseudonym. This includes the names of individuals, schools, school districts, cities, counties, universities, etc.

4. The ways that the students spoke with their teachers was not a focus, but teacher responses to their use were highlighted.

5. I acknowledge coding to be an interpretative act that allows for meaning to be assigned (Saldaña 2015, Chapter 1).

6. Descriptive code definitions: ‘The other’ included mentions of White people, the middle/upper-class, and/or individuals in positions of power in ways that distance the speaker or their students from those mentioned; ‘correction’ included discussion, mentions, and instances of modifying students’ language; ‘mesh’ included the (un)mixing of presumed standard and non-standard language – to also include a professed (in)ability to tell the difference between standard and nonstandard; ‘negative associations’ included expressions that students’ language and/or ways of speaking did not fit into the interviewee’s mental model of what ‘good’ or ‘proper’ English is.