DW 3b

In the article "Acknowledging the Language of African American Students: Instructional Strategies" by Sharroky Hollie he discusses how the American School System must search for a way to teach African American students in a way that will help to make them successful. He discusses six instructional approaches to help these students become proficient at speaking and writing Standard English while allowing them to achieve greater academic success. These six ways are to build the understanding and attitude of the teachers teaching these students, integrate linguistic knowledge of these other languages into learning, using the second language acquisition to support school language, employ a balanced approach that includes phonics, design instruction around strengths of these students, and use their culture to help teach them (54-55). He goes on to explain how these strategies can help teach an AAL speaker to learn Standard English by acknowledging the differences in the two.

It seems that Hollie is trying to say that it is very possible for AAL speakers to be academically successful as long as we acknowledge that they do speak a different language and we find ways to teach them through what they already know. African Americans have been labeled as bad students for years because no one took the time to find out the best way to teach them. Hollie discusses research done by Orlando Taylor in which Taylor compares two groups of African American Students. One group was taught in a traditional setting while the other was taught using what he calls the "non-standard language awareness approach." Over the course of the study the second group of students actually reduced their use of AAL in writing by 59% and the first group surprisingly increased their AAL use by 8.5% (57). With such a huge difference in the result of each group of students it is easy to see that by acknowledging the fact that these students do not use Standard English as a first option will dramatically increase their ability to become better students. It seems that once teachers are able to accept AAL as a rule governed, natural language, they are able to help these students more. By respecting AAL as a language, it gives students the belief that they can handle learning Standard English as well. Hollie ends his arguement well, saying, "It is time that other methods of instruction for this failing system be seriously considered" (59).