Summarize the author's main idea, supporting evidence of that idea, and how you think it discusses scholarship of AAVE/AAL in composition studies. What does the reading seem to say about AAVE/AAL? Does it effectively make an argument about it's role in composition studies? If so, how? If not, what's missing?

For this assignment I chose to use "A Perspective on Teaching Black Dialect Speaking Students to Write Standard English" by Judith Nembhardt. Basically, she is writing about how teachers in our schools are constantly being trained to teach kids how to write more effectively in workshops and meetings, but they don't know how to effectively work with a child with an AAVE background. Students that speak AAVE at home are labeled as "nontraditional", "culturally different", or "linguistically different". She answers the question of: "Can black students be carried along on the wave of improvement?"

The author believes just by dropping the labels, and even though it'll be a hard task, it is possible to make effective writers of the AAVE students. This writing approaches AAVE scholarship as unacceptable. The students must adhere to the standard English that they are taught in the school. "Children without standard American English are handicapped directly." Not so unacceptable as to destroy it, just to enhance the school language but also let them speak the way they'd like to culturally. The idea of teaching students how to write effectively is a more appropriate strategy then to uproot their cultural habits of language. It is more effective to teach them to write their ideas more creatively then to make students adhere to rules that they don't understand.

This reading successfully makes an argument about the use of AAVE in composition studies. The topic dealing with composition studies is education in the schools of America. What she is talking about is a possible situation where the teachers were more confident and were not intimidated by the fact that it would be tough to teach these sorts of students. She even outlines her own eight essential components of a teaching plan. She uses quotes and information from linguists such as P.A. Ramey, Joan Baratz, Roger Shuy, and WIlliam Labov.