A Black Classroom Culture: Student Code-switching in an Inner City Secondary School

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http://hdl.handle.net/11603/1036
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Date
2008-02-05
Type of Work
application/pdf
Text
theses
Department
Modern Languages, Linguistics & Intercultural Communication
Program
Intercultural Communication Language
Rights
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu.
Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan through a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
Subjects
Culture, dialect, high school
Language, Linguistics (0290)
Language, Modern (0291)
Abstract
This project is a study of the speech of African American students within the High School classroom and their verbal communication before, during, and after class. The overall goal is to observe and study their varying use of Standard American English (SAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) with a focus on the code-switching practices among these students. Through the analysis of salient parts of classroom communication, an examination of African American speech dynamics when African American students use both varieties (SAE and AAVE) is performed, extrapolating to which factors influence the use of each variety. Using the tenets of bi-dialectalism and code-switching as they exist in a speech community, this research aims to draw conclusions on the culture of this phenomenon. An inner city secondary school in Baltimore, Maryland, is used as the research site for this study.