Annotated Bibliography

In American society, students should learn standard English while being taught to embrace their cultural dialects.

Lin, San-Su. ""Standard Dialects" and Substandard Worlds." National Council of Teachers of English 1.3 (1970): 140. Web. 19 Nov 2009. .

A Dialect is a variation of language; language, or speech, as Edward Sapir defines it, is “a non-instinctive, acquired, cultural function,” “a purely historical heritage” of a group, “the product of long-continued social usage.” The Author, San-Su Lin, is not particularly for one side but he is stating a point that a dialect is not something wrong or incorrect that the students are doing. He is emphasizing that dialect is cultural or rather historical of where we are from and were born into. Basically we can not help the situation because I would not say it is a choice of how we speak in person, it is our natural ability to speak that way and it should not be taken away from us by learning the Standard English. But we should be able to speak the Standard in a scholarly situation. In my paper i want to stress the fact that all students can keep their dialect and not have to feel like they are losing their part of their life but also understand that they have to learn the Standard English. Also they need to know the appropriate time to use their dialect. I do not want this to be like me giving lessons but just a few things to point out.

Jones, Allen. "English Language Teaching in a Social/Cultural Dialect Situation." Nature of the Problem(1968): 199-205. Web. 19 Nov 2009. .

‘What are “acceptable habits” and to whom are they acceptable?’ Indeed, underlying both definitions is the assumption that there is one code, one language, one dialect which it is necessary for our pupils to master to the exclusion, presumably, of all else. It is this assumption that I wish to challenge: that the natural or home language habits of the child are inferior or irrelevant and should play no part on the process of development; that there is only one form of language usage - the ‘acceptable’ one - with which it is necessary for a person to explore all the outer and inner recesses of his experience. In this Article, Allen Jones, is saying there is nothing wrong with the children speaking from their cultural dialect because their habits are acceptable. But other critics would probably disagree because most people believe the only language is the ‘right language’ which to them would be the standard. To Jones, the right language is what he/she has learned growing up with what they have been around their whole lives. It sounds like he is saying it is a good habit. I want to use this in my paper to show that there is an acceptable reason why we can use dialect and be looked at as smart still for example if we are using southern dialect, then people automatically assume we are stupid. So in this case I want to show that we can be noticed as intelligent people with out getting rid of our dialect.