Search

For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African American students' Ebonics-based syntactical features has declined over the past decades. As a teacher, scholar, and writing program administrator, the author is interested in the extent to which African American students can employ African American linguistic phonological and syntactical features in different expository writing situations, since as the 1974 CCCC Students' Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) suggests, African American students--and all other students--have the right to write in the "dialects of their nurture" or "whatever" linguist patterns that students bring with them into the classroom. Thus, it would seem that SRTOL would include the right for students to use their own languages in formal expository writing situations and to have successes in a writing class by doing so. This essay extends SRTOL as a framework for helping college writing students understand the ways that they can make purposeful and strategic choices about language practices in the composition classroom. To forward this argument, the author offers a case study of how three African American students enrolled in a first-year writing course employ Ebonics-based phonological and syntactical patterns across writing assignments, including those that also require students to compose multigenre essays. By showing the different writing situations where African American students make purposeful and strategic language choices, the author offers a classroom example of what SRTOL might look like in an academic writing context that engages students' writing in different academic rhetorical situations. Thus, the author offers a research report of students' understanding and practice of their own languages when a supportive Afrocentric first-year writing curriculum is provided. The author concludes the essay by offering examples of how students come to see learning about Ebonics as relevant to their literate lives. (Contains 6 notes.)

The relationship between cultural diversity, linguistic diversity, and composition has been a topic that has received much attention in rhetoric and composition's disciplinary conversations, even if current pedagogical practices used to address these matters lag behind in progress. In this essay, the author focuses on how to address linguistic diversity and race in writing assessment in the classroom. This essay offers an example of one course that focuses exclusively on Ebonics as a specific African American linguistic practice and on rhetoric and composition scholarship as the primary topics of investigation. The author examines how one first-year writing class accomplishes the designated learning goals of a large midwestern institution, while exploring Ebonics and rhetoric and composition's disciplinary scholarship. (Contains 6 notes.)

The article reflects on the essay titled "Troubling the Boundaries: (De)Constructing WPA Identities at the Intersections of Race and Gender" and examined how the writing program administration (WPA) work broadens the roles of identity politics within the university writing programs.