umd-sunflower-alley

35 Michigan-Project on Oral language, Writing, and Reading (M-POWR) Teachers often focus, either unconsciously or more directly, on teaching students to use ME and MCE forms in classrooms. Furthermore, new nationally adopted state standards require that students in the early grades learn to speak, read, and write using the conventions of ME. M-POWR is a large project designed to develop instructional methods for the early elementary grades which can help students discover that dialects exist and that it can be fun and useful to be able to speak and understand more than one dialect of English. Teachers using M-POWR methods are encouraged to adopt a positive and constructive approach to the fostering of language diversity by their students. Our focus has been African American students in kindergarten and first grade. A commonly used and popular form of instruction in the early grades is story book reading. This book is one of a series of story books written and illustrated to appeal to kindergarten and first grade students, and to be useful to teachers during story book reading time. Each book has a central character who is a boy or girl of elementary grade age. The hero or heroine is a skilled speaker of both AAE and ME. Like most story books enjoyed by students of these ages, the plots are fairly simple, usually present a problem of some type, and the hero or heroine finds a way to solve the problem. Solving the problem may require one or more worthy personal attributes such as Maya’s joyful determination as she works to improve her community. Over the course of the story, the hero or heroine will engage a variety of other people in conversations about the theme of the book. Some of these characters will speak only AAE, some will speak only ME, and some like the hero or heroine will speak both, depending on the context. AAE and ME share many features. However, the two language systems differ from each other in many ways as well. Research has shown that young AAE-speaking students entering kindergarten know how to use more than two dozen grammatical features that are characteristic of AAE, as well as many other features characterizing sounds, word choices, and vocal expression. In this book, Maya is the main character. She takes on her school’s neighborhood clean-up challenge by planting a garden. As the garden grows larger, she must sacrifice her independent pride and ask other members of the neighborhood to help her before the judging begins. Maya’s friends, neighbors, and family are speakers of AAE. In addition to the narrator of each story, Mr. Smith, Principal Jones, and Mr. Green are speakers of ME. When Maya is speaking with these characters in the story, she shifts to speaking only ME. For example Maya says, “My garden looks beautiful” when speaking with Mr. Smith. When speaking with her Auntie Claire she says, “My garden need cleaning.” We have used boxes to highlight these forms, with “s” inside a box—s—when it is included (ME), and an empty box— —when the character spoke using the AAE feature and thus omitted the form. You may want to point out these times of inclusion and exclusion to the child to whom you are reading, and talk about the two ways of talking that these patterns represent. The process of creating each book required many steps. The story line was drafted, the conversations were re-written to include targeted dialectal forms appropriate to each character, the text was segmented into subsections and illustrations were developed for each. Over the course of many months, each story book was tested many times in numerous individual classrooms by research staff, project teachers, and classroom teachers. We gathered information from teacher journals, de-briefing meetings, video analysis, and student responses. All of this information was organized, studied, and interpreted resulting in frequent and on-going changes to the original drafts. The result, Sunflower Alley, is now available for teaching, learning, and enjoyment.