HESP Seminar: Sierra Hall

Honors Thesis Defense: Perspectives on non-mainstream dialect, particularly African American English and how they communicate these perspectives to their children

Abstract:
Background: Children learn about language ideologies from adults in their communities,including their parents and teachers (e.g., the intelligence of a dialect speaker or the  appropriateness of a language). Parents' perspectives on languages and dialects can also impact the languages and dialects they encourage their children to use. However, there is a lack of research regarding how African American parents view the use of African American English (AAE) and how they communicate their perspectives to their children. This study posed two research questions to address that gap: 1) What are parents’ perspectives on the use of non-mainstream dialects, particularly AAE? and 2) How do they communicate these perspectives to their children?

Methods: 31 parents from various racial backgrounds were recruited from the Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia areas. Parents answered a survey consisting of Likert and open-response questions that assessed parent perspectives of AAE and GAE, the dialect that parents identified speaking, how they explicitly communicated their views to their children, and general demographic information about the participants.

Results: The results show that parents significantly preferred GAE over AAE (p<0.05). After running separate ANOVA tests, with the independent variables being race and parent dialect group, there were no significant differences between ratings of Black and non-Black individuals and AAE and non-AAE speakers (p>0.05). The qualitative data from the open responses revealed no differences between how parents, across races and dialect groups, communicated their views of AAE and GAE to their children. Overall, parents had more negative views towards AAE use and more positive views toward GAE use and were more likely to encourage their children to speak GAE.

Conclusions: The results show that both AAE- and GAE-speaking parents may have an overall preference for GAE use, both for themselves and their children. Future work should include interviewing young adults to gauge how they formed their linguistic attitudes towards dialects. Also, include asking parents whether or not they code switch to gauge parent attitudes toward bidialectalism.