Linguistic Discrimination in Writing Assessments: How Raters React to African American Errors, ESL Errors, and Standard English Errors on State-Wide Tests by David Johnson and Lewis VanBrackle (2011) Dangerous Minds example: “stupid” and “idiot”. David and Johnson and Lewis VanBrackle tackle the issue of how African-Americans and ESL students are evaluated on standardized writing tests compared to speakers of Standard English. Looking at how certain aspects of African American dialects have lexical items that are considered to be “errors” in Standard English writing. After conducting research and a series of studies, Johnson and VanBrackle were able to successfully examine how there are in face bias opinions when rating essays that were written by African American and ESL student writers compared to those who use Standard English.
A Breakdown ● AAE (African ● Dialects: Varities of of Terms a language that American differ lexically, English) phonologically, and ● ESL (English as a grammatically Second from the standard Language) dialect. (Johnson & ● SAE (Standard VanBrackle, 38) American English) 2
Purpose 3 -Raters of student writing react strongly to writing errors and those reactions range from irritation and exasperation to amusement and sympathy. We will argue that reactions to errors are a significant factor in the assessment of student writing on a standardized writing exam that is graded holistically. Most significant, this study will demonstrate that raters react differently to “errors” typical of African American English (AAE) writers, of errors of English as a Second Language (ESL) writers, and errors of Standard American English (SAE) writers. The end result is imbalanced assessment of essays that are identical except for eight different kinds of errors. -For this study, we limited our exploration of this linguistic discrimination on the part of raters to an examination of which kinds of errors raters consider more egregious; thus, we did not consider the other higher level writing features. As the data collection procedures will show, we were able to isolate raters’ reactions to errors exclusively and not consider reactions to other writing issues such as coherence, originally, or style. -Linguists note that what mainstream writing teachers regard as errors might be reclassified as features. The African American dialect has many non-standard features (as does any dialect of English) which should be considered a feature from a descriptive linguistic standpoint. These contrast from ESL errors which result from a lack of complete language acquisition. -We acknowledge this classification of features by non-linguistics as errors, but at the same time our focus is not on a justification of a group’s right to their own dialect. Our focus is on how different kinds of features (or “errors”) influence writing assessors. Thus, all non-standard elements in the students essays will henceforth simply be called errors.
Academic and Anecdotal “Most raters are not fully “We have heard many raters aware of the linguistic condemn non-standard dialect features (both AAE motivations of these errors, and southern American and we believe most raters English) as “lazy” or succumb to a societal view “careless” mistakes and that regards non-standard comment that they should dialect features in writing result in a failing grade not as simply substandard and because of the quantity but careless writing.” (Johnson because of the severity ad & VanBrackle, 38) linguistic saliency of them.” (Johnson & VanBrackle, 38) 4
History 5 -AAE became a dialect due to its unique history and it remains a distinctive dialect like all non-standard dialects, due to sociopolitical pressure which motivates speakers to maintain it for identity purposes (Milroy, 1992). As with all dialects, there is a variation within the dialect, ubt there are sufficient common linguistic features to justify using a single designation. It is equally important to note not all African Americans use this dialect. As with all dialects, there is a continuum of usage by speakers of that dialect. AAE remains a highly stigmatized dialect of American English.
“ The present study is built upon the notions of surface writing errors. We define surface errors as those non-standard writing (marked) features that do not interfere with communication but would be noted by ost raters as non-conformity to the conventions of standard English. Surface errors include spelling, wrong verb forms, punctuation, and syntactic problems that do not obscure meaning (Connors & Lunsford, 1988) (Johnson & VanBrackle, 39) 6
Research Do essay raters penalize essays with AAE ▹ Questions errors more than essays with SAE errors on a holistically scored writing assessment? ▹ Do essay raters penalize with ESL errors more than essays with SAE errors on a holistically scored writing assessment? Do essay raters penalize essays with ESL ▹ errors more than essays with AAE errors on a holistically scored writing assessment? 7
The Study Three essay topics 8 -In order to investigate these questions, we used the following design. 1st, we used collected three sample student-written essays from previous years. These were actual essays written by university students from previous years and graded holistically by exam raters. We used an essay that had a failed, an essay that had passed, and an essay that had a high pass. We then corred all the surface errors in the three exams, but left everything else unchanged. Subsequently, we created an AAE version, an ESL version, and a SAE version of each of the three essays (for a total of nine essays). Topic 1: Failing essay: Do you believe it is the responsibility of the young to provide financial security for the aged? Why or why not? Topic 2: Passing essay: What are most important factors in personal success? Topic 3: High pass essay: Is increased life expectancy a blessing or a curse?
9 The three versions of each of the three essays differed only by the insertion of eight surface errors into each essay. The eight surface errors were errors typical of either AAE, ESL, or SAE writers.
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13 Tables 1-3 include samples of the errors that were inserted into the three essays.
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15 It is important to note that each version of the three essays had exactly eight errors. One or two single errors in the versions would not be a reliable method for noting differences in rater reactions. However, eight was a number we determined (based on a previous pilot study) that caused readers to note errors were of three kinds: AAE, ESL, or SAE. Certainly, many of the errors could cross boundaries. A comma splice and an inappropriate preposition are not, in and of themselves, indicative of one language group. However, we were careful to select linguistic features and a predominance of errors that indicated a pattern that was consistent with AAE, ESL, or SAE.
Limitations 1st Limitation 2nd Limitation “A simple particular error “While we did not have taken in isolation (e.g. hundreds of ratings, we punctuation) might not be consider having “ecological considered as serious as sound” or naturalistic data to another single particular answer to this criticism. We error (e.g. missing had actual essays with actual preposition or use of rates and so despite what some hisself ) on a timed, may consider a small sample holistically-scored writing size, the study employed test.” naturalistic data collection.” (Johnson&VanBrackle, 45) (Johnson&VanBrackle, 45) 16 1st-The emphasis in the research design was not to investigate reactions to single errors, but to investigate rater reaction to types of errors taken collectively as they represent a non-standard dialect speaker, a non-native speaker, and a standard English speaker. 2nd-Sample size
Results 17 -The results of this study confirmed that the percentage of failures and low ratings amongst African-American and ESL students compared to Standard English students had a bias when it came to “errors” in their writing. Even though the students of Standard English did have errors, they were not considered as great as the ones of ESL and African American writers. They say: “This discrimination against AAE (African-American English) features may explain, at least in part, the achievement gap on these standardized tests. Many AAE speakers score well below their SAE (Standard American English) speaker counterparts particularly on assessments that have free responses and essay components…” (Johnson and VanBrackle, 46).
“ “Those who have acquired additional codes because their local language differs significantly from the language of the national culture may actually be in a better position to gain access to the global culture than “mainstream” Americans who, as Martha says, “only know one way to talk.” Rather than think of these diverse students as problems, we can view them instead as resources who can help all of us learn how to become citizens of global community.” Lisa Delpit 18 Connecting this to Lisa Delpit, who is a scholar and author of “Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom”
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