English as a Second Language

"A lot of Negroes," says the Ford Foundation's Edward Meade, "speak with such a thick dialect that they cannot be understood by other Americans." In the simple interests of comprehensibility, Ford and others in the past three years have undertaken, Professor Higgins style, to add pure Huntley-Brinkley speech to thousands of Negroes brought up on Amos 'n' Andy accents.

Regional speech patterns vary, but many Negroes-and whites living in similar circumstances of cultural isolation-speak a nonstandard English (linguists call it "dialectolalia") with common characteristics. They may slur words as in "sawrat" (it's all right), "sisfirshear" (it's his first year) and "smothertam" (some other time). The sounds of f and r may be dropped as "hep yo sef" or "sistah." The th sound turns to f: "bofe" for both. Errant grammar includes "he be absent," "he do," "my mother, she done gone."

Like New Shoes. Now, in such large urban school systems as those of Miami, Detroit and Washington, D.C., in adult-education programs in Philadelphia and New Orleans, and in numerous colleges, English teachers are trying not to erase "down home" accents but to add standard English as a "second language" --to provide Negroes with what a New York City school official calls "a new pair of shoesyou wear your shiny new ones for a job interview and put on your old comfortable ones when you get home at night."

More than 40 school systems are using a curriculum developed with federal money by a Detroit teacher, Mrs. Ruth Golden. It consists mainly of tapes for group instruction in which phrases that Negro youngsters often misuse are spoken correctly, then mimicked by the students. In Philadelphia, Temple University helped 160 Negro girls speak better to qualify for secretarial jobs. A similar program at St. Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans led Student Leatrice Frilot to say: "The first time I heard myself on tape, I said 'who is that?'--but once you hear yourself, you know pretty much what's wrong."

Superficial Irritant. A few militant Negroes resent any attempt to alter their speech habits. Negro Writer Le-Roi Jones asks: "What's wrong with our black tongue now?" Philadelphia N.A.A.C.P. Leader Cecil B. Moore argues that "my dialect never hurt me--and no one tries to change the Irish, Italians or French who have dialects." Author Langston Hughes backhandedly praises the "old shoe" approach as "bordering on the poetic."

Others applaud the new programs as good, if properly handled. Philadelphia County Court Judge Juanita Kidd Stout insists that "good English has no color connotation at all-pride in bad language is foolish." Psychologist Kenneth Clark sees "a great potential" if instruction is presented "in a context of dignity," not condescension-"exactly as French or Russian might be." He considers speech differences "one of the main, if superficial, racial and class irritants," but since "prejudice is made up of such little things, if one or two or three can be taken away, eventually the whole superstructure will fall."

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