10/30 Readings

I personally found it really interesting how these studies thoroughly dissected AAVE, I guess mainly because my exposure to linguistic research has been very limited until now. That aside, I found it fascinating that the African American speech community has contributed so much to the development of sociolinguistic theory/methodology.

When comparing the readings to my own experiences, there are definitely certain variations of Spanish vernacular that are shared by a large portion of the Latin American community. I recently made a trip to Colombia and was exposed to Spanish that was different than the Spanish I grew up with. However, there were striking similarities in the motivation and reasoning behind certain phrases, despite the fact that the specific words were different. This tells me that, like the selected features of AAVE, there are certain features of languages that can span not only social classes, but also various countries that share a language.

I additionally found it really interesting that kids who were behind in school and received remedial instruction in a mixed form of AAVE and SE progressed faster than children who received the standard remedial instruction through the Bridge program, despite it's collapse.

The triangle reading was less interesting, personally. But it still depicted how language can affect people's interpretations of the same shape. Generally, the study did a good job of showing how language is not just a powerful way of communicating a goal state, but also how it is critically involved in eliciting the representation of the goal state.