Purpose of Voice
Within the structure of the core curriculum guidelines in Philadelphia, teachers are required to train students in analyzing, comprehending and deciphering literary elements used by various authors. Using voice to look at a vast number of the required and this unit's preferred poems, speeches, sermons, and essays will provide students with an opportunity to explore their own sense of who the speaker might be, how many speakers are heard, and what might be the message the author is trying to convey. For these reasons and more, students will learn to demonstrate fluency and comprehension in analyzing the uses and effectiveness of literary elements used by numerous authors. Students will be guided in reading selections aloud with accuracy using appropriate rhythm, flow, meter, tone and diction.
Viewing orality through literacy in this unit will introduce to students modes of communication such as poetic readings and text to speech recitation in can be treated as an oral genre. Students will learn that several specific writings can be specified as oral because of the dialect within poetry readings and speeches. Voice, vocal exchange, and sound in face-to-face interaction differ greatly from interaction between readers and the text on the page. In speeches and written poetic performances, speakers or readers can always refer back to a written text. This sets the stage for study of actual voices in interviewing, performances, readings, and listening. Voice is the vehicle for expression and persuasion, a personal style; it is like a fingerprint. Exchanging the presence of "I" depending on the relationship shared, voice is active in multiple forms, and is a shared creation of communication. Voice as a standard of physics is a product of a resonance of air that vibrates through the body. Students will learn all the aspects of voice as found in literary elements and in social interactions.
Whenever we speak we give listeners clues about our heritage and personality. Voice establishes and maintains relationships with other people. Authors use voice always in their writing; students must be active listeners when reading the word on the printed page developing their "imagining ear" as described by Robert Frost. The imagining ear is the process in which one can hear the tone from the words on the page using prior knowledge and/or personal experiences. There is a somewhat exploitation of incompatibles and dissonances between written and spoken communication between personal and public modes. Also, between silent and performance reading, students will uncover these differences and find similarities beyond the words either written or spoken.
Dialect Matters
"When I know a man's sound, well, to me, that's him, that's the man. That's the way I look at it. Labels I don't bother with." - John Coltrane 4
Dialect in America can be a distressing subject in issues pertaining to the African-American voice. Africans in America were denied their languages, denied literate education, denied communication, denied the comfort and communion of the word. Work songs, originating in West African farmers, became the means to the end for slaves in America; thus began their assimilation to the English language. First, slaves were assimilating language practice through uses of diction, syntax and word recognition. It must be noted that the singing and call and response of the work songs were at first African in words but later sung in English. As a result, literacy education was offered to African-Americans. They were able to learn, develop, design, and implement a "new" language, one in which they could safely communicate with each other without the threat of incitement of rebellion toward their masters or owners. Therefore, dialect was purposeful and needed for survival in this country. It gave African-Americans the ability to move in and out of and within groups. Furthermore it provided relations in connections to people outside their closest circles.
Accents and speech patterns generally tell people where we are from without the speaker having ever disclosed the information, except, some would say, in the case of African-Americans. These patterns reveal identity through voice. There are, varied forms of language that acquire multiple forms of dialect, considering socio-economic status and more. Many social attributes bring about different languages; some are found embedded in the socially dominant language. Students will find they speak a different language than that of their parents and others of different age groups. In considering dialect, African-Americans have to also consider external perceptions, combined with speaking abilities, including skin tone, attractiveness, age, gender, hair and clothing styles.
Some aspects of dialectic language differ from European-based dialect speaking, with regard to semantics, phonology, and grammar. Furthering the distance created by dialectic speech patterns, regional speaking differences exist, as well. This measure of differentiating the spoken word establishes a community of people with the same status in a social class system. Ask students to consider when a phone call comes in, what are their first thoughts after saying and hearing, "Hello!" As stated by Baldwin in regards to the role of a speakers' language. "Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other—and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him." 5 Baldwin in this statement refers to the irony of the Negro dialect being critiqued through the lens of a viewer who also has adapted their language to fit their geographic location and economic status but, that viewer, despises the Negro.
At this point in the unit, students will be shown a series of videotaped speakers requiring an evaluation of speaker effectiveness on audience attitude and thinking. Students will be asked to answer the same question for each speaker. Describe the speaker in stereotypical terms, understanding that all students know what stereotyping is. If they do not understand the concept, explain it. Briefly brainstorm ideas and give evidence for each suggested idea. Within this component of the unit, a discussion about "code-switching" is certainly appropriate. Stereotyping is a standardized categorization and/or identification of a specific group of people by conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by several members of the group or other individuals or groups. 6 Students can also brainstorm a list of situations when code-switching concept is used in life and give basis to each suggested instance.
Code-switching will be defined as the ability to speak two or more different dialects, using one dialect rather than the other in particular social situations. It shall be determined that students shall not only speak the language of the streets, but also the language of the boardroom, and beyond. Switching dialects has to be considered, for students, as a way to be more socially acceptable, as a form of social flexibility and empowerment. Code switching is a part of the evolution of language, nurturing the ebb and flow of the phenomenon of dialect. Students should be guided in deciphering the meaning of the term, the appropriateness of its use, bringing dialects together fruitfully, and the social situations in which it can occur. Teachers might attempt to have students develop a catalog poem or spoken word poem illustrating their comprehension of the term.
African-Americans and others perceive Black English as having lower credibility in many areas of society. Race and dialect are considered an integral part of the communication. Black English, Negro dialect, and Ebonics are all considered as a sub-standard means to communicate to the rest of the American world. Students will gain knowledge of use of varied vernacular languages when presenting speeches, poems and/or writing self-authored creative writing assignments or while reciting the poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar or reading a paragraph or two from James Baldwin's article (see Teacher Resources).
While participating in this exercise, students will be better-shaped speakers through knowing about social penalties when overusing dialect, or when using dialect in distinctly inappropriate social situations. However, students should not be guided in a negative way to learn the difference of the two dialects, only that usage of Standard English dialect offers more social rewards than not. Another small group discussion can be developed to determine a correlation between being well-spoken and success. Students would have to sense levels of dialect use through personal or professional relationships, associations, as well as the highs and lows of "superstardom" in the African-American community. Students can journal about different instances or situations they either participated in or witnessed in code-switching errors. Have them evaluate and/or comment on the instance; then discuss the consequences or outcomes of the blunder.
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