Research Paper on:
Effectiveness of Ebonics

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
wave among linguistics, parents and teachers across the United States. The teaching of Ebonics, which was considered by many to be a "black language," or speech patterns used by African  Americans, was deemed necessary by many professionals because they supported the theory that one reason why black children lagged so far behind in school was because they treated the English  taught in the classroom as a second language, rather than their primary language. The purpose of this paper is to examine a January, 1997 article written by Legrand H. Clegg  II entitled "Ebonics: A Serious Analysis of African American Speech Patterns," and determine if Ebonics is, indeed, its own language or a dialect.  According to Clegg, black Americans dont speak English at all, but they speak Ebonics, which evolved from the words "ebony" (for black) and "phonics" (for sound) (Clegg, 1997).  The term "Ebonics" was first developed in 1973 by Robert L. Williams, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri (Crozier and Smith, 1998). Interestingly enough, although incorporating Ebonics  into the Oakland School District caused a great deal of media scrutiny, the idea of California teachers participating in what was called the Standard English Proficiency program was hardly new  (Fields, 1997; see also Heilbrunn, 1997). SEP, as it was called, was created to educate teachers who work with black children about the history of the African American language (Fields,  1997). Training teachers in Ebonics was the natural outgrowth of SEP, and the decision was made after months of research as to why black children had lower grade point averages  than their white counterparts (Fields, 1997). Notes Cheryl Garrett, principal of an Oakland elementary school about the national hysteria over Ebonics, "Weve been doing this all along through the SEP