Are foreign-language teaching techniques useful in teaching English-speaking students standard English?
Although educators using translation techniques have claimed success in raising the scores of Ebonics speakers on standardized tests, others find these claims unproved. Moreover, it seems alienating and misdirected to teach English as a second language to students who already speak English as their first language, if you believe as I do that Ebonics is just a dialect of English. When the Oakland school board explained that it was simply having students translate from Ebonics to standard English, rather than teaching students both Ebonics and standard English, many critics began to relax, for that strategy looked like something they could live with. But second-language educators do not rely on translation alone. Instead they offer a rich combination of immersion and explicit teaching: students not only study vocabulary and grammar, they converse, role play, read newspapers and magazines, watch television and movies, and most important, interact with fluent users of the language in authe
