Stability of grammatical features of Black South African English

dc.creator	Vanessa Singh
dc.creator	Jean Parkinson
dc.date	2011-08-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:07:37Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:07:37Z
dc.identifier	10.5785/23-2-55
dc.identifier	0259-2312
dc.identifier	2224-0012
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/f3b1044856e74f509207f36b36e99da2
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/11354
dc.description	<p><em>This article explores the level of stability of some grammatical features of Black South African English (BSAE). The study involved testing a group of undergraduate speakers of BSAE using an exercise in which students judged the grammaticality of sentences and rewrote those they considered non-standard. Students were then alerted to grammatical differences between BSAE and Standard English (SE). Awareness of these differences developed during a student writing assignment in which BSAE features were discussed and compared with the standard forms, and students learnt to distinguish between SE and BSAE forms in assessing the rewritten sentences of their fellow students. After an interval of two months, the same participants were re-tested on their use of these features using a second similar grammaticality exercise. The results suggest that this minor intervention increased students’ ability to recognise most of the non-standard forms and rewrite them in the standard form. This indicates present lack of stability in the BSAE variety, and is in line with previous findings (Van der Walt and Van Rooy, 2002) that BSAE is in a transition phase in which standard and BSAE forms are both regarded as options. The study also found also that some features of BSAE are more stable than others. The last part of the article considers qualitative data reflecting students’ attitudes to BSAE and suggests that a sense of ownership of this variety might be an important step towards students’ extending their repertoire to include a more formal written variety.</em></p>
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	Stellenbosch University
dc.relation	http://perlinguam.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/55
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/0259-2312
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/2224-0012
dc.source	Per Linguam : A Journal of Language Learning, Vol 23, Iss 2 (2011)
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Stability of grammatical features of Black South African English
dc.type	article