IELTS Reading Matching Sentence Endings Example 6

Ebonics

A. In 1996, debates around the nature of “Ebonics’’ in the United States came to ahead. That year, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in California enacted Resolution 597-003, which officially recognized that African-American students “as part of their culture and history as African people possess and utilize a language”. Alternatively referred to as Ebonics (literally “black sounds”), African Communication Behaviours, and African Language Systems, this language was declared to be “genetically-based” rather than a dialect of Standard English. Within the profession of language research and pedagogy, a strong consensus formed behind the OUSD’s decision to recognise Ebonics. Linguistics professor John Rickford noted that Ebonics was not simply characterised by erroneous grammar and large slang vocabulary, but that underlying this language was a structured form and process of grammar and phonology that made English learning for Ebonics speakers far more complex a task than simply dropping bad habits. English teachers, Rickford counselled, must, therefore, accept and embrace these complexities.

B. The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) concurred with Rickford, adding that whether or not Ebonics should be defined as a dialect or a language does not matter in terms of its “validity”. While linguists studying Ebonics typically restrain from prescribing edicts in favour of tracking changes in form and style, the LSA did point to the fact that speakers of Swedish and Norwegian can typically understand each other while conversing in different “languages”, whereas Mandarin and Cantonese speakers cannot understand each other’s “dialects” to conclude that spatial and social tensions, rather than strict linguistic criteria, were the crucial factors in defining these terms. For many others, however, the OUSD’s decision was tantamount to endorsing lazy, vulgar, and “broken” English — the equivalent, perhaps, of acknowledging “text-speak” or Internet slang as a valid form of expression. Recognizing and fostering the use of informal, culturally-specific spoken language, say those detractors, traps users in a kind of linguistic ghetto in which they can interact with other disenfranchised and excluded citizens, but cannot engage within the public sphere in a meaningful way. Because of the dominance of Standard English in the United States, Ebonics-only speakers are essentially unable to go to university and work in high-valued professions, and they are unlikely to be electable to any kind of public office (even in areas with a high density of black residents, those who lose their Ebonics-tinged speech patterns fend to be more trusted).

1. to use Ebonies in order to express specific concepts
2. to recognise the genetic differences between African-American students and others
3. to acknowledge the systematic differences that Ebonies speakers must learn to overcome
4. to consider Ebonies as lazy English rather than a unique form of expression
5. to admit Ebonies users to university to gain more knowledge
6. to make a statement about particular geo-social relationships
7. to compare Scandinavian languages and Chinese dialects
8. to declare Ebonies an independent language, not a variation on English
9. to honour positive aspects of Ebonies, while emphasising the necessity of Standard English for formal use
10. to approve the language of text messaging as a legitimate mode of communication
11. to describe how Ebonies has developed without dictating rules for proper usage

1. to declare Ebonies an independent language, not a variation on English
2. to acknowledge the systematic differences that Ebonies speakers must learn to overcome
3. to describe how Ebonies has developed without dictating rules for proper usage
4. to make a statement about particular geo-social relationships
5. to consider Ebonies as lazy English rather than a unique form of expression