16: African American Language is Not Good English, by Jennifer M. Cunningham

Jennifer M. Cunningham (@jenmcunningham) reads her chapter "African American Language is Not Good English." (Don't miss the joke: the author of the chapter is disagreeing with the bad idea stated in the chapter's title.) It's a chapter from Bad Ideas about Writing, which was edited by Cheryl E. Ball (@s2ceball) and Drew M. Loewe (@drewloewe). Kyle Stedman (@kstedman) produces the show and will be back as narrator next week.

Chapter keywords: African American Language, African American Vernacular English, Black English, Ebonics, grammar, linguistics, Standard American English, Standard English, Standard Written English

Here's Cunningham's 2017 bio from the book: Jennifer M. Cunningham is an associate professor of English at Kent State University at Stark. Her teaching and research center on the themes and connections among digital literacies, African American Language, and online pedagogies. Jennifer has a background in composition, linguistics, and education, earning her B.A. in integrated language arts, her M.A. in composition and linguistics, and her Ph.D. in literacy, rhetoric, and social practice. Among other scholarly activities, she has developed and taught online versions of research writing and first-year composition and is currently researching social presence in online writing classes as well as digital African American Language and Nigerian Pidgin English within digital messages. Her Twitter handle is @jenmcunningham, and her website is https://jencunningham.weebly.com/.

Here's a 2020 update: Since publishing her chapter in Bad Ideas, Jennifer is currently the Writing Program Coordinator for Kent State University. She continues to research African American Language and recently submitted an NSF grant with a faculty member in computer science at another university with the hope of continuing her work by applying her methodological experience to a forensics linguistics project.

As always, the theme music is "Parade" by nctrnm, and both the book and podcast are licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. The full book was published by the West Virginia University Libraries and Digital Publishing Institute; find it online for free at https://textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas.

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