How AAE Speakers Become Effective SWE Writers

Hi, I'm Ashley McGillis and my blog post is going to be about turning AAE speakers into effective SWE writers.
According to the article, SWE stands for Standard Written English. SWE has been hard to learn by AAE speakers. AAE speakers need to work harder to accomplish SWE because they need to read carefully, write frequently, study different models of writing and collaborate with peers and teachers. Within the article, 5 contrasting approaches to teaching AAE speakers SWE are given. There is the Traditional Approach, the Second Dialect Approach, the Dialect Awareness Approach, the Culturally Appropriate Approach and the Bridge Approach.

The Traditional Approach:
The Traditional Approach uses explicit instruction and immediate feedback. It is said that AAE students benefit from practice and complete immersion in the language. The article notes that it is important that teachers do not point out every grammatical error while the AAE student is writing or speaking. The student is more like to do bad on reading comprehension tests. While the teacher is preoccupied with SWE errors, they often find themselves doing too much correcting and drilling.
The Second Dialect Approach
ESD is known as English as a Second Dialect. Using the ESD approach helps AAE speakers develop the metalinguistic awareness they need to decifer between the use of AAE and SWE. Teachers are encouraged to use error analysis, code-switching practice and contrastive analysis. By using these, teachers are able to give each student the instruction he/she needs based on their specific needs. Although the ESD approach is very useful and beneficial, it can be viewed as time consuming and may send negative messages about AAE and SWE.
The Dialect Awareness Approach
The Dialect Awareness Approach is able to help all students create positive attitudes about all languages. It teaches them positive ideas about diversity, and different cultures. This is a good approach in the sense that it does not focus directly on AAE or SWE. This approach invites all languages and encourages the students' to truly know their language so they can view other languages. This process needs more research to prove if a student's dialect awareness has any influence on them successfully achieving SWE.
The Culturally Appropriate Approach
CAT (Culturally Appropriate Approach) is able to help AAE students to write in SWE. This is done by positioning the students in the African American tradition of literacy. Some of these are known as " Afrocentric" or "African-Centered". The students were able to read African American texts, and also write about them. The teachers are able to infuse the curriculum with an Afrocentric content. The students are centered inside history, culture, science so they don't feel like outsiders in subjects.
The Bridge Approach
The Bridge Approach allows the students to focus on SWE at the end of their composing process. By doing this, the students are able to focus more on the task at hand, rather than if their Standard Writing English is perfected. The student is allowed to compose the paper, and then go back to find SWE mistakes. Teachers often use workshops to help students find errors they missed. If a student is constantly focused on SWE, they will end up not focusing on other important issues such as the formulating a thesis, synthesizing information etc.

The 5 approaches described here offer writing teachers different choices of teaching SWE to AAE writers. From the Traditional Approach replacing AAE with SWE to the Bridge Approach adopts AAE to learn SWE. The Traditional and Second Dialect Approaches rely heavily on grammar drills, and the Dialect Awareness and Bridge Approaches do not. Research suggests there is no "one-size-fits-all" pedagogy for teaching SWE, and teachers should be careful in their choice of methods. "Different strokes will work for different folks". It is important to find the right method for the right student.