Dialect Features and the Single Conventions Score
A middle school teacher collects narrative drafts. In dialogue, students write "I don't got no money" and "They was gonna get us." In the same drafts, several of those students write "there" for "their" and "could of" for "could have." The district writing rubric has one "Conventions" score with descriptors such as "few errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics." One teammate says the dialogue spellings are "wrong English" and should be marked everywhere; another says marking them is culturally biased and the rubric should be set aside for narrative writing. The team has to decide before the next common assessment.
1. How should the team sort the four observed features before deciding what to mark?
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They are not one category, and treating them as one is what makes the argument unwinnable.
- "They was" and "I don't got no money" are grammatical features of varieties of English: leveled past tense of be and negative concord. They are systematic and rule-governed - negative concord is standard in many languages - not random mistakes. In a character's dialogue they can be a deliberate, accurate representation of a speech community.
- "could of" is not a dialect feature at all. It is an orthographic error arising from the contracted pronunciation of could've, and it appears in academic prose from speakers of every dialect.
- "there/their" is a homophone confusion, also not dialect-patterned in this sense.
So the team should not apply one rule to all four. The last two are conventions targets in any register. The first two are register and audience decisions, and the instructional question is whether the writer chose them and can justify them.
2. What should the teacher say to a student whose narrative dialogue contains "They was gonna get us"?
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Correcting the line in a narrative would be teaching the student to distrust their own ear for character speech. The teacher should instead make the choice visible: "Would this character say it this way? If yes, keep it - that's voice. Where else in this piece are you writing in your own academic voice?"
That question does the real work, because it teaches code-switching as a skill rather than as a confession. The student should then be held to Edited Written English in the reflection or analysis that accompanies the narrative, where the audience and purpose call for it. The follow-up conference names the difference explicitly: "In dialogue, this is a choice. In your reflective paragraph, I'll mark it, because your reader there expects the school register."
What the teacher should not do is either mark it everywhere or say nothing. Silence leaves the student without the register awareness the standard actually names.
3. How should the team revise the rubric so it is valid for narrative writing without abandoning conventions instruction?
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The defect is that one holistic "few errors" score cannot distinguish a purposeful dialect choice from an unintended slip, so it is unreliable for narrative and unfair to students whose home variety is being scored. Two revisions fix most of it:
- Scope the conventions score to specified sections - e.g., "Conventions are scored on the reflective paragraph, not on dialogue." This keeps the demand for Edited Written English while removing the penalty for voice.
- Split the descriptor into control of academic register and purposeful use of language, each with language students can read: "Writes in a consistent register appropriate to the task" and "Makes deliberate language choices that serve character or mood."
Suspending the rubric entirely would remove the only signal the team has about conventions growth, so that option should be rejected. Anchor papers, including one with strong dialect dialogue and one with homophone errors in the reflection, would let scorers see the distinction in practice.