Baugh 1991

Baugh, John. 1991. "Review of 'Twice as less: Black English and the performance of black students in mathematics and science' by Orr 1987." In Minami and Kennedy 1991. (Reprint of Baugh 1988.) Interest level: academic.

Based on a nine-year study of Black English Vernacular (BEV) in Hawthorne School, an experimental high school in Washington, DC. At the end of two years, Hawthorne faculty concluded that excessive student failure centered on language, particularly "the usage by these students of such function words as prepositions, conjunctions, and relative pronouns" (page 21).

Orr argues that "language may shape the way one perceives quantitative relations--specifically, that the way a BEV speaker may understand certain standard English expressions of quantitative relations can affect his or her understanding of those relations" (page 11). Orr concludes that BEV is a restricted code that represents a barrier to success in science and prohibits speakers from conceiving of multiplication or division.

Baugh, in reviewing the book

• disagrees with many of Orr's assertions
• criticizes her research design, and
• considers "the limitations of Twice as Less exceed its virtues."

• Bibliography module: Baugh 1991
• In overview module: Bibliography (Literacy): B
• In modular book: Bibliography (Literacy), by Doris Gallemore, Trudi C. Hunt, Jeanne Swanson, and Stephen L. Walter
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 18 May 1999

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