Chicano English in the Classroom
Very little research examines the influence of CE on academic performance.
Castaneda and Ulanoff (2004) observed elementary children in grades 3, 4, and
5 and students in one high school in Southern California and reported that the
elementary students were reluctant to use CE in the classroom. The high school
students, however, were different. Castaneda and Ulanoff noted that they:
often chose to use Chicano English as a “political” and/or “solidarity”
statement within the context of school activities.... [For both groups, it]
was more common to hear Chicano English spoken on the playground
or at lunch than in the context of classroom interaction.... The high
school students demonstrated more proficiency with standard English
and so their use of Chicano English appeared to be something done
purposely, at times for group identity, at times to demonstrate resis-
tance to norms. (p. 7)Regrettably, Castaneda and Ulanoff (2004) were unable to assess possible
correlations between academic performance and CE, but we can predict that
manifestations of “solidarity” and “resistance” would not win the hearts of
many teachers. Resistance seldom characterizes students who are succeeding.
When we consider that the dropout rate for Mexican-American students has
hovered around 30% for decades, the Castaneda and Ulanoff report is not
encouraging.
Chicano English and Writing
What little research exists on CE and writing performance is so old as to be al-
most irrelevant but nevertheless warrants a review. The available studies are not
particularly useful because they looked at sentence-level issues rather than the
whole essay. Amastae (1981) evaluated writing samples collected from stu-
dents at Pan American University in Texas over a 4-year period to determine
the range of surface errors and the degree of sentence elaboration as measured
by students’ use of subordination. Spanish interference did not seem to be a ma-
jor source of error in the compositions, but the students used very little subordi-
nation (also see Edelsky, 1986), which would tend to make their writing seem
less than fluid, perhaps even choppy. Because subordination is generally
viewed as a measure of writing maturity (K. Hunt, 1965), its absence in the es-
says of Chicano English speakers could adversely affect how teachers judge
their writing ability.
248 CHAPTER 7