Vernacular learning - American Education

In education, a highly controversial approach to inner-city classroom teaching, using the vernacular (from the Latin verna, meaning household-born slave) or language of the streets, with which most children are more familiar. Proponents of vernacular learning maintain that many inner-city children automatically translate standard English into their own vernacular, but that the necessity to translate slows the learning process and often blunts children’s motivation to learn. Critics, on the other hand, maintain that classroom reinforcement of the vernacular automatically impedes children from assimilating into mainstream society by depriving them of standard English language skills. In spite of the controversy, inner-city schools have attracted so many teachers who are themselves products of the inner city that teaching and learning in the vernacular has gradually crept into the classroom of many such schools.

(See also Black English; MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION.)