Sorry I haven’t been posting much: this teaching certification program has been keeping me very busy. It’s given me plenty of ideas, too—here’s one of them:
In this video, Gloria Ladson-Billings describes the process of code-switching from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) to what she calls American "edited" English (“standard” or “formal” English) as "translating" from one to the other. I like this framing because it puts the two languages on an level playing field. (Note that I did say “languages” and not “forms of the same language”; as Samy Alim, Geneva Smitherman, and others have demonstrated, there AAVE has its own rules of grammar and syntax).
I'd love to do a project that considers rap songs in this light, asking students to consider the varieties of meanings that words have in different linguistic registers. Using rap music adds a layer of complexity to this because not only will students have to compare AAVE to edited English, but they will also have to consider use of figurative language. The first song that comes to mind (while not really school appropriate) is "Ebonics" by Big L. In the song, Big L essentially raps a lexicon of words common to AAVE at the time along with a more formal, “edited” meaning (“Hit me on the hip means ‘page me’!”).
The collection Hip Hop Speaks to Children could be a good resource for this activity: I can imagine assigning pairs of kiddos to look at one of the poems in the book, giving them a list of words to look out for, or perhaps asking them to select words that they find puzzling and make a list of their own.
In The Art of Rap, Dana Dane talks about writing short stories which he then converts to rhyming lyrics. I can imagine a similar exercise here, either with a preexisting short story or one that the students write. Or the teacher could ask students to do the opposite: rewrite a rap verse in prose, or a more formal narrative of some sort: this is how we say this in rap music (“Broken glass everywhere, people pissin’ on the stairs you know they just don’t care”); this is how we might say the same thing in a letter to a city council member. They could work on translating the lyrics into their home language and discuss what difficulties they faced in doing so (i.e., “we don’t have this concept or these sounds where I’m from”).