Through teaching and research, the authors have seen the magnificent ways that Black people use language to connect people, families, and communities across the Black diaspora. When students come to school using African American English, they know that many of their relatives, friends, and neighbors speak like them. They may also know that many of…

Purpose: The purpose of this assessment-focused clinical focus article is to increase familiarity with African American English (AAE)-speaking children's pattern of language use in third-person singular contexts and to discuss implications for speech-language assessments of developing AAE-speaking children. Method: The clinical focus draws on…

African American English (AAE)-speaking children's ability to judge the grammaticality of sentences was evaluated by their clinical status and grammatical structure. The study originated from a need to understand more about the tense and agreement systems of AAE speakers with specific language impairment (SLI) relative to their typically…

Improve your grading and feedback practices to benefit your students and their writing development. This guide models a research-based, linguistically inclusive approach to grading writing so that you can incorporate equitable assessment and feedback into your everyday practice. A linguistically inclusive grading approach honors Black linguistic…

Critical scholarship has collectively challenged multilingual spaces as operating under a Latinx/Anglo dualism that excludes the knowledge, voices, and experiences of young Black children. Therefore, we must reimagine multilingual spaces that are not only inclusive of Black languages and literacies; but also see them as vital resources that…

This purpose of this study was to determine the socio-cultural impact and parameters of Hip-Hop Based Education (HHBE) with the underlying goals of: a) detailing HHBE in relation to previously accepted education paradigms and philosophies; b) detailing the embedded nature of the language of hip-hop in the form of an amalgamation of African…

This research examined how linguistic differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) impact how children process sentences and learn new information. The central hypothesis of this dissertation is that these linguistic differences adversely impact how AAE-speaking children use contrastive inflectional verb…

Clinical Question: For young AAE speakers (P), how useful is the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) compared with Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in the presence of African American English (AAE)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: PsycInfo®, Education Source, Education Resources…

In this article, co-authors Brian Mooney, Joniesha Hickson, Aaleah Oliver, and Jahvel Pierce discuss language, race, and education with author April Baker-Bell. Speaking from their perspectives as teachers, scholars, researchers, poets, spiritual leaders, and cultural workers, their experiences address the importance of sustaining a Black…

There is tremendous variation in the use of American English by major geographic regions, as well as within these regions or cities, and by cultural background. The variety of English spoken by many African American people in the United States is called African American English (AAE). AAE affects early literacy skills in ways that may require…

At the University of North Carolina Greensboro's Speaking Center, recent formation of an Antiracist Values Committee, as well as former research completed by its members, have governed antiracist efforts. As one resource to students, the University of North Carolina Greensboro's Speaking Center offers tip sheets. These tip sheets are pamphlets…

This article makes a case for why Black Language (BL) must be a part of teachers' conceptualizations of multilingualism in U.S. contexts. BL is a living linguistic legacy, an embodiment of Black culture, and much more than simply a list of distinct grammatical features. For teachers to move toward dispositions and language and literacy pedagogical…

Purpose: Many studies have found a correlation between overall usage rates of nonmainstream forms and reading scores, but less is known about which dialect differences are most predictive. Here, we consider different methods of characterizing African American English use from existing assessments and examine which methods best predict literacy…

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy…

Leveraging ground-breaking work of Black feminist scholars alongside established techniques of focus group and community-based participatory research, we explain sister-girl talk as a novel method for collecting and analyzing group interview data with Black women. We outline the procedures for consultation, facilitation and preliminary analysis of…