Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, African American Language (AAL) remains stigmatized throughout the United States education system. There have been proposals to counteract this through curricula and/or ideological interventions targeted at teachers that seek to validate AAL while maintaining Dominant American English (DAE) as an…

Relationships among African American English (AAE), linguistic knowledge, and spelling skills were examined in a sample of 92 children in grades one through three whose speech varied in the frequency of morphosyntactic AAE features. Children were separated into groups of high (AAE speakers) and low (standard American English, SAE, speakers) use of…