This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by…

The ways in which literacy in English is taught in school generally subscribe to and perpetuate the notion of a homogenous, unvaried set of writing conventions associated with the language they represent, especially in relation to spelling and punctuation as well as grammar. Such teaching also perpetuates the myth that there is one…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

In this article, Paris explores the deep linguistic and cultural ways in which youth in a multiethnic urban high school employ linguistic features of African American Language (AAL) across ethnic lines. The author also discusses how knowledge about the use of AAL in multiethnic contexts might be applied to language and literacy education and how…

The purpose of this study was to examine the language ideologies--the assumptions about the nature of language, language variation, and language learning--reflected in a widespread daily editing activity often known as Daily Oral Language or Daily Language Practice. Through a yearlong ethnographic study of grammar instruction in three urban,…