In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Most sociolinguistic studies rely on apparent time, cross-sectional methods to analyze language change. On the basis of apparent time data, sociolinguists have hypothesized that cultural processes of lifespan change create predictable cycles of linguistic behavior in which adolescents lead in the use of vernacular variants and advance sound change…

The field of literacy studies has seen decades of calls for scholarship and instruction that address issues of dialect diversity, identity, and power but few empirical studies that document students' engagement in classroom activities designed to address these issues. The goal of this article is to describe how three bidialectal African American…

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…

The purpose of this study was to examine how classroom conversations about diverse dialects of English can provide a useful foundation for critical language and literacy instruction for students who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other stigmatized dialects. This article describes a weeklong unit on language variety that…

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,…