Although many linguists seek to demonstrate the validity and profundity of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), much of the pop culture world seems to use it as a way to sell products and to rebel against parents. Each time that the dialect is pulled into the sphere of pop culture--and each time that it is reduced to a stereotype--its…

The number of undergraduates with diverse linguistic backgrounds currently enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities has increased dramatically over the past decade. Many of these students are international nonnative English speakers, resident bilinguals, and bidialectal speakers of African American English (AAE). Challenged by a host of language…

Background/Context: Although progress has been made since members of the Conference on College Composition and Communication passed the Students' Right to Their Own Language resolution (1974), there still remains a demand to examine youth perceptions of language. Such examinations can help teachers and researchers improve curricular choices, honor…

This readable book features K-12 teachers and teacher educators who report their experiences of culturally responsive literacy teaching in primarily high poverty, culturally nondominant communities. These extraordinary teachers show us what culturally responsive literacy teaching looks like in their classrooms and how it advances children's…

In this essay, the author suggests that recent developments in English studies and popular culture create an opportune moment for writing teachers to welcome such literature in composition curricula. The author describes how studying stories by John Edgar Wideman enabled first-year composition students to engage political and interpersonal issues…

As African American mothers and teacher educators, the authors' investment in teacher education is both personal and professional. The authors build upon these personal and professional investments in their teaching practices with primarily White pre-service teachers, in the hopes of better preparing them to teach African American children. This…

Via a Speak Aloud and Write protocol methodology, this study investigated the characteristics of the wording formulation process of a select group of 7 African American students in freshman composition who claimed nonstandard features were active at least 30% to 40% of the time while they composed their papers. Control of rhetorical context was…

The "ISSS Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2009 proceedings, see ED504973.]