This article revisits the legacy of Ken Goodman, specifically his work on African American Language and reading. In this body of scholarship, Goodman and like-minded scholars entered a fray of competing interests, political agendas, and economic stakes, which continue to plague current debates about the teaching of reading. To make sense of…

Exploring the role hip-hop language arts plays in the development of Black (and other minoritized) youth, this study provides a theoretical account of hip-hop moral codes and how they become part of young people's ethical sensemaking. This study extends sociocultural theories of moral development by centering the "cultural form" as a…

Background: African American Language (AAL) refers to a rich, widely used, and extensively researched language variety. Despite its importance, AAL remains widely stigmatized in the United States due to anti-Black linguistic racism. Many colleges offer courses with AAL content, and these courses have the potential to help disrupt anti-Black…

Research on bias in artificial intelligence has grown exponentially in recent years, especially around racial bias. Many modern technologies which impact people's lives have been shown to have significant racial biases, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Emerging studies have found that widely-used ASR systems function much more…

The author examines some of the critical issues raised by Baker-Bell (2020a) about language education in the United States. The challenges associated with linguistic justice are related to a history of linguistic discrimination in the United States, which many sources have documented and affected many different linguistic backgrounds and peoples.…

Although W.E.B. Du Bois' impact on race theory is well-known among social scientists; his work is not widely incorporated into the sociolinguistic canon on racial identity through language. Moreover, one pervasive feature in sociolinguistic discourses is the paucity of literature exploring the Afro-Portuguese language. In addressing these…

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies"…

In this autoethnography, María Cioè-Peña recounts her experiences of Black erasure in bilingual education in US schools, where the focus is on language and an imagined mixed-race collective, centering culture to circumvent race and treating language as connective yet racially neutral. But languages and how language users are perceived are not…

Foundational principles of formal math language in mathematics classrooms are necessary for students' ability to succeed academically. However, cultural dialects such as Black language are vilified within the scope of education, particularly in mathematics education, despite evidence that acknowledging students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds…

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a distinct variety of English that exhibits unique phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. However, the focus of this study was on the grammatical aspects of AAVE. The objectives were to identify and analyze the predominant grammatical features of AAVE employed by Justin Bieber in his songs from…

The purpose of this study was to determine the most prevalent African American Language (AAL) phonological and grammatical features in slavery- and Civil Rights-themed children's literature. Seventy-six books were initially selected to determine if they used AAL in dialogue or in narration. Of the 76 books, only 39 included AAL. The 39 books were…

Urban schools are becoming increasingly linguistically diverse. However, principals are not adequately prepared to address linguistic variation, and in particular, issues related to African American Language (AAL). This study explores the language ideological voices of urban school administrators. Focus group sessions were conducted with 15…

Shin and Mill (2021) propose four steps children go through when learning "variable form use." Although I applaud Shin and Miller's focus on morphosyntactic variation, their accrual of evidence is post hoc and selective. Fortunately, Shin and Miller recognize this and encourage tests of their ideas. In support of their work, I share data…

Historically, language instruction involving Black Language (BL) assumes a goal of eradication, particularly in school-sanctioned literacy practices. Language arts education for Black students must be liberatory, that is, antiracist and artful. The opportunities for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers to create, augment, and change the course of…

The purpose of this article is to discuss issues of language, specifically African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as it relates to the reading performance of African American children. Previous research on the science of reading provides a research-based framework that is a starting point for evidence-based research that can be used to…