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…

Research has long claimed that rubrics provide the objective, fair, and equitable means by which to assess student writing. Recent moves in writing programs and composition classrooms have acknowledged the ways that writing assessment perpetuates linguistic violence, and shifts towards anti-racist assessment practices have ushered in grading…

This study sheds light on the socio-economic factors determining the (re)location of sociolinguistic prestige in postcolonial environments. It uses the case of Namibia, an ethnolinguistically diverse African country that replaced Afrikaans -- an established lingua franca -- with English as its official language to weaken the hold of the formerly…

This article undertakes a textual analysis of an autobiographically informed novel, "American Street," to analyze the process of identity formation of a Black Haitian immigrant youth in the United States. Black immigrant youth remain an understudied demographic in literacy research compared with their Latinx and Asian immigrant…

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that…

Production and perception of word-final "th" was assessed among 40 Black English- and 40 standard English-speaking children from grades one to four. The two dialectal groups were significantly different in production but not in perception of the word-final "th." Sequential developmental stages for the acquisition of word-final "th" are proposed…

To investigate speech-language clinicians' attitudes regarding treatment goal setting for children who were speakers of Black English, questionnaires based on W. Wolfram and R. Fasold's conceivable goals in teaching standard English to speakers of nonstandard dialects were distributed to 103 clinicians. (Author/CL)

Investigated African American Vernacular English dialect features in the midwestern community of Davenport, Iowa, and compared them to those reported by Pollock and Berni (1997) for Memphis, Tennessee--specifically productions of vocalic and postvocalic /r/ across African-American speakers from Davenport and Memphis. (Author/VWL)

Three groups of first grade children were identified with a screening modification of the Carrow Elicited Language Inventory: children who spoke standard English, children who spoke Black English vernacular, and children with true language pathology. Discussion of the results describes the identification of Black children with true pathological…

Describes the use of black communication style by African Americans in an organized environment. Uses a research method involving a multimethod approach of field data collection using direct observation and semi-structured interviews. Shows that, although the black employees felt they were changing their communication style to fit organizational…

The extent of differences noted between adult phonologies of Black English and standard American English were less evident in emerging phonologies since unique error types were not exclusively characteristic of either group. Findings have implications for articulation testing of Black English-speaking children who have acquired their adult…

Investigates the preferred patterns for the "organization of experience" among African-American adolescents. Finds that these adolescents report a strong preference for using vernacular-based patterns in academic writing tasks as they get older. Suggests that the organization of expository discourse is affected by cultural preference and…

Examines specific collective identity and political expression of the rap group the Wu-Tang Clan. Reveals a multi-layered political strategy that has been conscientiously designed and implemented to instigate a social movement. Prioritizes the voices of marginalized Black peoples and provides raw narratives about oppression. (MMU)

A syntactic analysis of the language spoken by Black characters in three Black situation comedies on television; "Sanford and Son,""The Jeffersons," and "Good Times." (PD)

Code-switching is examined in oral narratives of 30 African-American women as they switched from Standard English to Black English Vernacular. A little over half of the speakers assign positive values to their code switches. Examples are given from interviews with two subjects. (SLD)