Analyzes the discourse styles, including linguistic practices, of African-American students at an urban high school. Concludes that students use Ebonics or Black English as the norm against which students evaluate other speech practices and that students construct standard English as a vernacular, a discourse to be disrespected…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether proofreading a text aloud was more effective than silent proofreading in helping Black English Vernacular (BEV) speaking students to locate and correct dialect features in writing. The study was divided into two parts. In the first part, 29 11th grade BEV-speakers edited three teacher-produced…

It is the premise of this study that the performance of black students in math and science is crippled by the interference of their language patterns. It is argued that schoolwork of these students demonstrates how nonstandard English can lead to misunderstanding. The connection between students' misunderstandings of certain quantitative relations…

In a practicum study, 21 students in a speech and debate class were encouraged to discuss openly the roles of Black English (BE) and Standard English (SE), use both freely in the classroom, and engage in speaking situations in the classroom and forensic tournaments to develop confidence and proficiency in their speaking abilities. The objective…

A social literacies perspective is used to analyze a rap written by a high school student. The article begins with an examination of the student's uses of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and standard English. The student writing sample and the researcher's analysis are subjected to review by two other African American teenagers, and…