There is a long-standing gap in literacy achievement between African American and European American students (e.g., NAEP, 2019, 2022). A large body of research has examined different factors that continue to reinforce performance differences across students. One variable that has been a long-term interest to sociolinguists and applied scientists…

Students bring cultural and linguistic richness to the English Language Arts classroom in the form of English language diversity; that being said, English Language Arts (ELA) education has traditionally privileged Standard American English (*SAE) and its related white culture rather than embrace the aforementioned diversity. With calls for more…

"Communicate Globally, Teach Locally" observers that the English language has evolved to be the predominant language of business and for communication globally, which allows thousands of NESs to go abroad and work as English teachers in foreign countries. This study assessed how self-efficacy competence of the African American NESs…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

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…

This experiment measured teachers' attitudes towards African American English and Academic English. Participants were graduate students of Education at a college in New York City. They completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that assessed their explicit attitudes towards the two varieties, as well as a Psycholinguistic Experiment that was…

Grounded in literature on the miseducation of students whose native varieties of English differ most noticeably from the standard academic variety (Delpit 2006; Labov 1972a; Rickford 1999; Smitherman 1999; Wolfram, Adger, and Christian 1999; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2006), this dissertation examines the links between the sociolinguistic…