Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

This article examines various ways people of the past and present have dealt with the unfair practices associated with the use of norms and standards. Nineteenth-century responses of writers to the unfair aspects of standards are revealed by first examining the standards and then analyzing the discourse of two 19th-century women writers and social…

Examines the reasons and myths surrounding the Ebonics controversy, which concerns the use of the English dialect spoken by many African-American children in Oakland, California, schools as a strategy for teaching Standard American English. Implications for diagnosing and educating special-education students whose primary dialect is Ebonics are…

This article reviews recent investigations of the development of phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics in the development of speech and language by African American children. Clinical implications are offered to aid the distinction between normal language development using features of African American English and language disorders.…