Purpose: This study explored how typically developing 1st grade African American English (AAE) speakers differ from mainstream American English (MAE) speakers in the completion of 2 common phonological awareness tasks (rhyming and phoneme segmentation) when the stimulus items were consonant-vowel-consonant-consonant (CVCC) words and nonwords.…

This article investigates how playwriting served three middle school Black girls within a larger practitioner research study seeking to better understand the literate practices of girls of color. It delves into the ways that playwriting provided the girls in an afterschool writing club opportunities to explore both their knowledge and ways of…

The achievement gap between African American students and their Caucasian peers is a problem that has persisted within the educational system since the early 1970s. Researchers have been investigating whether differences in oral language, such as, Nonmainstream American English (NMAE) use contribute to this gap. There is also concern from…

Purpose: Using a framework of culturally and linguistically responsive classroom management, this study employed both quantitative and qualitative analyses of ethnographic data to illustrate patterns of corrections/behavioral warnings in teacher-child interactions for an African American child in the classroom. Method: Three child participants and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of dialogic reading on the expressive vocabulary skills of children with moderate to severe expressive impairments. Previous research has shown positive effects of dialogic reading on the language skills of children who are typically developing and on children who are at-risk for language…

This dissertation examined the ways in which African American Language (AAL) speakers utilized AAL in various discursive contexts in an elementary two-way immersion (TWI) Spanish/English dual-language program. In this study, I problematize the notion of TWI programs as an additive program for AAL speakers by investigating the phenomenon from three…

This study investigates the learning of linguistic structures associated with African American English (AAE) among four non-AAE-speaking teachers of AAE-speaking students. It considers implicit and explicit learning/development of a second dialect in two novel ways. First, it focuses on the understanding of a socially-stigmatized dialect by…

This study examined the effect of dialect variation on children's spelling by using devoicing of final /d/ in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as a test case. In line with the linguistic interference hypothesis, African American 6-year-olds were significantly poorer at spelling the final "d" of words such as "salad"…

In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, "Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that…

Despite the substantive body of research on African American Language (AAL), designating it a meaningful, rule-governed language system and the first language of many African Americans, schools in the US have systematically failed to integrate a language policy related to African American English learners (AAELs). In this article, we employ a…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Purpose: The inability to accurately recall sentences has proven to be a clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI); this task yields moderate-to-high levels of sensitivity and specificity. However, it is not yet known if these results hold for speakers of dialects whose nonmainstream grammatical productions overlap with those that are…

In this article, I argue that English educators must interrogate acts of physical and linguistic violence against Black and Latinx youth and take them into consideration when shaping curricula. English teachers can provide a space for youth to make sense of their racialized experiences. I highlight the marginal treatment of Black and Latinx…

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…

At the start of the pandemic, a lot of talk occurred about reimagining education, especially since the inception of schooling in America is not built for Black children. Research has examined the violence against Black children in schools, not to mention the double pandemic that they are experiencing with COVID-19 and the country's history of…