While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2-year research-practice…

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…

The Curriculum and Pedagogy book series is an enactment of the mission and values espoused by the Curriculum and Pedagogy Group, an international educational organization serving those who share a common faith in democracy and a commitment to public moral leadership in schools and society. Accordingly, the mission of this series is to advance…

This study investigates principals' individual and aggregate perceptions of and expectations for students who use African American Vernacular English. Using the African American English Teacher Attitude Scale (AAETAS), the study seeks to describe the relationship between principals' demographic characteristics and their perceptions of African…

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…

Recounts how a teacher used herself as a model to motivate black students to speak standard English. (JL)

This project was initiated in response to the science and mathematics language needs of Sea Island students who speak African-American dialects. Research has indicated that there appears to be a relationship between dialect diversity and academic success. In response, the program's goals were to identify students who exhibited dialect/language…

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…

The country must celebrate the unprecedented improvements the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling has brought about in the education of black students. At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that "Brown" did not and could not completely resolve the struggle that has shaped questions of race and education in the U.S.…

If our historic goals of individual opportunity and literacy are to be realized, contributions from all appropriate disciplines must be brought to focus in classroom language instruction. The organization and content of this book reflect this interdisciplinary point of view. A basic concern is to explore possible solutions to educational problems…

This report describes a program which grew out of a study that explored writing and literacy skills in Anglo, Black, and Hispanic high school students in North Philadelphia. Section One describes writing in the lives of adolescents as viewed within the home, community, noninstitutional, and broader sociopolitical settings. Particular emphasis is…

The purpose of this paper is to formulate objectives pertaining to knowledge, thinking, attitudes, and skills for a methods course for prospective teachers of English in desegregated high schools, to discuss the selection and organization of course content, to illustrate the principle that prospective teachers learn to teach by performing and…

Recommends the use of Charlotte K. Brooks' book "Tapping Potential" by English teachers who deal with minority students. Discusses how the book treats everything from language development to reading and writing to literary criticism from the Black aesthetic point of view. (NKA)

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…