Tongue-Tied is an anthology that gives voice to millions of people who, on a daily basis, are denied the opportunity to speak in their own language. First-person accounts by Amy Tan, Sherman Alexie, Bell Hooks, Richard Rodriguez, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many other authors open windows into the lives of linguistic minority students and their…

This book provides tools that black parents can use to make their children lifelong lovers of reading and writing. It is geared specifically to black children from the perspective of an educator and parent. The book stresses the need for early involvement in the learning process, challenging the traditional notion that issues surrounding child…

Marva Collins' teaching style includes positive reinforcement, high teacher expectation, high motivation, and love. Cultural congruence, or the relationship between curriculum and the pupil's cultural experiences outside the school, is also a significant factor. Although she uses a traditional curriculum, Ms. Collins' success lies in the…

This article reviews the major components of Public Law 94-142 and the implications of this law for Ebonics-speaking children. (BE)

Using the example of the African-American community and its own distinctive voice, argues that schools can draw upon routine practices within the cultural life of communities to enhance the literature students' skills. This paper explores "signifying" and links between literature and talk in the African-American community. (JB)

This study of lexical familiarity with black English for 324 African Americans, 266 whites, 21 Latino and "other", and 10 unidentified workers indicates that white industrial workers are more familiar with black English than are white white-collar workers. Black English is the core of an industrial lingua franca. (SLD)

This paper examines the political meanings of language in the USA, from the perspectives of both majority- and minority-language groups, and focuses especially on Mainstream US English, African-American Vernacular English, and Spanish. It briefly traces the history of language policy in US education and argues that because language serves as a…

"Freedom Schooling" looks at a Freedom School class taught by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Specifically, this article explores the philosophies of language and education that informed this class and the organic relationship fostered between the classroom and the political goals of African American communities during the…

This 3-year research project sought to determine whether language differences between Gullah-influenced and English speaking students in Charleston County (South Carolina) influenced test performance and subsequent interpretation of test results. A sample population of 503 educable mentally handicapped, learning disabled, and regular students…

Because an instructor's attitude toward students' language is a crucial factor in determining whether students will be active participants in the educational process, it is important for teachers to be aware of dialect differences. Labelled by many as "nonstandard," Black English is a dialect derived from Gullah, a creole based on…

A study of the relationship between patterns of use of the verb "to be" and reading comprehension had as subjects 103 college freshmen in a developmental program, including 53 black and 50 white students. The students' use of Black English constructions of the verb on a writing skills test and their errors in response to a reading comprehension…

In analyzing the issue of the extent to which speaking a nonstandard dialect of English affects a child's ability to learn to read, this paper reviews linguistic and reading research from the 1960s to the present and notes how that research has changed and developed. Based on this research, the paper argues that (1) there is no direct causal…

Whether black students should be required to use standard English in school is a controversial issue that has fostered contradictory opinions, studies, and data. This annotated bibliography of more than 100 items provides a wide range of material dealing with the following aspects of this topic: the historical backgrounds of black English, the…

The study described in this paper was designed to compare the composing processes of three black adolescent females--a low, a moderate, and a high user of nonstandard dialect. After explaining the procedures used in selecting the subjects on the basis of their degree of usage of nonstandard dialect features, the paper describes the research…

A study was undertaken to confirm previous findings on the relation between teacher performance on the "Teacher Test of Black English" (TTBE), certain teaching behaviors (direct correction, establishing a set, and "directly relevant" teaching), and the achievement of Vernacular Black English speaking students. In addition, the study sought to…