For too long, the debate about Ebonics has been about the validity of the language and not about how the perception of the language impacts those that speak it. Ebonics has been considered inappropriate and inadequate as a language in institutions of higher education since the moment Black people in the United States were allowed access. However,…

In this autoethnography, María Cioè-Peña recounts her experiences of Black erasure in bilingual education in US schools, where the focus is on language and an imagined mixed-race collective, centering culture to circumvent race and treating language as connective yet racially neutral. But languages and how language users are perceived are not…

Urban schools are becoming increasingly linguistically diverse. However, principals are not adequately prepared to address linguistic variation, and in particular, issues related to African American Language (AAL). This study explores the language ideological voices of urban school administrators. Focus group sessions were conducted with 15…

Scholars have examined and debated the use of African American Language (AAL) in the past but research that has focused on its use in college settings has been scarce. This study uses a case study approach to examine attitudes and perspectives of a university community toward AAL use inside and outside the classroom and beyond. The case study…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy…

This study investigates the role of African American Language (AAL) and *Standardized American English (*SAE) in Black/African American same-race teacher-student relationships. The teachers in this study (1) used AAL as a valuable tool for building rapport and trust with their students; (2) were aware of their positions as linguistic role models;…

Drawing on recent decades, literature in college writing that theorizes the importance of Critical Language Awareness (CLA) curricula for African American Language (AAL)-speaking students, this article offers empirical evidence on the design and implementation of a college writing curriculum centered on CLA and its influence on AAL-speaking…

Despite decades of sociolinguistic research, African American Language (AAL) remains stigmatized throughout the United States education system. There have been proposals to counteract this through curricula and/or ideological interventions targeted at teachers that seek to validate AAL while maintaining Dominant American English (DAE) as an…

Multicultural and culturally sustaining approaches to education help educators act on two essential concepts: that each student is unique and that uniqueness is central to the academic and social development of every student. Language is a key aspect of this uniqueness, and because language is integral to culture and identity, understanding…

This study investigates the attitudes of educators of different race, class, linguistic, political, and disciplinary backgrounds at a large, urban, public university to code-meshed Black English in academic texts. This research draws on surveys as well as interviews gauging how educators responded to the idea of code-meshing not only in principle…

Research has long claimed that rubrics provide the objective, fair, and equitable means by which to assess student writing. Recent moves in writing programs and composition classrooms have acknowledged the ways that writing assessment perpetuates linguistic violence, and shifts towards anti-racist assessment practices have ushered in grading…

Purpose: The purpose of this tutorial is to guide practitioners to a critical praxis of speech, language, and hearing. This tutorial provides a foundational knowledge of critical theory as an approach to framing, conceptualizing, and interpreting phenomena and demonstrates its application to the speech, language, and hearing profession. Method:…

For educators committed to promoting social equity, the question of how to address dialect hegemony is increasingly important. While linguists have long accepted the concept of dialect equality, educators have struggled with the issue, sparking a history of controversy and debate underscoring larger social issues of diversity and equity. For…

The author situates language education policy and scholarship on Academic English within the broader historical context of standard language ideology, the view that the language variety of socio-economic elites is intrinsically more complex than other varieties. It is argued that the current predominant focus on the nature of school language gives…