South Africa is a country characterised by great linguistic diversity. Large indigenous languages, such as isiZulu and isiXhosa, are spoken by many millions of people, as well as the languages with European roots, such as Afrikaans and English, which are spoken by several millions and used by many more in daily life. This situation provides a…

A critical function of schooling is to provide young writers with opportunities to explore real-life, out-of-school experiences through writing. However, literacy instruction in U.S. schools primarily (and sometimes almost exclusively) focuses on the tested skills, with little recognition of children's diverse backgrounds and experiences. The…

This article focuses on the development and experiences of two African American Language speakers who are on the precipice of biliteracy and bilingualism. Using a composite counterstory that integrates samples of the girls' language during daily routines as a critical race theoretical analytic tool, we examine their language virtuosity as…

Black English (BE) and standard English are treated as two different closely related linguistic systems that coexist in African-American linguistics. Focus is on a middle-class female informant who appears to be a balanced bilingual and who offers counter evidence to the claim that BE is spoken mainly by poor and uneducated persons. (13…

Roger Shuy and Ralph Fasold's introduction describing sociolinguistics as (1) a desire to refine linguistic theory, (2) an attempt to describe the sociocultural matrices of language, and (3) an effort to apply sociolinguistic knowledge to this monograph. Walt Wolfram contributes substantially to the development of sociolinguistics theory in…

Understandings of the ways home and school languages shape classroom dynamics and influence development, identity, and subsequent school success are important for teachers of both bilingual and African American students. This article builds a link between these complementary bodies of research by analyzing interactions in a second grade mainstream…

This paper deals with the phenomenon of code switching among bilinguals. Whereas previous studies of code switching have, however, concentrated on instances in which code alternation can be correlated with a change in social occasion, this paper uses examples from the speech of Mexican-American and Afro-American bilinguals to focus on those…

The paper focuses on the linguistic behavior of Negro children concentrated in communities where a non-standard form of English is the accepted currency. Such children are verbal, possess a language fully developed to serve the needs of their "world," and think effectively enough to survive in a sometimes hostile environment. Certain basic…