Black men on a national level have historically demonstrated their inability to read at the appropriate grade level (Tatum, 2015). Upon a closer analysis of this phenomenon, Washington (1998) posits that attitude has a profound effect on literacy rates because it has the power to cause Black men to either be drawn to literature or avoid it.…

Researchers and teachers often are not privy to the literacy events smuggled into the private lives of urban African-Americans. Yet, these hidden literacies, such as journal writing and reading personal business letters, often reveal deft rhetorical skills as well as intellectual grappling with the social complexities of power, race, and class.…

This article describes how a group of black women read culture, class, and other social relations, analyzing the process and skill of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues in allowing individuals to navigate across multiple discourses. I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in a Midwestern hair salon. Such research seeks to strengthen…

According to a National Assessment of Educational Progress report, most American school children have mastered reading and writing fundamentals without learning how to analyze, evaluate, and extend ideas they read and write about. To address this "surface understanding" problem, the report recommends literacy programs aimed at high risk…

This study examined factors contributing to poor literacy and numeracy development among black South African children ages 5.5 to 7 years. Findings pointed to a conglomerate of factors, namely inadequate visual-motor integration, poor visual analysis and synthesis, poor fine motor development, and inadequate exposure to mediated reading and…

This chapter argues that a detailed, grounded understanding of classroom literacy practices as well as of learners' writing is crucial to begin to change the ongoing and patently unequal educational outcomes that schools often produce. It is impossible to intervene realistically and effectively in an evidential vacuum. The 1955 "Brown v.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 14 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the influence of black nonstandard English on how a person is perceived, (2) Navajo language maintenance and shift, (3) the relationship of the syntactical…