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 thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

The present article compares and contrasts linguistic findings from longitudinal studies of low-income Americans derived from evidence of recorded family speech interactions. Hart and Risley (1995) employed research assistants who spent 1 hour per month observing language usage among families from different socioeconomic backgrounds in their homes…

For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African…

This article provides a brief description of the linguistic features of African-American English (AAE) and reviews the positions that have been taken up about its role in American education, ranging from those in which AAE is seen as an obstacle to the education of black children to those in which it becomes a language that is different from…

This experiment measured teachers' attitudes towards African American English and Academic English. Participants were graduate students of Education at a college in New York City. They completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that assessed their explicit attitudes towards the two varieties, as well as a Psycholinguistic Experiment that was…

Grounded in literature on the miseducation of students whose native varieties of English differ most noticeably from the standard academic variety (Delpit 2006; Labov 1972a; Rickford 1999; Smitherman 1999; Wolfram, Adger, and Christian 1999; Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2006), this dissertation examines the links between the sociolinguistic…

The evidence of a general achievement gap, and more specifically, a reading gap between African American students and White students is a well documented and alarming phenomenon (Chatterji, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2004, 2007; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin & Heilig, 2005; Fishback & Baskin, 1991; Jencks & Phillips, 1998; Haycock, 2001;…

Examines several longstanding, isolated biracial sociolinguistic situations in the coastal and Appalachian regions of North Carolina: a core community of African Americans and two case studies of isolated speakers. Compares diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for speakers representing different generations of African American and…

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are…

In dealing with the differences between the school and non-school language of Black children, the author uses a contingency grammar," which considers all speakers of a language to have the identical linguistics competence but includes a level of systematic performance" to account for dialectal and other systematic differences. (FB)

Four realizations of the copula occur in English, two in both Anglo and Black English and two in Black English and in some varieties of Anglo English but not in standard English. This paper describes the use of the copula in English and identifies the phonological, syntactic, and semantic factors which are believed to condition its realization in…

The writer, who feels that the chief differences between Black English (BE) and White English (WE) are phonological and not syntactic, reports on a sociolinguistically oriented examination of that variety of English spoken by children in rural Northern Florida (CBE/Fla). Twenty-two black children between the ages of nine and 12 were taped…

This article surveys the literature on Ebonics that was published from 1865 to 1975. The linguistic features of Ebonics are categorized into phonological, systactical, and lexical groupings. (Author)

An idealized model of mutual second dialect acquisition in a bidialectal speech community is presented, placed in historical context, and used to illustrate the inherent social nature of hypercorrection and hypocorrection. The controversy surrounding hypercorrection for Black English is reviewed, and hypocorrection is shown to reinforce…