This article examines African American rhetorical feature use in the secondary literacy classroom. It explores the historical evolution and pedagogical implications of incorporating African American rhetorical features into classroom writing instruction. The article discusses the historical evolution of African American Language and its position…

This article makes a case for why Black Language (BL) must be a part of teachers' conceptualizations of multilingualism in U.S. contexts. BL is a living linguistic legacy, an embodiment of Black culture, and much more than simply a list of distinct grammatical features. For teachers to move toward dispositions and language and literacy pedagogical…

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…

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…

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…

This article undertakes a textual analysis of an autobiographically informed novel, "American Street," to analyze the process of identity formation of a Black Haitian immigrant youth in the United States. Black immigrant youth remain an understudied demographic in literacy research compared with their Latinx and Asian immigrant…

Despite a wealth of scholarship documenting its linguistic complexity, students in the United States are rarely encouraged to speak or write in African American Language (AAL) in their primary classrooms. The authors documented how one teacher and his highly diverse second-grade class examined, explored, and experimented with AAL in an…

This article argues that writing teachers should allow, and even encourage, students to code-mesh in community college classrooms. By looking at and analyzing code-meshed writing produced by three students in an English 101 class, the author argues that code-meshing provides students with both a craft-wise approach to writing and a way to address…

We explore the disconnect between education policy and culturally sustaining instruction, curriculum, discipline, and assessment for African American Language (AAL) Learners. Framing the omission of language policies as linguistic violence and anti-Black linguistic racism, we discuss antecedent and contemporary educational language policies and…

In the wake of racial violence in urban schools and society, we question, "Can the field of urban education love blackness and Black lives unconditionally and as preconditions to humanity? What does it look like to (re)imagine urban classrooms as sites of love? As educators, how might we utilize a pedagogy of love as an embodied practice that…

In this article, the author historicizes the argument about Black Language in the classroom to contextualize the contemporary linguistic inequities that Black students experience in English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Next, the author describes "anti-black linguistic racism" and interrogates the notion of academic language. Following…

Via an account of the genesis, development, and enactment of a seminar in translingual writing, this paper represents an attempt to indicate the extensive amount and interdisciplinary nature of the knowledge that one needs to be familiar with in order to develop a rich and nuanced understanding of the phenomenon as well as to provide a resource…

Teachers' language ideologies inform our assumptions about what counts as valued practices in schools. As teacher educators in an urban elementary education program, we aim to sustain youths' linguistic and cultural diversity, in part by cultivating a "critical" language ideology with teachers that explicitly acknowledges the…

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that…

Classrooms act as linguistic sieves when they continue to accept only dominant forms of English as the "correct" and "appropriate" language choice for all students. Students who speak other languages, such as African American Language or Spanish, are often encouraged to use those languages on the playground or at home but not…