In this reflective essay, we explore key life experiences of one African American teacher--(the first author of this paper)--who has taught kindergarten, fifth grade, and is presently a 9th grade English teacher in the high school from which she graduated. We couch the first author's story in the professional literature to analyze and illustrate…

In discussions of cross-linguistic influence (also known as language transfer), the focus is usually on the influence of a particular structure in a particular instance of language contact, for instance, the negative transfer of serial verbs by Vietnamese learners of English: "She has managed to rise the kite fly over the tallest…

Speakers of stigmatized varieties are often judged as less educated and less competent than speakers of prestigious varieties. This can have profound effects on speakers' academic achievement and language assessment in schools. Linguists' efforts to destigmatize AAVE have included providing commentary in media outlets, publishing scholarly works,…

The study examined children's use of verbal -s marking (e.g., he "walks") in two nonmainstream dialects of English, African American English (AAE), and Southern White English (SWE). Verbal -s marking was of interest because there are gaps in the literature about the nature of this structure within and across typically developing children…

This study's purpose was to examine the acquisition and use of BE, DO, and modal auxiliaries by African American English (AAE)-speaking children. The impetus for this work was the lack of information regarding the developmental trajectory of these auxiliary types and their use, in AAE relative to what is known about auxiliary acquisition and use…

B. Z. Pearson, S. L. Velleman, T. J. Bryant, and T. Charko (2009) demonstrated phonological differences in typically developing children learning African American English as their first dialect vs. General American English only. Extending this research to children with speech sound disorders (SSD) has key implications for intervention. A total of…

This article responds to two long-standing dilemmas that limit the effectiveness of language education for students who speak and write in African American Language (AAL): (1) the gap between theory and research on AAL and classroom practice, and (2) the need for critical language pedagogies. This article presents the effectiveness of a critical…

The 1974 Conference on College Composition and Communication's (CCCC) resolution declaring "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL) defends the rights of students and all other writers to use different varieties of English (see Committee on CCCC Language Statement, 1974). In addition, the 1988 CCCC adoption of the National…

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of the…

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…

Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as "John's ass" appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor ["John," and similarly for pronominal possessors.…

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 field of literacy studies has seen decades of calls for scholarship and instruction that address issues of dialect diversity, identity, and power but few empirical studies that document students' engagement in classroom activities designed to address these issues. The goal of this article is to describe how three bidialectal African American…

This focus of this paper is to present an overview of the current research which examines the language and literacy performance of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as presented from a deficit versus difference perspective. Language and literacy and assessment and remediation of AAVE speakers are…