One African-centered linguistic paradigm argues the primary language of most descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States is not English but an African language. The language is called "Ebonics." Clinical linguist Dr. Ernie Adolphus Smith (1938-) is the most conspicuous figure in the history of the paradigm. The reconstructed…

The author explores the racial and cultural ideologies that inform what it means to be Black in the United States and how this mainstream framing of Blackness intersects with teacher preparedness to engage Black textual expressions in the classroom.

This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two…

Purpose: We compared teacher ratings as measured by the Teacher Rating of Oral Language and Literacy (TROLL; Dickinson, McCabe, & Sprague, 2001, 2003) and Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2006) to 2 established screeners, the Part II of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-ST-II;…

African-American students continue to lag behind White peers in nationwide test scores, in part due to deficits in literacy skills which may be connected to use of African American English (AAE) in the school setting. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between exposure to varying levels of mainstream American English (MAE)…

"Communicate Globally, Teach Locally" observers that the English language has evolved to be the predominant language of business and for communication globally, which allows thousands of NESs to go abroad and work as English teachers in foreign countries. This study assessed how self-efficacy competence of the African American NESs…

My starting point is "Staying Power", an exhibition that aimed to increase the number of photographs representing Black British experience in the UK. The exhibition was recommended by a former pre-service/PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) student who had grown curious about the language and culture of her students. One…

Purpose: This study investigated the fictional narrative performance of school-age African American children across 3 elicitation contexts that differed in the type of visual stimulus presented. Method: A total of 54 children in Grades 2 through 5 produced narratives across 3 different visual conditions: no visual, picture sequence, and single…

Teaching reading to children whose language differs from the oral language of the classroom and from the linguistic structure of academic text adds an additional layer of complexity to reading instruction. There is a large and growing body of evidence indicating that language variation impacts reading, spelling, and writing in predictable ways. In…

The authors draw on their own experiences as practitioners, one as a Biology and Agriculture teacher in Kenya, and the other as an educator in a summer science program serving African American youth in a city in the Midwestern United States. They document and analyze moments of language contestation and explore the use of the construct of…

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the harmful effects of native speakerism in English language teaching, including how perceptions of native speaker status are deeply intertwined with race and national identity. Recently, scholars have begun to investigate how teacher training programs might push back on native speakerism by…

In this article, we review three responses to the study and evaluation of grammar in children who speak nonmainstream dialects of English. Then we introduce a fourth, system-based response that views nonmainstream dialects of English, such as African American English (AAE) and Southern White English (SWE) as made up of "dialect-specific"…

This research investigated the expository language of school-age speakers of African American English. Specifically, the study describes the language productivity, syntax, and pragmatic features present in expository language samples produced by African American children and compares their performance with White children in the extant literature.…

Recent research has shown that distinct event-related potential (ERP) signatures are associated with switching between languages compared to switching between dialects or registers (e.g., Khamis-Dakwar & Froud, 2007; Moreno, Federmeier & Kutas, 2002). The current investigation builds on these findings to examine whether contrastive and…

This article focuses on two-way immersion (TWI) education and restates two previously expressed cautionary notes about the unexpected costs of such programs for the Latino community and for children who are racialized speakers of nonmainstream varieties of English. Utilizing an analytical framework focused on the process of…