In "True to the Language Game", Keith Gilyard, one of the major African American figures to emerge in language and cultural studies, makes his most seminal work available in one volume. This collection of new and previously published essays contains Gilyard's most relevant scholarly contributions to deliberations about linguistic diversity,…

Purpose: This study aimed to determine if the number and type of African American English (AAE) features that are spoken in sentences influence speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') judgments of (a) how noticeable the dialect is (dialect detectability) and (b) how understandable a speaker is to others (comprehensibility). Method: Certified SLPs…

Purpose: Research has established that African American (AA) children are lagging behind other children in their reading skills. A number of factors have been proposed to account for the literacy gap; however no single factor has entirely explained this disparity. This investigation examined the appropriateness of the Gray Oral Reading Test-Fourth…

Deborah Vriend Van Duinen and Marilyn J. Wilson confront normalized notions of "correct" English. They offer suggestions for teaching about marginalized voices and introducing students to the complexities of English dialect variations. (Contains 1 figure.)

This study examined whether children's use of subject relative clauses differs as a function of their English dialect (African American English, AAE vs. Southern White English, SWE vs. Mainstream American English, MAE) and clinical diagnosis (specific language impairment, SLI vs. typically developing, TD). The data were spontaneous language…

This study used data from questionnaires completed by teachers employed in North Carolina schools (N = 370) to determine if teachers felt that non-school-related or school-related factors served as barriers that limited the number of African American male children from participating in gifted programs. The majority of the teachers taught 3rd- to…

This article examines various ways people of the past and present have dealt with the unfair practices associated with the use of norms and standards. Nineteenth-century responses of writers to the unfair aspects of standards are revealed by first examining the standards and then analyzing the discourse of two 19th-century women writers and social…

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for "high-risk" minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary…

As a first-grade teacher preparing for the upcoming year, I was shocked to learn that George was on my new roll. His previous teacher wrote that George was a "behaviour problem", was defiant, talked back to adults, didn't speak properly, was behind academically and spent over half of kindergarten in detention. George initially gave me negative…

Finding a way to integrate authentic learning experiences and explicit instruction is essential if teachers are to adapt to the current policy environment while at the same time acknowledging the rights of students to determine their own goals for literacy learning. Toward this end, the author presents a case study of one student's development as…

Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show how this particular group of…

The number of undergraduates with diverse linguistic backgrounds currently enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities has increased dramatically over the past decade. Many of these students are international nonnative English speakers, resident bilinguals, and bidialectal speakers of African American English (AAE). Challenged by a host of language…

Purpose: In this study, the authors evaluated the contribution made by dialect shifting to reading achievement test scores of African American English (AAE)-speaking students when controlling for the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), general oral language abilities, and writing skills. Method: Participants were 165 typically developing…

A major challenge for the increasing multicultural and multilingual community college student population has been the difficulty in accessing the register features which define academic writing. In this study, an analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between teacher attitude toward Black English and student achievement in reading. For this study, 61 teachers of reading or English/Language Arts in grades 3-6 were surveyed. These teachers, whose informed consent letters indicated a willingness to participate, were selected from 17…