The domain of inquiry by literacy researchers has expanded greatly over the past generation. Literacy researchers now address out-of-school literacies, multimodal texts, literacy across the curriculum and other important issues. Research on literacy development has become even more important in the high stakes assessment environments in today's…

In this article, the author shares his experience growing up speaking African American Vernacular English in school and his observations about nonstandard American plantation English. The author's amateur linguistic observations about nonstandard American plantation English gave rise to immediate dialect comparisons between African American…

In this essay, I address the problem of White racism in the classroom, proposing a way of reading racist discourse that takes into account its emotional dimensions and hence its persuasive appeal for White students. This way of reading begins with the insight that racist language functions metaphorically, and that it acts as a rhetorical bridge…